Antequera

Our excursion to Antequera (last Friday) made for a long day, but it was worth it. Antequera is similar in some ways to Ronda. It’s in a valley surrounded by mountains in the Andalucian interior. It’s a very ancient town, and it has a Moorish past. It’s not quite as topographically or architecturally dramatic as Ronda – or at least not the town itself. And it isn't anywhere near as over-run with tourists. Given how much there is to see, it's hard to figure why it seems to be so much less a tourist draw.

It took us about an hour to drive from Málaga. We were there by a little after 11. Miss Tom-Tom who, at this point, was behaving well – she would fail miserably later – directed us to a well-situated car park that was not too expensive (€5 for the day) and had its own tourist information office where we were able to pick up a map.

The city is known for a few things. It has an abundance of churches, some of them worth visiting, plus other religious sites including convents and monasteries. The city hall is in an old convent. Antequera also has an Alcazaba, a Moorish fortress, with its own story of Christian conquest. It happened here in the early 1400s, about 80 years before Moorish Málaga fell to the Catholic kings.

Antequera City Hall, a former convent

View of Antequera from plaza below Alcazaba

We headed first for the Alcazaba. We did question whether we really needed to see another Moorish fort, after having toured the much bigger one in Málaga, but it turned out to be good. Included in the entrance fee was an entertaining audio guide, partly narrated by a modern voice, partly by an actor playing Ferdinand, the future king who led the conquering Christian army. At each station in the tour, there was a little historical vignette set at the time of the conquest. It sounds hokey, and it was, a bit, but also good fun. We clambered up towers and along battlements, and enjoyed the views out over the town and the countryside beyond.

There is a Roman bath just below the fort. It’s mostly the stub ends of walls that remain. As often happened, the Moors scavenged stones from the Roman site to build their own structures. Ditto for later Christian builders, of course. An intact Roman mosaic remains as well, but it’s now covered to protect it and not viewable by the public.

A once important church and teaching institute also sits just below the fortress walls, built in the 18th century on a site supposedly chosen by the same Ferdinand who led the conquering Christian army 300 years earlier. It is now, for reasons I wasn’t clear on, deconsecrated. Entry was included in our ticket to the Alcazaba, but it’s not a terrifically attractive church to begin with and there isn’t much left inside. It’s mainly used for music performances now apparently.

We went back down the hill into the town and found a restaurant with a menu del dia lunch and seats in a pretty shaded square, Plaza de Descalzas. The place is called Marengo. For starters, we both had a local cold soup, a variation on gazpacho, called porra. It tasted too much of sweet red peppers to me – not one of my favourite flavours. The mains were hunks of meat (can’t remember what kind) with fries and cooked veg – the usual, but well prepared. The desserts were quite fancy for a menu del dia lunch. I had a chocolate cake thing, Karen had rich chocolate ice cream on a bed of whipped cream. Can’t remember what we paid, but it was under €30 with drinks (and I had two beers).

After lunch, we hiked in broiling sun out to the other important attraction in town, the prehistoric “dolmens” or burial chambers, now a UNESCO World Heritage site. It’s about 1.5 kilometers from the centre of the city. There are three dolmens altogether, two in the park we walked to and a third further out of town, too far to walk to. Entry is free.

Like Stonehenge, which dates from about the same period – 5,000 years ago – these burial chambers were constructed from huge slabs of stone. The mystery, as with Stonehenge, is how the builders transported the materials from their source and then erected the structures given the enormous weight of the rock slabs. The total weight of materials in the largest of the dolmens we visited, the Menga, is estimated at 180 tons.

With Stonehenge, as we discovered when we took Caitlin there 15 years ago, you can’t get near the stones anymore. When I went in the 60s and then again in the 70s with Karen, you could walk among them. At the Antequera dolmens, you can go right inside. The one, the Viera, is small and architecturally not very interesting. The Menga is impressive: about 40 by 15 feet and eight feet high, wider at the entrance. There are flat-ish slabs for walls, and three pillars supporting the slab-rock ceiling.

We were lucky in just having missed a bus tour of noisy Spanish pensioners. We had the place to ourselves. It’s slightly eerie, which is partly down to the artful lighting, partly down to the fact that this place is friggin’ 5,000 years old! People whose lives we have little idea about built it with enormous hardship for reasons we don’t understand, presumably they decorated it – how we don’t have much clue, buried their dead here, and performed obscure religious ceremonies. Five thousand years ago! Mind boggling.

By this time it was mid-afternoon, but the day was far from over. We trekked back into town and visited the Iglesia de Carmen, the beautifully decorated church attached to a convent on the edge of the old city. It was the one church our guide books said not to miss. They were right. The altar-piece carvings and frescoed chapels are, if not unique, very distinctive. Gorgeous!

The last item on our itinerary was El Torcal de Antequera, a national park in the mountains about 10 kilometers outside town. The attractions include bizarre limestone rock formations, some of which look like piles of pancakes, and fantastic vistas over the valley below.

The drive up to Torcal is long and winding, with switch-backs that force you to drop down to about 20 kph in places. It was after four by this time and I was tired, but once we got half way up and started to get glimpses out over the valley, we understood why it was worth doing. We stopped at the Visitor Centre at the top and walked out along a boardwalk to a look-out point with fabulous views over the valley and the hills beyond. There were a few too many people out there for our liking, but it was still worth it. Pictures, as Karen is fond of saying, don’t do it justice, which is certainly true in this case. But I took many.

We drove a little way back down the road from the Visitor Centre and found another viewing spot. There were a couple of other cars there, including one with a quartet of young Spaniards, who may have been doing some kind of photo shoot. In any case, they lingered, annoyingly, rght where I wanted to take pictures, the young women posing sitting on the rocks. I tell you – other people! They’re so annoying. They eventually cleared off, though, and we had the place to ourselves.

We drove back down, talking about how we really hadn’t seen enough of this place. But the light was already failing and we still had a drive of at least an hour. We couldn’t stay any longer. Maybe we’d come back, we said. (And we did, a few days later.)

Miss Tom-Tom decided we should take the highway we’d driven up on from Antequera, which eventually, after about 25 kilometers of narrow roads with switchbacks, meets the A45, the motorway back to Málaga. The other option would have been to go back to Antequera – longer, but probably faster because more of it would have been on the motorway.

Next up: Nerja. (I’m talking, of course, about our activity of a week ago, last Saturday, April 1. Next post.)