Visit Lorenzo's website relating his travels in France and richly illustrated with his own photographs. The site includes Lorenzo's pen-and-ink postcards of Paris and Provence. Click on www.french-places.com
Portrait of Montefrio can be purchased along with your reservation, or during your stay. You can have it shipped to you before your trip, also. I have prepared a reduced version of the text for your enjoyment, without the 60+ pen and ink illustrations and maps you will find in the paper version.
a book for the curious traveller
PORTRAIT OF MONTEFRIO
a town in the western hills of Granada Province
written and illustrated by Lorenzo Bohme
Editorial Natívola
To the curious traveller
It may seem strange that an Englishman should be the author of the only guidebook to an Andalucian town. In fact, I have lived here much longer than I ever did in England, and in many ways feel myself to be an adopted son of this half-forgotten bit of Spain, of which I have the honour of being the first foreign resident. I first came here as a student in 1960 to hear the great flamenco singer - may he rest in peace! - Manolo Avila. As you can imagine, I fell under the spell of the singer, the music and the town, and many years later, tired of wandering, I bought a farmhouse nearby and decided to stay.
Speaking several languages, I established myself as a free-lance interpreter, working at conferences throughout the region. Some years later, I had the idea of making it possible for other curious travellers to enjoy the life of this rural community, with its many relics of the past, its traditions and its welcoming people. I purchased first one and then another peasant cottage, made them comfortable - so comfortable that I eventually moved into one of them myself, an eagle's nest overlooking the village - and got started in the holiday rental business.
Since there was no guidebook, I wrote one myself, to give my guests an idea of the many pleasant and interesting things to see and do in Montefrio. At first it was just a sheaf of photocopies stapled together with a drawing on the first page, which went from hand to hand. Then our new Mayor, "Antoñito", asked me to make a real book out of it, in English and Spanish, with illustrations by our local photographer. Roads and Trails of Montefrio, as I entitled it, also allowed me to describe some of the finds I had made in the archaeological site, which have, I think, shed light on the amazing history of our town, and especially the time between the Roman period and the arrival of the Moors.
But once the Internet came of age, I began to receive more and more curious travellers, some of whom were French and required a book in their own language, which I have the good
fortune of being able to express myself in. And once I got to work on "Portrait de Montefrio", I decided to add new elements, such as walking maps for the archaeological site. The result was so satisfying that I felt I should rework the English version as well, with the new title, which seemed more appropriate, since it is more than just a guide book. And once that was done, I decided to add some stories about life here which, enshrined in my Web site, have whetted the curiosity of many prospective tenants of the Casas de Lorenzo...Until recently, few "outsiders", foreign or Spanish, ever strayed this far from the beaten path, mainly because they didn't know Montefrio existed. All we were famous for was our spectacular church on the ruins of the Arab fort on the cliff, and, as one popular guidebook belatedly says, our black pudding. But I am sure that once the reader has gazed up at the former and bitten into a chunk of the latter, he or she will soon discover that there is much more.
May 2003
the village which went west
It is not strange, in the light of Andalucia's agitated history, that the village of Montefrio should have changed place twice since it was created, each time moving westward, from one mountain roost to the other. The first settlement began 5,000 years ago on a crag facing the nearby Sierra de Parapanda, and it was there that the Roman colonizers discovered it. After the fall of the Empire it shifted to another, equally impregnable height nearby, and it reached its third and final perch, several miles west, at the end of the Dark Ages, 500 years later.
First came a prehistoric tribe, which found refuge on the heights of a natural fortress called Los Castillejos. Its people were Iberian shepherds and buried their dead in massive stone tombs, or dolmens.
Much later came the Romans, who enticed or obliged the natives to grow wheat below on the plain of Parapanda Valley. The Romans produced flour in a series of six ingeniously designed mills using the scant water of the creek, the Arroyo de los Molinos, to supply the cities of the region.
When Hispania fell to the barbarians from northern Europe, called Visigoths, the people of the valley - native Iberians who lived in the Roman way and practised Christianity - continued to lead their peaceful existence of shepherds and farmers, far from the power struggles between princes and bishops, royal cousins and brothers, which raged constantly in Toledo and Granada.
But another foreign invasion, by the Byzantines, who wanted to reconquer the land which their Roman forefathers had lost, forced the community to once more seek refuge in the hills. This time they chose an outcropping of stone which, like an island, could be easily defended and had a spring of water at its feet: the Castellón Hill.
Scarcely a century later, the Byzantines withdrew and, after a short interval, the Moors invaded Spain and settled on the
plain of Granada. The people of the hill held tight and clung to their religion, forming one of the many Christian enclaves which existed in Andalucia... until the tribes of warring Moors, finally united under the Caliphate of Cordoba, forced the old Christians of Andalucia, many of whom had taken part in a fierce uprising, to disperse.The new Moorish governors chose, for strategic reasons, to build their outpost on the summit of a third promontory several miles to the west, creating the nucleus of the town which is now Montefrio.
When the Castilian Reconquest reached this part of Spain in the mid-14th century, effectively placing the tiny outpost on the constantly challenged northern frontier, the Moors were forced to build a much larger castle. This, along with the popular uprisings and wars of succession which immobilized the Christian enemy during that time, enabled the garrison to survive until the destruction of the Nasrid Kingdom, a century and a half later.
After the Reconquest, the town was repopulated with people from northern Spain who, with no internal enemies to fear, chose to live more comfortably at the foot of the great cliff, rather than on the plateau. The village grew and became an agricultural center, with three fine churches. The oldest of these, which was built on the ruins of the Moorish castle, is known today as the Iglesia de La Villa.
From La Plaza to La Villa
Our stroll - or climb, if you wish - will take us backward through time, since we are going to begin in the Plaza with the relatively modern Iglesia de la Encarnación. It is said to be the only perfectly round church having a smooth stone dome without ribbed supports, in Spain and even in the world. It was designed towards the end of the 18th century in the neo-classical style of the French Enlightenment, by a fashionable Madrid architect, Ventura Rodriguez. He never came here himself and is better known for the church of Santa Fé, the town near Granada which Isabella and Ferdinand created as a camp from which to command the siege of the Alhambra. He also designed the Cathedral of Pamplona, and several other churches in the Kingdom of Granada (as the reconquered territory was called until the end of the 19th century) including those of the neighbouring villages of Algarinejo and Alomartes.
Although this church cannot be said to be beautiful - in an irreverent frame of mind, I once likened it to a "pressure cooker" - it is extremely impressive when seen from afar, and inside, the almost total lack of windows gives it a distinctively gloomy atmosphere, like a planetarium without stars. The intention of the enlightened monarch, Carlos III, an energetic promoter of modernization, was to shed the light of 18th century humanism on the backward, superstitious and spiritually medieval folk of the region, and this explains the disconcerting lack of decoration. The objective was to create a new Andalucian man, in line with the progressive ideas of the time. Religion was not yet rejected outright - the idea that God might not exist was unthinkable even to contemporaries like Voltaire - but relegated to second place after Reason.
The church is enormous, 29 meters in diameter, with walls almost 3 meters thick. This makes it only one quarter smaller than the Pantheon of Rome (43 meters in diameter) on which it was modelled. Historians have conjectured that when the plans were made, in Madrid, for the construction of this and other buildings in the region, the administrators on the ground sent in
an inflated figure for Montefrio's population to obtain a larger slice of the pie. It would not be surprising if this were true, when one thinks of the figure-fiddling which plagues our present-day politicians.Nowadays, such domes are easily built with steel and aluminium, but then the challenge was enormous. A huge amount of stone had to be literally suspended in the void, and there were only two ways to do it. When Brunelleschi designed the Cathedral of Florence, in the 15th century, he created an ingenious set of machines, scaffolds and cranes for the purpose, but it seems unlikely that this was done here because of the lack of timber, not to speak of the technological prowess. The other way was invented by the ancient Romans when they poured the concrete of the dome of the Pantheon, but their descendants the Florentines gave it a typically Machiavellian twist, which would I am sure have made it highly effective in Montefrio. Once the "drum" or circular, vertical wall was built, it was filled with rubble and sand until it had the right shape, like a huge cake, to support the dome, and after the church had been covered, the filler was removed. Since this required a Pharaonic amount of labour, a deal was struck with the workmen who "volunteered" their services. Gold coins were tossed into the rubble as it filled the cavity, and when the dome was finished the workers removed it on the agreement that each one, in lieu of payment, could keep the coins he found.
The hundreds of swallows' nests under the eaves have been there for so long that they have become a symbol of the village in their own right, always forming a halo around pictures of our Madonna, the Virgin of the Remedies, who is enshrined here. This pretty statue of the Mother with Child was probably made in Italy, in spite of the legend, which claims she was miraculously found in a trunk during a storm. She has such emotional importance that when, in the Civil War, a brigade of anti-clerical Republican soldiers set about breaking up the effigies in the church, one of them, who was a native of the village, managed to hide her in the neighbouring convent, where she was kept until the fighting was over. Every August 15th she is dressed in her finest robes and solemnly paraded around the town, making even the most anti-clerical montefrieño´s heart swell with pride. In fact, this is the time of year when there are most people in town, because so many of the villagers who left to find work and a new life in north-eastern Spain, and particularly the Balearic Islands, return to visit their loved ones and be present for the stirring moment when "La Virgen" lurches out of the church door.
Franco's troops took over from the Republicans at the end of that terrible summer of 1936 when, as well as restoring the broken religious statues, they summarily executed all the leftists they could find, including the poet Federico García Lorca, who met his fate in the hills above Granada. In Montefrio alone, some 30 rojos were in like fashion taken to the cemetery on the hill and forced to dig their own graves before facing el pelotón. It was not, sadly, the only massacre of its kind in our town, for "la noche de los niños", as it is known, still awakens bitter memories in the hearts of the few old-timers who can remember it. After Franco took over, a small band of young Republicans took to the hills to wage guerrilla warfare on the Nationalist forces, until they were captured and cut down at the cemetery, under cover of darkness.
Another well-loved legend surrounding the Virgen de los Remedios says that the Bishop of Granada came to see the Madonna after she was discovered in the trunk, and found her so beautiful that he insisted she be installed in the Cathedral. But when the cart, which had been commissioned to carry her away to the capital, reached a certain point on the main street, the mules refused to go any further, so she was allowed to remain in Montefrio. It is a measure of the villagers' devotion that the particular spot where the mules balked (about where the Banco Español de Crédito stands today) is still known as El Tranco, the barrier.
All the other paintings and statues in the church are replacements installed after the war, dreary, mass-produced works of scant artistic merit. The only object of interest beside the Lady is the pulpit, which stands to the left of the altar, and more for its history than beauty. Ornately carved in pink marble, it is conspicuously out of keeping with its austere surroundings. This pulpit originally belonged to the church on the cliff, and having spent a good deal of money on it just before the building was abandoned, the villagers undoubtedly decided to take it with them. The irony is that, with its rococo style, the pulpit was too sophisticated in style for the old Renaissance church, and too fussy and old-fashioned for the new Classical one, fating it to be out of place in both.
After the Civil War, Franco had large memorial crosses nailed to churches such as ours, with the names of those villagers who had been "wickedly murdered by the Marxists" - vilmente asesinados por los marxistas - painted on wooden panels. When I returned to Montefrio in 1983, after an absence of 20 years, I was surprised to discover that the communist mayor - who had just won the second democratic election ever - had removed our Cruz de los Caídos only a few weeks before. Curiously, the workers, with that indifference to detail which is so characteristic in these parts, failed to rub away the pale shadow which the cross left on the gingery brown stone. The result is that until today it can be seen, hanging there like a ghost between the shadows of the two panels and reminding those of us who knew it of unhappier times.
Most of the statues, monuments and other memories of the Franco regime have disappeared in Spain since the advent of democratic rule, but in our town, strangely, one still subsists. Foreigners are often surprised to see that the main street still bears the name "Paseo del General Franco", although we all call it simply "El Paseo". It was a subject of some controversy twenty years ago, but since the younger generations regard "all that" as being ancient history which has nothing to do with the world they live in, the street signs have remained as just another tribute to a forgotten dignitary.
The broad street to the left of the church, which heads up toward the castle, is known as La Plaza Alta, the High Square, and the first building on the left is our tourist information office, housed in an ancient and elegant building called the Casa de Oficios, or Guild Hall. Until recently it was our post office and so thickly coated in whitewash that no one suspected it could be of any value. After the post office was moved to its present location and the decrepit market building which stood in front of it had been demolished, the mysterious façade was cleaned and restored, and identified as belonging to a 16th century assembly room for the guilds of trades and craftsmen.
On the other side of the street, just up from the church, is a private palace belonging to the Alba family (no relation to the famous Duchess), distinguished by its monumental door in gracefully chiselled stone. It is a fine example of the Cordovan baroque style which can be seen in the churches of Cordoba itself and, particularly, of the nearby town of Priego de Córdoba. The house is closed most of the year because the owner lives in northern Spain, but I was once allowed in to see its 18th century chapel, rather claustrophobic but impressive.Next we come to the Ayuntamiento or Town Hall, a magnificent 18th century palace which once belonged to the Valdecasas family, who sold it to the Town Council in 1945. Under Franco, mayors were usually the local doctor or lawyer, "Don so-and-so", and appointed from above, but since democracy came in we have had a succession of elected mayors, ranging from Marxist to Socialist and Conservative, all of whom ritually promised to "work for the village" but then did pretty much as they pleased, thanks to the huge powers which the Socialist Government bestowed upon the position.
It was the notorious "Stalinist" mayor (Communist and then Socialist leader from 1983 to 1995) who ordered the unsightly bronze busts which prod up from the flower garden in front of the Town Hall, commemorating three singers of Montefrio. One of them is supposed to be a likeness of my dear friend Manuel Avila, who was the most illustrious flamenco singer of the three. The Mayor wanted to please the families and friends of the subjects, thinking of all the votes they could provide, so he had the Art teacher at the high school do him three busts - from photographs since the good man arrived in Montefrio after the models had died - for the price of one. The heavy-handed results make me think of livid corpses rising from the ground in a Grade B horror film. I am still hoping that some future Alcalde will have the good taste to replace, or remove them altogether.
Just above the Town Hall stands a former church, the Ermita de San Sebastián, on the street of the same name. This chapel was built in the 16th century and, like most neighbourhood churches in Spain, de-officiated in the 19th, having been used for various purposes since then, most notably as our Health Clinic. We were promised that it would become our long-dreamed-of archaeological museum, but political interests somehow got in the way and now it bears a sign proclaiming that it is a "Center for Olive Farming Resources", and, as far as I can see, only used for a yearly meeting of agronomists, who spend most of their time trying out the local jamón serrano. One may assume that after 2,000 years of olive farming the men of Montefrio have the matter firmly in hand, and require nothing more than further EU subsidies to make it profitable.The alleyway which separates these two buildings is called the Calle del Muro, the Street of the Wall, because the defensive wall of the Moorish town once ran through this part of the village. When the wall was demolished, after the Reconquest, the gap it left became a street, as happened in many medieval cities.
We climb on - shoes with rubber soles are strongly recommended - passing on our right the very steep Calle Santiago, so named for a wandering school teacher who lived there at the beginning of the century, and who was greatly loved, in those days before the school was built, by the villagers and farmers, who fed him in exchange for the lessons he gave to their children.
We continue up the Calle de San Sebastián, admiring the cave house with the pigeon roost nestling under the crag up on the right, and come to a belvedere, which overlooks the poor quarter called La Solana. In Spain, any place which receives the sunlight from dawn to dusk is called a solana, or sunny spot. Most of our gitanos live across the valley in El Coro, but there are also many here, joyously mixed in with the payos, or non-gypsies. To our right, as we stand at the railing, we see the profile of one of the six towers of the Moorish fortification which protected the southern slope. The remains of these towers are connected by a wall which is in some places still intact, and can be seen from the Algarinejo road.
We continue up an even steeper street, until we come to a small square, or plazuela. The house on the corner with the two ancient millstones at the door is the Casa de las Piedras, one of the cottages I restored for holiday rental. The stones were given to me by the owner of one of the Roman mills in the Arroyo de los Molinos.
This quarter, at the foot of the castle, is called El Arrabal, an Arabic-origin word (from al-rabat) which means "the suburb". If you turn left and walk along the path, you will see the strange cave-like houses which are built against the cliff, all of which are now uninhabited. Lying just outside the fortress (hence its name), this is the most ancient part of the town. Above the roofs, on the cliff face, there are rows of holes which once supported the beams of higher buildings, giving us an idea of the importance which this part of the town once had, strategically situated close to the castle gate.
The last inhabitants of these "semi-caves" were my friends known as El Sopo and La Negra, an elderly gypsy couple, who moved to a newer building nearby and sold me their cliff-house, which I sometimes use to stage impromptu flamenco performances for my guests, under the name La Cueva del Sopo.
Returning to the plaza, we cross to the far end and come to the cottage with the rounded terrace overhung by a grapevine. This house, named Casa de la Parra for the vine, was one of the first homes I restored, in 1995. When I bought it from the old man that lived there, known to all as El Cigarrón, the front porch was only a yard deep and the grapevine grew in front of it, up from the street. I had this porch built out into the street so that the grapevine now grows through it, and through the brick table I built there as well, which my mason artfully constructed around the gnarled trunk.
From here, we turn left to the castle gate. The cottage on the right hand side of the gate is the House of the Apricot Tree, so named for the tree which overhangs the porch and which
bears its fruit in July. I bought the house early in 1998 from the heirs of an old gentleman called José. I had had my eye on this superbly positioned, two room hut - which was originally the home of the guardian to the castle, and had been recently rebuilt for José by the government with a tile instead of a thatch roof, and a modern bathroom - for some years. While I was visiting Paris that winter, and driving through the 18th Arrondissement on my way to dinner, I got a call on my cell phone from a village friend saying that José had died and his relatives, who had come from Valencia to divide up his belongings, wanted to sell it as soon as possible.I turned right around and headed back for Montefrio, and two days later it was mine. We tore the bathroom out of the front of the cottage where it blocked the only wall which had a view, broke open the back wall to build a new one behind the cottage, and joined the two dank rooms into a single, airy space. We brought up some squarish stones from a house which had been demolished on the Plaza and with them rebuilt the fireplace which had been sealed up for years. The hut was built against the side of the steps leading up to the castle, which means that the rough stone wall next to the cottage's double bed was put there by the Moors, in the 14th century.
As you walk up the steps under the towering cliff and church, notice the crumbling remnant of masonry on the right, standing on its own like a jagged claw. This is all that remains of the Moorish military gate which once arched overhead to join the cliff. Compared to the towering foundations of the church on our left, the masonry is crude, composed of an outer shell of rough, squarish stones and a filler of clay and small, irregular stones. At the top of what was once a ramp which the Moorish warriors could climb mounted on their horses stands Montefrio's original Iglesia de la Encarnación, given that since it was abandoned and became a ruin, the name was transferred to the round church below on the Plaza.
The Reconquest reaches Montefrio
How did such a great church come to be built in such an inaccessible place, and on the ruins of an even greater fortress?
Shortly after the Moors swept north through the peninsula in 711, the Christians, who had taken refuge in the mountains of north-western Spain, began the 800-year long series of battles and truces called the Reconquest, during which they slowly pushed the Moors further and further south. This seemingly endless process culminated in the Moors' final expulsion, with the taking of Granada in 1492.
The Christian crusade reached this part of Andalucia in the mid-14th century, soon after King Alfonso XI cut off the enemy's main link with North Africa by conquering the port of Algeciras, facing the Straits of Gibraltar. He then took advantage of the Moors' disarray by seizing a number of castles in north-eastern Andalucia, including Alcalá Benzaide, which was renamed Alcalá la Real, or "The Royal", 20 kilometers to the north of Montefrio.
The Moors set about defending the new frontier of their shrinking kingdom by raising a string of forts that formed a crescent stretching across the south-eastern corner of the peninsula. The names of some of these castle towns, on the Christian side of the line, still refer to this frontier, such as Jerez de la Frontera. In Montefrio, they built a massive castle, of such importance that the construction was entrusted to one of the architects of the Alhambra itself. The clan of Moors who made their home in the castle took on the name of al-Muntifridi, from whom descended one of the most distinguished men of the time, the vizir, historian and poet Ibn al-Jatib.
During the century and a half that followed, the fortress town suffered constant raids and skirmishes from across the no-man's-land that stretched north over the hills to Alcalá. But in 1469 the Christian kingdoms - hitherto constantly at war with one another - finally achieved political unity through the marriage of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, who resolved to drive the Moors from Spain forever. When they reached the gates of Montefrio, in 1486, the siege they laid was a mere formality. The local alcaide began negotiating surrender before they had even camped in front of the castle walls.
28 Christian captives were freed from the dungeon, the Moorish inhabitants were allowed to take refuge in Granada, and the town was repopulated with Christian immigrants from the north. Some time afterwards, the new masters of Granada began to build a series of monumental churches - such as our Iglesia de la Encarnación - on the foundations of the castles of their defeated enemies, as a symbol of their victory over Islam.The elegant building we discover on the plateau was built in a peculiar marriage of styles that is officially known as gótico-renacimiento, providing us with a living example of the transition between medieval and Renaissance architecture. When the building was designed in 1505, the new Italian style and humanistic ideas were still rejected in the Court of Castile because it was felt, quite rightly, that they were less passionately religious in spirit that the great medieval cathedrals.
Queen Isabella herself - who died a year before the work began - was a pious and austere Franciscan and insisted that all churches, particularly her own mausoleum the Royal Chapel, be built in the majestic late Gothic style which she and her husband had made famous in Toledo, most apparent here in the buttressed exterior and the ceiling with its intricately ribbed arches. But Isabella's successor and grandson, known as Carlos Quinto, was a "modern", which explains why the decorative columns, capitals and doors of our church, which was not completed until well into his reign, are resolutely Renaissance in style. The architect Diego de Siloë is famous for creating the most beautiful churches of 16th century Granada, including the western gate of the Cathedral, and he has marked our temple with his inimitable "signature", the rows of pyramid-shaped protrusions that stud the arches of the nave. And although the altarpiece has disappeared, we know, from the town's ledger books, that it was commissioned to the architect of Carlos Quinto's palace in the Alhambra, Carlos Machuca, who had trained under Michelangelo in Rome.
The remains of a small fortress stand behind the church, with crumbling walls perforated by loopholes and, in the middle, a deep water cistern, once covered by an arched roof. It was long believed that this was the original Arab fort, but it now appears to have been built immediately after the conquest of 1486 as a symbol of Castilian lordship over the territory. It was short-lived as a military building, because as soon as the Guerra de Granada was won, in 1492, all fortresses in the region were, by Royal Decree, dismantled, in order to discourage internal conflicts from breaking out among the conquering knights. The care with which the walls of this building and the church are knitted together and the discovery of skeletons in the large patio suggest that the fortress was later adapted to become the church graveyard.
This disproves the popular belief that the famous crosses carved on its corner tower were traced there by the Catholic Monarchs and their military chief, the Gran Capitán, with the tips of their swords (and subsequently immortalized by a stone-carver) after the Moors had surrendered. Obviously, it would have taken some time to build the new fort and Isabella and Ferdinand never returned to Montefrio, so the crosses must have been carved by someone else at a later date, to commemorate their presence.
The villagers confusingly refer to both the church and the cliff itself as "La Villa", as if they were one and the same thing, which they are not. "Villa", in old Spanish, simply means "city", like the French "ville", which is explained by the largely forgotten fact that the town of Montefrio, up to the 16th century, stood on the plateau and not down below. The Moors lived there because it was fortified, and when the Christians came they did too, officially calling their new conquest "La Villa de Montefrío". The designation "villa" was used to distinguish a settlement, for administrative purposes, from the smaller lugar and aldea. The most notable example of this is Spain's capital, officially called "La Villa de Madrid".
This explains why the plateau is covered with remains of the Moorish and, later, Christian city, the most visible of which are the tiny floors of houses one finds everywhere, carved in the rock, to create a level area for building. There is also a huge water tank or aljibe, with an arched roof, most of which has long since collapsed. No excavations have ever been made on La Villa, so we still don't know what else lies under the ground.
Sometime in the 16th century, but exactly how long after the conquest of Montefrio no one can be sure, it was decided to move the town below to its current location, which left the great church standing high and dry, a back-breaking climb away from its parishioners. This daunting situation endured until the church was abandoned in the year 1767, when a lightning bolt struck the roof.
It is said that when the church was struck, it was full of people praying, but only a dog was killed by the falling stones (churches were like public meeting halls then so it may not have been uncommon for domestic animals to wander into them). This was considered to be a miracle, which is still celebrated on the last Sunday of May with a holiday known as the Día del Rayo, the Day of the Bolt, when a solemn procession is led through the town by the priest and the mayor.
There is a tradition, furthermore, that dogs can enter any church in the village, supposedly out of gratitude towards the victim for drawing the disaster upon itself, but, more pragmatically, in the hope that if another bolt strikes, the "miracle" will be repeated. I once put this to the test by allowing my inseparable pooch Bolero to follow me inside the church on the plaza, and not one of the pious ladies there moved to reprimand me, whereas he is, to our mutual chagrin, barred from entering restaurants and hotels almost everywhere else in the country!
I can testify to the fact that the hole in the roof was only a few yards across, because it was there when I first came to Montefrio in 1960, with the rubble still on the floor, untouched after almost two centuries. And there it remained until the Andalucian Government restored the church in 1980. One must assume - given that no documents mentioning the subject exist - that the villagers took advantage of the accident as a pretext for giving up the church altogether. The faithful had for several centuries been forced to walk all the way up the hill to Mass, often several times a day, which must have seemed like an act of penitence in itself. So we can assume they welcomed the excuse to abandon it and build a new church down below, to which they duly transferred the name Iglesia de la Encarnación. During the half-century between the Day of the Bolt and the completion of the new church, they worshipped at the Ermita de San Sebastián, which we saw next to the Town Hall.
There are no engravings or written descriptions of the church to tell us how it looked, and the one important element of the décor which still exists is now somewhere else: the pulpit which was once cemented into the shallow cavity carved in the wall of the nave, to the right of the altar, and which we have already seen in the round church on the Plaza. The door to the left of the altar leads to the Sacristy.
The name of the church has a political significance which tells us much about the spirit of the Reconquest. Like most of the churches in the newly Christianized territory, it was dedicated to the incarnation of the spirit of God in Jesus, Iglesia de la Encarnación. Accordingly, the scene carved above the door shows God overlooking a praying Mary as she receives the message from the angel of her coming motherhood, with its clear allusion to her virginity. In the ideological battle between Christianity and Islam, the Christians felt that their trump card, so to speak, was the fact that their prophet alone had been born to an immaculate maid, so they drove this point home whenever they could, to encourage the conquered population to embrace the "true faith".
This supposed "superiority" over Islam had much to do with the launching of the medieval cult of the Virgin Mary, which reached its climax in Spain with the stirring songs of Reconquest propaganda, the Cantigas de Santa Maria. These several hundred polyphonic narratives were designed to uplift the morale of the Christians and undermine that of the Mohammedans. In one of them, for example, a Moorish woman whose son is ill desperately watches him sinking towards death, until, seeing a Christian woman praying before a statue of the Virgin Mary, she imitates her and her son's health is restored.
How a rebel prince became King of Granada in Montefrio
Being a frontier post and only a half day's ride from Castilian Spain, "Muntifrid", as the Moors called it, was an ideal base for the palace plotters who seethed in the Alhambra, since it was never difficult to enlist the enemy's assistance in bringing down the current Sultan. The story of Prince Ibn Ismael is a good illustration of the treacherous intrigues and cross-alliances that typified all of the Reconquest and slowly but surely allowed the Christians to "divide and conquer".
In 1445, after the Sultan known as Mohammed the Lame seized power in Granada, the rebellious Abencerraje clan staged a counter-coup designed to put an ally of theirs on the throne, Prince Ibn Ismael, who was living in exile in... Castile, at the court of King Juan II! The Moorish Prince obtained his royal host's backing and, heavily escorted by Christian knights, set off from Alcalá la Real to meet the leader of the Abencerrajes in the fortress of Montefrio, where they were in league with the local commander. It was here, with great pomp and ceremony, that Ismael was proclaimed King of Granada.
When Ibn Ismael approached Granada at the head of an army massively reinforced by Christian troops, the Sultan, unable to muster the support of his own subjects, who detested him for his cruelty, fled the Alhambra and allowed the pretender to take the throne. However, Ismael was soon dethroned in turn because the mistrustful Moors understandably feared his "special relationship" with the Christians.
Now for the 111 steps of the bell tower, which will literally be the culminating point of your Montefrio experience! Fortunately there are several balconies and chambers to rest in on the way up, although no record exists of the use to which they were put. At the top of the steeple, we see that the bells have disappeared.
In fact, when I first came here, there were no tiles on the church at all and the steeple was uncovered. The numbers crudely painted in black on the stones of the bell tower date from the late 1950's, when an earthquake destroyed the steeple, and the stones were numbered, arch by arch, before being reassembled. In 1984 and while I was living in the town, another lightning storm destroyed half of the steeple again, and this time, after it was rebuilt, a lightning rod was attached to the side of the belfry.
The main tower of the Moorish fort stood here, so the view which the sentinels enjoyed must have been very similar to the one from the steeple. Muntifrid had its own "early warning system" composed of a string of four atalayas, or watchtowers in the surrounding hills, which alerted the inhabitants of approaching enemy troops, by means of flashing mirrors and smoke signals.
The first of these towers, on top of the Sierra de Parapanda (thoughtlessly destroyed 30 years ago to make way for the TV transmitter - another kind of atalaya) overlooked the road leading south from the Christian fort of Moclín, the main launching point for raids into the realm of Granada. From this tower the signal was relayed to three others. The ruins of one can be seen from the road to El Tocón, there is another near the junction of the road to Granada and the Cemetery Road, and the fourth stands in direct view of the castle, on the ridge above the new housing development to the northeast of the town.
Once we have enjoyed the magnificent view below us, we should direct our attention to specific parts of it. Looking north on the other side of the ravine, we see the new Montefrio, which began in 1967 when the school was built. Before then, the only education was provided by nuns who gave classes in the convent, and a few wandering teachers such as the penurious Santiago.Things began to change the year before I first came here, in 1959 when Franco's regime, as part of a drive to improve its social image, sent a group of students from the University of Oviedo in the north to carry out a literacy campaign among the peasants of the region. The teachers, most of them young women from well-heeled families, were so shocked by the backwardness and ignorance which they found in our countryside (although our "Don Juan" of the time, whose name was actually Don Curro, ensured that were also wined and dined at his olive oil mill) that Montefrio soon acquired negative fame in the halls of power.
The affair created such embarrassment for the regime that our Franco-appointed mayor, the irrepressible Pepe Guzman (still politically active at this writing) had only to catch the train to Madrid and visit the right politico to obtain the funds for building a school virtually overnight. This, with the construction of the TV transmitter on Parapanda Mountain a little later, completed Montefrio's cultural revolution and, for better or for worse, brought us definitively out of the Middle Ages.
The long rows of semi-detached bungalows to the right of the school are low-income housing, known as casas de protección social. Just in front of the gas station we see the Centro de Salud, our health care clinic. The high yellow tower next to the school is a wheat silo, no longer used because it is now cheaper to import flour (the fields of cereals we see in the countryside produce animal fodder such as oats and chick peas). The low, flat building with the broad red rim around the roof is the Sports Pavilion and, among the trees, is the fair ground where the Monday morning fruit and vegetable market is held, which circulates around the region, with an established day of the week in each village.
A word of caution about shopping at the market: prices for produce are given for quantities of 2 or 3 kilos. At the baratillo, or "cheapie", as it is also called, everything is so inexpensive that you are expected to take a full week's Spanish-family sized supply, although exceptions are made for penny-pinching foreigners.
At the very end of the district is the public swimming pool, one of the most handsome and well appointed in the region, but which, incomprehensibly to the hardy British, is only open during the summer school holidays, end of June to mid-September. The reason for this is, like so many other things, a cultural one: Andalucians cannot conceive of jumping into the water unless the weather is very, very hot. The Piscina Municipal is a fine installation with its gardens, restaurant, outdoor theatre and children's pool with slides, and it opens every day (during the summer) from 12 noon to 8 in the evening.
I specify "12 noon" because in Spain, although medianoche is the same as our midnight, mediodía is not our noon at all but two o'clock in the afternoon. This gives rises to much confusion when foreign visitors who have learned their Spanish at school or in Latin America are asked to meet at "mediodía" - they get to the appointed place two hours ahead of time! The reason is that the day here is divided in two parts, the morning that ends at lunchtime, and the afternoon after that. And since lunch is never before two…
The industrial buildings to the right of the pool include the olive oil mill called Cooperativa de San Francisco, where you can buy our virgin olive oil, a factory that prepares table olives, Aceitunas Manzano, and a cheese factory, Quesos de Montefrío. Previously the milk of our many herds of goats was sold to cheese factories in La Mancha, but now we have our own production and it is of excellent quality. You can buy it at several stages of ripeness: añejo, aged, which is sharp, semi-curado, or half-ripened, which is milder, and fresco, or fresh, which is chalky white, spongy in consistency and sold without the wax coating. The latter is my favourite because it has a goatier, creamier taste. I like to munch a slab of it without bread for breakfast, accompanied by a cup of café con leche. To try some, just ask for un queso de tres días, "a three-day old cheese".
Strangely, few stores in Montefrio carry our local cheese, olive oil or ham, all of superior quality. Several commercial reasons are offered for this state of affairs, none of which make much sense to me. All there is for it is to buy them directly from the factories, with the exception of one or two local stores which sell our ham in slices, such as Ramón's shop (rhymes with jamón) on the Calle Santo Cristo, and Barbara's grocery store in front of the Post Office.
Further to the right, but on the horizon, we see the long white wall and poplar trees of the town cemetery, where tombstones have become a thing of the past, largely superseded by the towering walls of multi-tiered crypts or nichos, each with its glass window and garland of artificial flowers. The advent of cheap building materials not only made it possible for people to indulge in their penchant for living one on top of the other, but also for being buried - if one can call it buried - that way.
This peculiar aversion to being sunk down in the dank, worm-ridden earth is part and parcel of the legendary Spanish fascination with mortality. As Pepe Cunao, an old friend of mine whose own shelving-away I recently had the sad duty of attending, would say, somehow the whole thing seems less final when it ends up above ground.
No fond sentimentalizing about eternal rest and endless natural cycles here! The horror of extinction is loudly voiced by all every time the awful word is mentioned. "¡Qué bueno es poderlos escuchar!", the villagers are wont to say, with a shudder, when the church bells toll for a funeral - "How good it is to be able to hear them!".
Which is a nice way of saying, thank God it isn't me. Another dicho popular which expresses people's adamant refusal to find something good about the state of non-being is
"Los muertos al hoyo, y los vivos al bollo", which translates loosely as "The dead, to their hole, and the living, to their bowl".Instead of returning to the town through La Solana, we will turn left after leaving the castle gate, walking down through the Old Cemetery. On the way, and just behind the Casa de la Parra, we can see the back wall of the Casa de la Roca, a cottage I restored for myself to live in 1999, before renting it out along with the others. It hangs like a balcony over the town, with fine views from every window.
There are three huge incisions in the rock below the road in this part of the Arrabal which I believe are the remains of a quarry that provided the builders of the church with stone. One is immediately below the Casa de la Roca and the other two can be seen on the north side of the house, as you walk down to the platform that we call El Cementerio Viejo, or El Panteón.
This was the town cemetery after the church on La Villa was abandoned in 1767, until 1901 when, for fear of infiltrations that might poison the villagers' wells, it was moved to its current site rather too far away on the eastern ridge. The large holes in the face of the cliff overlooking the area were family vaults, or crypts - the forerunners of today's nichos.
From here it is a short walk down the Calle Arco and the Calle Gracia to the center of the town. It is hard to think of it as a Plaza, and even harder as a "Square", because it is really nothing more than an asymmetrical widening formed by the junction of five streets. But it has a real life of its own, much more than many well-designed town squares in other places that are usually empty except when some official celebration is held.
Depending on the time of day, and the day of the week, you will find large groups of unoccupied men standing about in different corners, basically watching one another and, of course, watching you as you make your way across the Plaza. There are even spots preferred by the gypsies, on the curb next to the church and, diametrically opposite the great building, where the Calle Alta meets El Paseo. Their numbers fluctuate and they come and go, but, as a rule, from Monday to Saturday mornings you will find them there, whiling away the morning chatting to one another or simply standing alone in silence, waiting to see who comes along.
This phenomenon exists in other towns of the region, but none as strikingly as in Montefrio. In the old days, under Franco, when things were hard, the field workers would gather here to wait for one of the landowners to drive up in their trucks and hire them for the day. It was even common, when work was scarce, for him or his foreman to hold a sort of digressive auction in which the jobs went to the lowest bidder.
Nowadays, most of the "workers" are living on some sort of welfare and would not accept a job if you offered it to them, but the tradition persists. It is often difficult to drive a car across the Plaza between 11 o'clock in the morning and Spanish "noon" three hours later, for the thicket of men that form this unofficial, open-air social club. It may not be a coincidence that the gathering takes place while their wives are busy at home getting ready to serve them their lunch - preceded, of course, by a glass of wine and a hot tapa.
The other side of town - El Pósito, El Convento and El Coro
The eastern, less ancient side of the town is distinguished by two landmarks, El Pósito and what is popularly known as El Convento. El Pósito Real - The Royal Deposit, or storage house - was built in 1795, at the same time as the round church. Like the church, it was part of Carlos III's modernization program, and intended to help stave off the famines that were common, by providing the people with a silo or granary where they could store their wheat in proper conditions. But it also acted as a state-owned rural credit bank that gave loans to the farmers against collateral in grain. There are very few of these pósitos left in Andalucia, and ours, after being brutally adapted as a trade school without any regard for its historical value, has now been restored as a very handsomely appointed cultural center.
It is my theory that El Pósito was built here, on the east of the village, because this was the closest point to the mills in the gorge below Parapanda Valley. It makes sense that the grain was taken directly from storage in the town to be transformed there into flour and bread, since each mill also had its own bakery. This would give some weight to the suggestion that the mills themselves were built under Carlos III at the end of the 18th century, although their importance for the granary would be the same had they been of Roman origin, as I believe they are.
Just up the hill from El Pósito stands the church of San Antonio de Padua, built in the baroque style in the mid-18th century. It is popularly known as El Convento because the adjacent building, now a ruin, was once a Franciscan monastery. Like most of the Church's huge landholdings, it was expropriated under the State anti-clerical reform in 1832, the tongue-twisting Desamortización de Mendizábal. After that it was turned into a tenement house and bakery, itself abandoned when the village bakers formed the current panadería cooperativa near the Plaza. All of this has brought about a migration of names from one place to the other which is typical of these parts: the church is known as El Convento because of its proximity to the monastery, and the monastery is known as La Máquina because it once contained the machine which milled the town's flour.
Sadly to say, as of this writing nothing more is left of El Convento than a roofless ruin. It was some years ago attempted to restore the monastery for the purpose of transforming it into a hotel, but this incomprehensibly resulted in the demolition of the entire building, with the stones of the arched cloister being numbered and carried away for storage. Then the Town Council in charge was voted out of office and now the whole project lies in limbo, and will continue to do so until further notice from the Ayuntamiento. It might take a long time in coming since, as the saying goes, "las cosas de palacio van despacio", which, once more loosely translated, means, "the wheels of power turn slowly".Every May 4th there is a lively neighbourhood fiesta on the Plaza del Convento known to all as El Señor de las Roscas, the "Christ of the Cakes", with a procession in which anis-flavoured ring-shaped pastries, or roscas, are distributed to the faithful. A band plays and fireworks are launched into the night sky, with a crowd milling about, and everyone dances to the music of a well-amplified orchestra. In the old days the religious procession with the handouts of bread was the main attraction, but nowadays Andalucians are less concerned with salvation and starvation than having a good time, and the whole thing has become centered around the baile and the open-air bar.
The reason this curious holiday came about has been forgotten by all except a few of the village's old-timers. One spring during the drought-ridden end of the 19th century, the people prayed, to no avail, before all of the saints in the churches for rain to make the wheat grow. At the height of their despair, the priest of San Antonio de Padua had the idea of taking the figure of Christ in a holy procession around the town, on a cloudless afternoon. In those days, blue skies in springtime meant hunger.
By the time the chanting crowd had returned to the church, thunderclouds were rolling overhead and after several days of continual rain the parched fields were quenched. The pastries given out symbolize the rescued wheat harvest, and the official name of the holiday, la Fiesta de la Caridad y Paciencia - "the feast of charity and patience" - clearly refers to the need to wait for the mercy of the Lord.
I have my own, quite different memories of El Convento and its priest, when I first came to stay here in 1961. It not only had its own sacerdote (with the massive decline in church attendance there is now only one, shared between the two churches) but he was an outspoken and even revolutionary one. Don Manuel had set up a radio station in the church, with the antenna on the steeple, and was famous for having dared to use it, during a labour dispute, to encourage the peasants to "use their hoes and shovels to crack the skulls of the landowners". The fact that he was a representative of the Church made it difficult to silence him.
When I came to Montefrio with an Australian classmate from the University of Granada, he invited us to an interview in the tiny station, broadcasting over the most primitive equipment imaginable. But the questions we were asked had nothing to do with politics, just the usual "What do you think of our town?" sort of thing that I was asked, that same year, for a report in a short-lived village paper called Ecos de Parapanda. Don Manuel was especially impressed to learn that my friend's father, a Lithuanian journalist who had immigrated to Australia after the War, was a great lover of Spain and had made the only existing translation in his language of Don Quixote.
Until half a century ago, there was an Easter week procession that led down from the Calvary Chapel on the hill to San Antonio, but it was abandoned when the Church, in the new ecumenical spirit, began cutting back on pageantry. Some of the crucifixes of the Via Crucis still stand along the road, so thickly coated in whitewash - applied by generations of those little women in black one sees embroidering on their tiny wicker chairs - that they seem to have become an organic part of the houses themselves. Unfortunately the crucifixes are not protected by any sort of official "artistic monument" status so their survival depends entirely on the whimsy of the people who own them, and since most of these are well on in years, I fear that they may soon be torn down to make way for modern constructions, unless an unusually sensitive Mayor steps in to save them.
The last stretch before reaching the ruined chapel is a dirt path, and if you take the trouble to climb it you will be rewarded with a fairy-tale view of the town and castle, among the endless hills of olive groves.This barrio - really just one long, zigzagging street that rises from the church to the chapel - is called El Coro, because, like the choir of a church, it is in the highest part of town. After you pass the water fountain, several hundred yards above the church, the slope becomes steeper and, in the sunken alley on the right, you will see the first house which I restored, noticeable because of the magnificent wrought-iron grill over the window, which once adorned one of the most beautiful houses in the village, on the crossroads called La Esquina de Jesus, where I spent two summers during my student years. This enchanting house, a sort of Moorish monastery, was sadly demolished, and the owner had the grill torn off, bending it badly in the process, and dumped it in a vacant lot. Upon my return I ruefully bought it from him and kept it for several more years on my farm.
When I bought the Coro house in 1990 as an office for my translation work, my first step was to have the grill straightened out and fix it to the façade - it took four of us just to lift it into the air. The setting is far more humble than the aristocratic old house near the Plaza, but one where it is unlikely to be troubled again, in view of the neighbourhood's unattractiveness to speculators. It now belongs to a charming gypsy lady known to all as Pippy, who rents it to holidaymakers through my good offices.
When I first came to Montefrio, I would accompany my friend Manolo, the town butcher and one of Andalucia's finest flamenco singers, up into El Coro to visit two gypsy brothers, Melchor and José, who were fine cantaores themselves.
Then, there was only a donkey path of beaten earth with boulders protruding everywhere, lined by impoverished hovels covered with thatch roofs. Half-naked children played in the refuse while their mothers fanned charcoal burners to cook the daily stew.
Some years later a fire destroyed most of the roofs and the government had the houses tiled. Then, with Spain's tourism boom, the inhabitants began to migrate north to do casual labour in the resort areas of the Costa Brava and Mallorca and, with the resulting influx of cash, later supplemented by the unemploy-ment benefits which came into full force after Franco's death, the quarter was gradually upgraded. Now it is almost as respectable as the other working class quarters of the village, with the special distinction that its inhabitants are gypsies.
From the Casa de Pippy up, the atmosphere becomes livelier and more "electric"; you may come across groups of girls with flashing dark eyes, shaking their lustrous manes of hair and displaying rows of gold rings on fingers tipped with blood-coloured nails. You may hear a burst of flamenco coming from some hidden stereo or a housewife hanging out her laundry, chanting nasally as she holds up her husband's underclothes to the sun. There is something festive and devil-may-care in the air, for you are among a joyous tribe - "la ciudad de los gitanos" which Lorca wrote of in his famous poem.
Unlike some other towns in the region, relations with the gypsies are relaxed, if not precisely affectionate, but fortunately we pale faces from afar are not thought of as being the garden variety of payos, and all you have to do is smile and say ¡hola! to get the same warm greeting in return. In any case, Montefrio has few of the drug-and-crime problems that blight the gypsy ghettos of Madrid and Barcelona, so you have nothing to fear, except perhaps slipping on the steep street, now covered in concrete.
At the entrance to Montefrio when coming from Granada, and just one hundred yards up the hill from El Pósito, stands a massive whitewashed building with green trim which does not qualify as a monument in its own right but marks an important chapter of our history also. It is the Cuartel de la Guardia Civil, the "barracks" of the Spanish Civil Guard, and was built just before my first visit to Montefrio in 1960, at the height of the Franco regime.
It has a distinctly military appearance, with its pepper-pot sentinel tower pierced with gun-slits and the massive wooden gate that swings open onto an interior patio. The Civil Guard were Franco's right arm and the harshest persecutors of his opponents, as well as of the gypsy people, for one of their duties was to "watch over the gypsies". One of the most beautiful poems of Federico García Lorca, "Ballad of the Spanish Civil Guard", describes, in chilling terms that did nothing to endear him to their ranks, how the guardsmen invade and pillage a gypsy quarter.
But the "Benemérita", as they are known, were not created by Franco nor to crack down on gypsies. Their origin goes back to the beginning of the 19th century, when Spain was plagued by bandits who attacked travellers and farmhouses, in the wake of the expropriation of church property, the controversial "Disentailment", which closed down our Franciscan monastery. A liberal Minister, Mendizábal, who to boot was of Jewish origin, decreed that the vast landholdings of the Church should be put up for auction in order to redistribute the wealth accumulated since the Middle Ages.
Ancient churches and cloisters were torn down or turned into industrial buildings, and thousands of monks and nuns found themselves literally in the street, reduced to beggardom. Most of the confiscated property quickly found its way into the hands of the new bourgeoisie, the class from which bureaucrats such as Mendizábal himself came. The immediate economic result was that well-heeled provincial dynasties were created, who until today constitute the upper class of many towns such as Montefrio.
As one can imagine, the Church did not take this setback lying down, and the priests went to their pulpits to inflame the minds of the peasants against the usurpers. They encouraged them to pillage the pillagers, crying "¡Quién roba a un ladrón tiene cien años de perdón!" - he who robs a thief will be pardoned for one hundred years - and the result was an outbreak of lawlessness. To defend their acquisitions, the landowners pressed for the creation of a rural police force to hunt the bandits down wherever they were hiding, and the Civil Guard, with its distinctive black patent-leather three-cornered hats, came into being.
During the long Franco regime many dissidents disappeared into great doors such as the ones that protect Montefrio's cuartel never to be seen again, but since the dictator's death, the institution's image has greatly changed for the better. The Civil Guardsmen are invariably courteous and helpful and do their best, without trampling the wrong-doers' sacrosanct human rights, to curb the petty crime and drug-dealing which makes Spain something less than an earthly paradise. Rather than resent the civiles as we did in the past, we have of recent years even had reason to feel sorry for them, and not only because they must bear the brunt of the Basque terrorist attacks which take so many innocent lives.
When, in 1982, Spain got its first Socialist head of state, Felipe Gonzalez, he created a stir by making one of his own apparatchiks, Luis Roldán, the General Director of the venerable police force, ostensibly to democratize it. This "average bloke", who had been a time-card controller at a factory in Zaragoza until he found his way up through the ranks of the newly triumphant "Partido Socialista Obrero Español", was delighted to find himself in such a respected position and soon created a network of corruption so brazen that even the most jaded politicos were amazed when it was revealed.
For example, he set up a fund for children wounded by terrorist bombs and insisted that all contributions be delivered to him personally in cash, which he then had flown to a Swiss bank account in a suitcase carried by his Latin American wife. The Civil Guard stood by helplessly because they feared that any complaints on their part would be dismissed as anti-democratic.
When the scandal became so outrageous that it finally broke, anti-democracy notwithstanding, the PSOE was at first plainly relieved to see Roldán flee the country, but the public uproar forced Gonzalez to track him down. The international Mafia spirited him to a hideaway in Chile, and when that became too risky he was smuggled into Laos, of all places, where Spanish agents finally, and oh so reluctantly, caught up with him.
We all had a good laugh at his threats, when brought to trial, to "pull the blanket" off his colleagues who had also had their fingers in the honey jar, but thanks to some clever political footwork most of the big-wigs were spared. His name, "Roldán", became a synonym of skulduggery and he is still in prison, but the reputation of the Civil Guard was sorely tarnished, in spite of the fact that the democrats, for once, were clearly to blame.
Las peñas de María Brava
The peñas, or cliffs, is really a single cliff that faces the promontory of the castle across the valley, and, according to the geologists, was once joined to it. The cooling of the earth's surface produced a fissure that split the hill in two, and river erosion did the rest to form the cradle-shaped gap in which the village is nestled.
It has been said that, because of this, the village's name is a combination of the words monte ferido, which means in old Spanish "wounded mountain", while others claim that it means what it reads, "cold mountain". Since we have no documentary proof of either theory, we are free to take our pick, as so often occurs with the history of the region.
The Cold Mountain translation would certainly seem to be right if this was indeed the place that the Romans called Mons Frigidus, but of this no one can be sure. The site of the village is not on a mountain and the climate is not particularly cold, but the name could have been originally that of the Sierra de Parapanda nearby and then transposed to the site of the castle when the village moved westward in the Moorish period. We know that the name Parapanda was not given to the mountain until the end of the 15th century, and, being the highest summit in the region, it always receives snowfall in winter.
What makes me lean towards Wounded Mountain, apart from the fact that I like words which describe things well and succinctly, is that the earliest irrefutable trace we have of the name is the Arabized version, Muntifrid, given that it was the Moors who first created a town here in the Middle Ages. The Arabs pronounced the Spanish and Latin words as best they could, adapting them to their phonetical system, but there is no reason for them to have added a "d" which did not originally exist. And there can be no doubt that the Arab name had a "d", because we have written proof that the clan that lived here became known as al-Muntifridi, by association with the place.
As you drive down from El Tocón, you can see, in a single glance, both sides of this great rift or "wound" in the hillside. On the left, the wedge-shaped "chunk of hill" standing on its own with the castle on top, and on the right, the jagged face of the bulk of the hill.Las Peñas is a forgotten and bucolic corner of the town of which I am especially fond. You can walk there from El Paseo, going up the Calle del Agua, crossing the Calle Ánimas and taking the ramp to the place called El Visillo, which literally means "the viewpoint". The spectacle, like most of the vistas in this blessed town, is magical.
Near the lookout, we see a curious, rounded cement construction protruding from the surface. This is the covering of the holding tank that was built to supply the village's main pilar, the Fuente de los tres caños, "the fountain of the three spouts", near the Plaza. The precious stuff flows down through a pipe buried under the Calle del Agua to the fountain where, until running water was installed in every home in the mid-70's, the housewives would noisily congregate with their earthenware cántaros.
The tank is filled by a natural underground spring, and in the rainy season the villagers always know that the wells are full when it overflows, or "bursts". Then they exclaim, ¡Arrevienta María Brava! -: María Brava is bursting! It does this with such violence that it was given the name brava or "wild", María being a common epithet for fountains.
If we walk to the end of the path which skirts the foot of the cliff, we come to an impressive public washing basin, sheltered in a cavity of the cliff. El lavadero is a long, shallow rectangular pond made of large slabs of stone. From the perfection with which it is all carved and built, it could well be the work of Carlos III again, and part of the urban improvement program begun in
1795. Today, it is at once romantic, mouldering in the shadow of the huge rock looming above it, and sadly uncared for, filled with stagnant water and littered with rubbish left by the children of El Coro, who come here to play.The abandoned house standing in front of the laundry basin was once the village matadero, or slaughter-house, which, before the village had running water, needed to be close to an abundant supply.
La cueva de las gazapillas
But the most interesting thing in this nostalgic corner of Montefrio is the cave dwelling that overlooks the mirador, and for two good reasons: first, it has a lurid human drama attached to it, and second, it is, at least nominally, mine. I bought it from an old man who lived down the path, who used it as a pen for his flock of goats. It is just big enough to make a charming rental cottage for two, on the lines of the Apricot Tree House over in the Arrabal, and the views and setting are unparalleled, but the job of rebuilding the walkway which leads up to it is, as things stand, more than I can cope with on my own.
So much for my personal interest in the matter. The story that follows, as told to me by El Tipo, the man who sold me the cave, is the essence of a piece I wrote for a literary contest held in Montefrio some years ago, and which was eliminated right off the bat because, according to my friend the postmaster, who sat on the jury, "it lacked literary quality". Perhaps it was just too embarrassing to be made public.
The cave is known to the old-timers as la cueva de las gazapillas, which literally means "the cave of the little rabbits". The owner was a man nicknamed El Gazapo, the little rabbit (probably because, as a baby, he was very small) and he lived there with his wife, two daughters and small son. He earned a meagre living as a truck-driver's assistant, and when the Civil War broke out he went away and never returned, leaving his family destitute in a time of great hardship.
The fate of the people of Andalucia was particularly cruel during the war, because most of them supported the Republican forces and were left to their own devices when Franco took over. They were often reduced to living on roots and leaves, during the conflict and for years afterwards. The old-timers tell of the outbreaks of sarna - mange - that plagued them, with everyone scratching their skin, due to the appalling conditions in which they had to live.
Montefrio was taken over by Franco's troops during the first months of fighting and a garrison was placed at the bridge to control the entrance to the village, just below the cliffs. The soldiers had food and a gaggle of women and barefoot children clustered around the mess tent when the cook ladled the stew into the tin plates. Having been here at the end of this terrible time, I can easily imagine the threadbare black dresses, the thin legs and the dust of the army lorries that rolled in and out of the town.
The two sisters, then in their teens, came down from their cave too, and before long the soldiers were luring them into the bushes under the bridge. As the war progressed, the girls became plump and, being no longer in immediate need of food, began demanding money for their services. When dusk fell the soldiers would climb the hill to line up in front of the cave. It became a well-organized brothel, one of several which were to be found in the town during those threadbare times. When a woman had nothing to feed her children, the last resort, as El Tipo put it, was to alquilar el humero - "rent out her smokestack".
There was, and still is, a front room and a bedroom in the back. The girls, by this time known as las gazapillas - the nickname they inherited, in the feminine and diminutive form, from their departed father - took their customers through the parlour, where the mother and boy were sitting around the oil lamp. They were so businesslike that when the girls were away or indisposed, the mother took over for them, rather than lose the clientele.
My friend El Tipo, may he rest in peace, assured me that the cave was always spanking clean, beautifully whitewashed and with pots of geraniums hanging gaily around the door - the gazapillas ran a tight ship. When I asked the old man if he too had patronized it, he smiled nostalgically and croaked, "We all did".
Then the war ended and the soldiers went away. The sisters began to serve the local market, and when the men went on a binge they would end up knocking on their door, late at night. Until one day the village women decided that enough was enough. A gang of them marched up to the cave, waving saucepans and crying "Be gone, you pigs!". The gazapillas packed up and moved to Granada, and the abandoned cave was used as a shelter by indigents who drifted through the village, until El Tipo took it over for his goats.
Before I can restore the cave I will have to rebuild the path, a technically difficult and costly job because of the height, some 15 meters from the foot of the cliff. The old ramp was made of boards and stones piled one on top of the other, the remains of which still dangle over the void, but for holiday rental purposes it will have to be solidly cemented in place. But, rest assured, when the Cave of the Little Rabbits finally becomes one of the Casas de Lorenzo, the saga of the three women will, in one form or another, be inscribed on the whitewashed walls for the benefit of my guests. After all, it is part of our history, too.
Our archaeological site, Las Peñas de los Gitanos
The remains of Montefrio's Iberian settlement have been known to archaeologists for almost as long as interest in prehistory has existed, since the 19th century. Then, historians for the first time became interested in all ancient things, whether they belonged to the times before the Greeks and Romans or after
them, simply because they tell us about what we once were, rather than what we should try to become.The man who discovered our antiquities was Don Manuel de Góngora, a professor of history at the University of Granada. In the summer of 1868 this lonely pioneer led an expedition through the wilderness of Andalucia in search of prehistoric remains, which he described in a small book, handsomely illustrated with etchings, called Antigüedades de Andalucía. The local peasants led him up the Gorge of the Mills to a forbidding range of cliffs and meadows, where hundreds of curious slabs of stone, forming boxlike constructions, jutted out of the earth.
Góngora tells us that not only was the natural citadel rich in remains, but that the path that led from it to the town of Montefrio was "strewn with tombs on either side". Since then, bulldozers and explosives have enabled the farmers to remove these obstructions from their fields, so that only those among the cliffs, where the terrain is too rough for agriculture, have survived.
There are many such sites in the region, but ours is exceptional for the chronological coherency of its remains and the extraordinary natural beauty in which they are set. Las Peñas de los Gitanos is nothing less than a sprawling, open-air history book whose successive chapters can be "read" by the curious traveller, in a magical landscape of oak forests, limestone cliffs and hidden valleys, stony mountains and rolling olive groves. Montefrio may, apart from its fairly modern domed church, have no single monument of great importance in itself - there are better preserved Moorish forts, more elegant Renaissance churches, larger and more complex prehistoric tombs in other parts of Andalucia - but it is unrivalled for the continuity and harmony of the ensemble, virtually unspoiled by progress.
The site, which towers above the road from Montefrio to Puerto Lope, some 5 kilometers east of the town, was the main center of population in the region for over 4,000 years. It contains the remains, many inaccessible or in shambles, of several hundred dolmens - the "stone tables" of the ancient Britons, better described as megalithic tombs - as well as a Roman fort and an early medieval village.
The people who first settled here were not Celts, as was originally thought by historians such as Góngora, but native Iberians. Several archaeological excavations have been made since his discovery, but they have literally only scratched the surface of the remains believed to exist, both buried in the ground and hidden in the region's caves. In Spain, there are too many antiquities, and not enough money to dig them up.
The name of the place itself tells us something about its more recent history: the Cliffs of the Gypsies. It was so called because, until the end of the 18th century, Spain's gypsies, who roamed the country begging and stealing, as well as practicing more innocent trades as weavers, tinkers, musicians and fortune-tellers, were very much feared by the people and, for this reason, not allowed to live within several miles of the nearest town. Our gypsies camped here among the cliffs and meadows, although there are no physical traces of their presence.
This maze-like, multi-levelled region, which stretches over several miles - when seen from the air, it resembles a great gash thrown up among the rolling hills of olive groves - can be easily visited by means of the three following "trails".
The Trail of the Dolmens - El Rodeo
This is the best-known part of the site, because of the prehistoric tombs that stand on the large meadow known as El Rodeo, at the foot of a mighty wall of cliffs. The dirt road that leads up to it is currently barricaded to prevent cars from entering, but you can park on the highway and enter on foot. Do not be discouraged, either, by the boulders that again block the road several hundred yards up.
These rather daunting obstacles were put there in 1998 by the owner of the property, in an attempt to force the government to expropriate the site, contending that it has been useless to him since it was declared heritage land. The government says it can't afford to pay him the amount of money he is demanding, so he retaliated by putting up the barricades. At first he denied access to visitors altogether, but later backed down and said that they could enter on foot. One day, perhaps, the dispute will be settled and you can drive in, saving yourself the kilometer-long walk.
In any case, the scenery is so beautiful that the walk is an enjoyable one. And a positive side effect of the feud is that there are no more of the noisy Sunday picnics and football matches which, since the advent of the family automobile, had been taking place on the meadow, leaving those of us who visit the place for its historical interest to wander among the ruins in the appropriate tranquillity.
The dirt road runs through an abandoned quarry at the foot of the cliffs and, several hundred yards on, crosses a small meadow, ending in a roundabout at the second, much larger clearing, El Rodeo.
In the short stretch between the two meadows, on the right hand side of the road, stands a finely-built dolmen, the covering slab of which has been thrown to one side by the almond tree growing in its midst. These tombs are composed of a mortuary chamber in which many bodies were buried, with access through a long, narrow corridor and small opening carved in the front slab, usually composed of two stones fitted together with a notch in each forming a door. But in this dolmen the aperture was gouged out of a single piece, making it especially impressive. I often wonder why no one has taken the trouble to root out the invading tree and put the stones back in their places, because this is one of the most beautiful examples we have.
On the floor of the vast meadow, spectacularly framed among cliffs and stony mountains, we see a number of rectangular cuts in the reddish soil, which were made by the archaeologists to reveal other similar tombs. Most of them have lost their covering slabs, but there are several dolmens on and around the meadow which are intact, and the best known of them all stands on a low rise overlooking the meadow itself. From the roundabout, you must walk towards the cliffs on the right, skirting around the foot of the rise until you find a rough path leading up to the plateau.
There are two tombs here, and the first one is in almost perfect condition, only lacking one of the stones that form the entrance corridor. The tomb just beyond it, however, is in total ruin, its massive slabs cast on all sides. There was a spate of grave-plundering in the 1950's, after several well-publicized caches of treasure were found by demolition workers in houses of Granada's old Moorish quarter, the Albaicin, apparently hidden there by the original occupants when they were expelled from Spain after 1492. Many of the rich Jews and Moors preferred to leave their wealth behind, in the belief that they would one day be allowed to return, rather than risk having it confiscated by the Christians as they left the country, or stolen by their fellow Moors when they reached the other shore of the Mediterranean.
Since the local people believed, and many still believe, that all ancient remains are the work of los moros, upon hearing about the treasures they set about tearing apart all of the tombs which had not been previously plundered by the Romans, and when the stones were too heavy to move they blew them up with dynamite, something the Romans didn't have.
Of course, all they found were bones, flints and clay pots. I first came to Montefrio not long after the treasure-hunting craze, and got an idea of the grip it had on people's minds. One summer evening a farmer came to our house in the village saying that his wife had had a dream about a tomb in Las Peñas which was full of gold and jewels, and that if my companion and I could bring from Germany a machine he had heard about capable of detecting such materials, he would be willing to share the treasure with us.
The other two dolmens lie across the meadow, to the south. The first one is hidden by a clump of oak trees, and is somewhat smaller and rougher than the tomb on the rise. It is especially important to me, though, because I spent three nights camping inside it, in the summer of 1961.
The third intact dolmen in El Rodeo is hidden in the thicket of oak trees that stands on the rim of the meadow just beyond, and is still sunk deeply in the ground, untouched by the archaeologists. It is different to the others because its "door" is composed of two rectangular slabs set several feet apart, without the characteristic notches.
The people of the prehistoric settlement grazed their sheep and buried their dead down on the meadow, but they lived in a safe place high up on the cliffs. You can get to the Poblado de los Castillejos, as the site is known, on foot from here by working your way westward up among the cliffs, but it is much easier to enter the site from the west, at the Cortijo del Castellón.
Trail of the prehistoric village and Roman fort - Poblado de los Castillejos
Leaving the village on the road to Illora and Puerto Lope, turn left after the bridge and take the dirt road up the hill to the farmhouse called El Cortijo del Castellón. If you are driving, park here and continue on foot along the track which begins between the farmhouse and the Castellón Hill, heading west towards the cliffs. The road skirts around the foot of an impressive rock formation and uphill into the cliffs, fading out on the grassy slope. At the top of this clearing, on the right, is a sign with information on the archaeological site.
The outcropping of rock above the sign is the site of the Roman fortress, but before climbing to the top we should examine the curious cave at its foot. It would seem to be part of the fortress because its mouth is partly sealed with a wall of large, symmetrically carved stones that once framed a door. The Romans may have used the cave, spacious and high inside, as some sort of storage area.
On the plateau above the cave are several rows of massive, squared stones which are all that is left of the fortress. Some of the stones have small notches cut in the upper edge, facing one another from stone to stone to form a butterfly-shaped cavity, into which molten lead was poured to clamp the blocks firmly together.
The view from the plateau sweeps across the fertile valley below, making me think that the Romans chose this place because it allowed them to control the comings and goings through the Gorge of the Mills, where they had built the series of flour mills which I believe were so important for the region's economy.
Further on are the excavated remains of the Roman-period settlement, with a small grid of walls. The far end of the small plateau is occupied by the metal hangar that was erected by the archaeologists in 1990 to protect the excavation. There is an opening in the far side that enables us to look in.
What we see appears, to the untrained eye, to be nothing but a large, square hole. 5,000 years ago, the ground level was at the bottom of the excavation, 7 meters down, and it effectively rose with the passing of time, to the level on which we are standing. When the first settlers arrived, the surface of the plateau was shaped like a deep groove or canyon between two natural walls of stone, and the tribe chose this slot between the rocks to build their thatch-and-wattle huts, because it offered them protection from the weather. As the huts crumbled and were replaced, other huts were built on top of their remains, so that the ground level imperceptibly rose - at the rate, I calculate, of 1.5 meters every thousand years - until it had effectively emerged from its protected corridor. The silt and debris created by the village filled the slot completely, forming the smooth surface that the plateau has today.
Seen from inside the hangar, the hole seems more meaningful. The eastern wall, out of sight when we look in from the openings, provides us with a cross-section of the village's many layers, showing how the inhabitants stored their grain in clearly silhouetted, round-bottomed grain silos. These were small pits dug in the earth and lined with mud that hardened, and then filled with grain and covered, as protection against rats and insects. The horizontal white strips are the ashes left by the cooking.
To visit the dig of the Iberian village "Los Castillejos", leave your car at the Castellón farmhouse and take the track on foot to the meadow. Bear up the slope to the right.
A huge slab of stratified rock lies on the floor of the pit, which is believed to have been attached to the upper part of the southern wall, forming a sort of roof overhanging the narrow canyon. It was at first thought that it could have been struck by a lightning bolt and fallen onto the village at its early beginnings, but the fact that it lies on the rock bottom, rather than on the accumulation of silt left by the village, suggests that it fell before the arrival of the first inhabitants, who simply built their huts around, and as the surface level rose, on top of it.One day, when I was living nearby, my shepherd friend Juan told me that people were digging on the ridge. A few hours later I had made friends with the young archaeologist, Ulises Ramos Cordero - delighted with his name, Ulysses, I dubbed him Ulises que viaja en el tiempo - who had been commissioned to continue the excavation, begun years before, of the prehistoric settlement, and to dig until he reached rock bottom.
On one of my many visits to the site during that year of 1991 he showed me a tear-shaped amber bead he had discovered, pierced with a tiny hole. Both of us being born romantics, we imagined it had hung from a necklace that some Iberian lass had lost in the alleys of her village, three or four thousand years ago...
Now, walk to the end of the plateau, stopping to gaze down at the sublime perspective of hills and valleys lying between Montefrio and Granada, a topsy-turvy mosaic of olive groves, oak forests and naked peaks, dotted with whitewashed farmhouses shining in the sun.
A path plunges down through a narrow crack in the rocks, leading to a gaping cavern that, Ulysses assures me, was the original entrance to the village from below, forming a tunnel to the bottom of the canyon. To return to the farmhouse, double back up this path a few steps and head down through the meadow that lies to the north of the plateau. The strange ruin of a huge water basin which we see here was built by an eccentric fellow from Barcelona, during my absence in the 1970's, and was to be a swimming pool, although he died before it could be finished. I am told that he was a professional guitarist who had returned to his birthplace, Montefrio, and bought a large tract of land here, on which he wanted to have a swimming pool shaped like… a guitar!
Trail of the medieval Christian citadel - El Cerro del Castellón
This time, we will set out from El Cortijo del Castellón towards the south, to visit what is perhaps the most fascinating, and least known, of Montefrio's many historical sites. The hill that we are going to explore resembles, as we approach it, an island of rock which stands apart from the mass of cliffs, separated from them by a plunging ravine. For some six centuries, half of which under Moorish domination, it was the site of a village inhabited by the descendants of the Spaniards of antiquity, a mixture of Iberian natives and Roman soldiers. El Cerro del Castellón was home to a Christian enclave during the Islamic period, constantly harassed and finally engulfed by the dominant religion.
However, the hill was used as a refuge even before the arrival of the Moors in 711. It may be assumed that, after the fall of the Roman Empire and under the rule of the Visigoths, the community did not change its customs and continued to live between the protected cliffs and the fertile plain below. It is even possible that none of the warlike Visigoths ever visited Montefrio, since the new masters were few in number and lived largely in the towns.
But in the 6th century, the south of Spain was invaded by the Byzantines, who wanted to win back the colony of their ancestors, the Romans. Under the Emperor Justinian, they moved into the western Mediterranean, taking southern Italy, Carthage, and the southern shore of the peninsula, with the ultimate objective of gaining control over the Straits of Gibraltar, in order to bring back the old Mare Nostrum.
The Byzantines gave up their over-ambitious project in the following century, but before they withdrew from Spain they had to fight off the attacks of the Visigoths. This turned our region into a battle zone, since the invaders occupied the plain of Granada up to the southern flanks of the Sierra de Parapanda. It was then that the farmers of the valley to the north of the mountain took refuge on the heights of the Castellón Hill, probably preferring it to the old acropolis of Los Castillejos because, being shaped like an isolated hump, it was easier to defend. And when the Moors arrived, 60 years after the departure of the Byzantines, the inhabitants would have found no good reason to come down from their refuge.
In spite of what is often said, the Christians, and the Jews too for that matter, did not always have a comfortable lot in Moorish society. At the beginning, when the Muslims' position - as a very small minority in a hostile country - was still quite weak, they were more benign, out of pragmatism. But under the Caliphate of Cordoba, in the 10th century, Islam took hold as the country's main religion, and the Moors finally succeeded in federating their various clans, which had been fighting constantly against one another since the invasion of 711.
This enabled the Caliph to strike out against the Christians of the realm, who had openly rebelled against him. Some of his Moorish enemies had even converted to Christianity, joining the ranks of the old Christians, known by the Moors as mozárabes, or "Arabized" Christians, since many of them had adopted the language and the customs of the Muslims, while retaining their original faith.
In any event, the Caliph Abd-al-Rahman III succeeded in crushing the Christian rebels who infested al-Andalus, and at the same time took care to disperse the inhabitants of enclaves such as the Castellón. This forced our villagers to leave their roost and go down to live on the lowlands, where it was easier to govern, and to tax them. In the Middle Ages, one of the main reasons for conquering new subjects was to make them pay taxes, and infidels always paid much more than believers.
We have no written history of the community, but the excavated remains of the hill show that it was abandoned at this period. At the same time, the Caliph's soldiers decided to establish a military post in the region, presumably to keep control over the rebellious inhabitants. The site they chose was several miles west of the cliffs, on the great promontory that is today La Villa de Montefrío.
The history of the Moors of al-Andalus is fascinating, but we should not forget the lot of these Christian communities that tenaciously hung on to their saints and eucharists, in places as inaccessible as the Castellón Hill.
The burial ground
As in the prehistoric settlement of El Rodeo, the people continued to live on high and bury their dead below. The part of the necropolis, or cemetery, which was excavated in the winter of 1980-81, lies on the right hand side of the road to the farmhouse.
Several dozen tombs, or coffins made of slabs of stone, have been laid bare. As many as three or four skeletons were found in many of them, suggesting that the villagers were unable to build enough graves for their dead and had to re-use old tombs, placing the bones of the previous occupant at the foot of the grave and the skull on one side at the head, to make way for a new body. This "crowding" could be explained both by the fact that the village grew suddenly in size, receiving refugees from other areas in the period before the community was dispersed and, also, that the people were too busy fighting off the Moors to enlarge their cemetery.
The Medieval Road
The road leading up to the citadel skirts around the west side of the hill and was clearly intended for the use of carts, probably drawn by oxen. Since there was no source of water on the hill, the inhabitants would have carried jugs in this way from the spring which lies in the valley to the west of the hill, La Fuente del Castellón. Let us cross the meadow at the foot of the hill and enter the forest of oak trees by what at first seems to be only a path but, as soon as it begins to climb upwards, belies its ancient origins. By carving into the bedrock and heaping boulders along the outer side of the road, a cradle-shaped trench was formed which was then filled with rubble to form a smooth surface. The small stones that litter the road are all that remains of the original pavement, the flagstones having been carried away for use in construction elsewhere.
The Military Gate
Once we reach the plateau, the traces of the road disappear in the midst of a small meadow, but the large vertical slab of rock in its center, which at first glance resembles a menhir or "standing stone", is, I believe, the remains of the military gate which protected the citadel. Next to the stone we can see the line of half-buried stones that runs towards the edge of the cliff. The wall seems to have closed off the entrance to the road between this point and the ridge on the east. The great stone formed one side of the gate, which could have been barricaded with timbers.
The Cliff Road
We wend our way along the path, among stones and bushes, until we come to the most impressive stretch of the road. Here, it had to be cut into the face of the cliff, on one side, and built out onto a retaining wall on the other to give it the necessary breadth. If the angle of the light is favourable, we can see the scratches that the cartwheels made in the corner of the cliff and the road. It is easy to imagine the men pushing and whipping their beasts of burden as the cart, heavily laden with earthenware jugs of water, slithered along the narrow road, in constant danger of sliding over the edge.
The village - El Poblado del Castellón
We skirt around the west side of the plateau, following the path down through the oak trees until we come to the grid of houses which was excavated in 1981, known as el poblado, at the southernmost tip of the plateau. Although the archaeologists of the University of Granada chose this part of the site, a dig made almost anywhere on the plateau would have uncovered the same foundations, since it was almost entirely covered in houses.
But from a purely aesthetic standpoint their choice could not have been more spectacular. Here, the beauty of the land vies with the fascination of the markings left on it by man. The maze-like skeleton of stones on the brink of the plateau, sparsely framed in small, dark-leafed oak trees, is tilted face to face with the stony mountain and the valley. Below, legions of olive groves march one against the other over the foothills, forming a great, fertile funnel that in turn plunges into the cleft between the Sierra de Parapanda and the Sierra del Tocón. This opening in the range - the Gorge of the Mills - creates a wedge-shaped window looking down on the plain of Granada, veiled in a purple haze. And beyond the undulating expanse of the Vega rises yet another range of mountains, the Sierra de Almuñécar, standing like a screen between us and the Mediterranean, whose brilliance is mirrored up behind the peaks in an all but colourless aura.Here, I must confess that if I had to choose one place on earth as my spiritual home it would be the Castellón Hill, and each time I wander there, I thank God, if God exists, for having let me live so close to it.
We know from the shards found in the digging that the roofs of the houses were tiled and at least one of them had a crude mosaic floor, probably imitating one the owner had seen in the Roman "villas" of the valley below. This part of the village was crossed from east to west by two parallel streets that are clearly visible. The curious double walls between several of the houses, running downhill from north to south, were gutters for rain and sewage water. The Castellón Citadel, which has been justly called the "Macchu Picchu of Montefrio", is a remote refuge of Roman civilization, whose people spoke a colloquial form of Latin and practised a mixture of Christianity and paganism, but who by tradition were, and certainly considered themselves to be, sons of Rome. We know, from the finds which have been made, that their way of living and working was Roman, with their own manufacture of pottery, cloth, ironwork and, as we will now see, olive oil...
The Olive Oil Mill
This means going back a stone's throw on our steps, if we have followed the Medieval Road as shown on my map. But it makes more sense to speak of the mill after the description of the village, in whose life it surely played an important part.
At the end of the slope, where we turn east towards the ruins, stands a curious stone that can only have been our community's olive oil mill (the Romans introduced olive tree farming to the region in the 2nd century).
Amazingly, in spite of the clearly "worked" appearance of this heart-shaped stone, several meters in length and standing a good meter high, the University archaeologists made no mention of it in their handsomely-produced publication, which is strictly devoted to the results of the excavation. Like the ostrich that buries its head in the sand, it would seem that nothing was of interest to them if it was not underground!
My own attention was called to the existence of this impressive object, one of the oldest olive oil mills in Spain, by Juan, the local shepherd, who had no doubt what it was and showed me how, were it not for the effects of 1,000 years of erosion, it could be used to make oil today.
A rim or lip has been cut around the edge of the flattened surface to prevent the precious liquid from escaping, giving the stone the form of a platter or tray. In the center a small hole has been bored into the surface to anchor the axle of the grinding stone (a stick inserted in a central hole) that was dragged around over the olives. The angle of the rock, which has been accentuated by the oak tree growing out from underneath it, caused the oil to flow down through the opening or "spout" cut into the lower end of the rim.
At first, I wondered how they prevented the oil from dripping down the front of the stone and being lost in the earth, but when I walked around and parted the bushes I saw that there is a mouth-shaped incision just below the spout, in which a rounded tile could be fitted to draw the oil off for collection in a jug.
The Fort
After visiting the village, we climb up the eastern side of the plateau, along the edge of the towering cliff that overlooks the ravine separating the Castellón Hill from Las Peñas. There are many convenient stones to sit on, so that we can catch our breath as we gaze over, or down on, the magnificent landscape. If you keep a careful eye on the ground, difficult as this may seem when surrounded with such scenery, you will see many straight rows of semi-buried stones, testifying to the fact that the entire citadel was covered in houses. The squarish holes cut in the bedrock, several feet wide, were watering holes for animals or, perhaps, silos for storing grain. Other small round holes, some 8 inches across, were used as sockets for the supporting beams of houses.
We come out onto the smooth summit of the hill. The only object which catches our eye, as we begin to cross the knoll, is a smaller and more primitive olive oil mill, resembling a long basin half-sunk in the ground, with a curious hole bored in the side. The olives were crushed by hand with stones, and the accumulated liquid dripped through this spout into a receptacle.
Standing near the mill, let us look towards the cliffs that tower in the east. Just under the ridge we can clearly see the white, metal roof of the hangar that covers the excavation of Los Castillejos, the Iberian village. The knoll ends abruptly in a precipice overlooking a deep rift that cuts across the entire hill from east to west, like a corridor.
This is the highest part of the hill, and its stony crown bears a single, minute trace which makes it clear to me that this was the site of the fortress of the community, the place where the inhabitants took refuge when under attack.
At the very edge of the precipice, a narrow groove - about 8 centimeters in width, and 10 deep - has been cut, in a curved shape which leaves no doubt that it was used to haul things up from below. When I first noticed its existence, years ago, it seemed clear to me that the early inhabitants of the hill, who lived not at the southernmost point that we have visited, but in the corridor below, used this pulley to pull up baskets of provisions and weapons when the citadel was being besieged.
It is easy to imagine ten or twenty men pulling together on a rope greased with animal fat, as their comrades kept the Moors at bay.The "Great Street" - La Gran Calle
If you're nimble enough, you can find your way down into the ravine, known by historians as La Gran Calle, by walking west along the edge of the cliff and climbing down the natural "staircase" between the rocks. Pushing aside the undergrowth, we step out onto the floor of a canyon surrounded by natural walls some 20 meters high, so that all we can see above them is a long rectangle of sky. This natural enclosure was once crowded with huts, and the rubble that litters the ground is what remains of the materials of which they were made.
As we walk east through the ravine, we can see on our left a number of hollows carved into the cliff. There are the remains of rupestrian (rock) dwellings, or semi-caves, which were covered with branches and leaves and carved with niches used as hearths and shelves. The "house" on the left has a finely chiselled cavity that resembles a kitchen sink with drainage spout.
On our right, there is a ramp carved in the cliff face, leading up to the fort. Further on, you can make out the "pulley" etched against the sky, and, at the far end of the canyon on the right, a number of notches for climbing up the rock. Try and you'll see that it works perfectly, up to the part of the rock that has been split and covered by the invading vegetation. This emergency ladder made it possible to scramble up to the fort when danger threatened.
The long mound, broken in the middle, that crosses the east end of the canyon is the remains of the wall and gate that protected the community. The stone wall further down the slope seems to have been made in more recent times by shepherds, so that the canyon could be used as a corral.
We leave the Gran Calle by a gap in the north side of the ravine, and climb several steps up onto the part of the plateau which I call the "church" because of the nature of its rock carvings. Near the electrical pylon are three tombs cut into the stone, which have long since lost the lids that fitted into the surrounding notches. And several steps toward the west, in the direction of the great cliffs of Las Peñas across the valley, we discover what is for me the most intriguing and evocative of all of Montefrio's historical treasures.
The baptismal font - el niño del Castellón
The baptistery means much to me, so I am first going to tell the story of my friendship with the shepherd who helped me find it.
One day I stopped at the Castellón farmhouse to buy some eggs from Juan's wife, Maria. The old man invited me in to sit with him by the fire, where he was drying his boots, and showed me a small clay jug with a broken handle which, he said, a tractor had thrown up with the remains of a skeleton in the field above his house, while digging holes to plant olive saplings. In his opinion, it was cosa de los moros - made by the Moors - and probably worthless.
At that time I was raising ducks at my cortijo down the path, one of which was a male that Juan said he wanted. The deal was struck immediately: a bird weighing two kilos for a funereal urn from the Dark Ages. It was a good deal for me, of course, but also for Juan, who had no use for the clay pot, and above all for the duck who would otherwise have soon found his way into a copper pot to be stewed with oranges and brandy! Andalucians only think of ducks as pets to have running about the yard, not as something which is good to eat.
The early Christian inhabitants of Andalucia buried their men with this jar, probably filled with some kind of sacred oil, and the women with bronze hoop earrings, a vestige of paganism which enables the archaeologists to distinguish the gender of the bones, even when they have turned to dust.
Of course, I was not long in visiting the site of the discovery, up on the Loma, where I saw how the tractorista had dug his hole in the very middle of the construction of long, flat stones that form the same tombs that have been excavated on the Castellón Hill. Juan's son had already planted the sapling, still in its black plastic bag, and when I reproachfully asked him, "Why didn't you dig the hole a little to one side, so as to spare the tomb?", he replied that the olive trees were always planted in perfectly symmetrical rows and at the same distance from one another, and that the spot for that tree was there. Keeping my indignation, once more, to myself, I gathered up the bones which had been scattered everywhere, and kept the scraps of skull, jaw, femurs and teeth in a cupboard, along with the small urn.
Once Juan realized how much his neighbour was interested in las cosas de los muertos, as he also calls them, he never failed to show me his discoveries in the surrounding woods, which he roams every afternoon with his flock of goats. In turn, I faithfully translate for him the letters he receives each year from the Pensions Department of the city of Auch in south-western France, where he worked as a farmhand during his youth. In order to continue collecting his tiny pension, our Town Hall must confirm that he is still alive with a "Certificado de Vida", since the French authorities seem to have discovered that descendants of retired immigrant workers do not always give notice of their passing.
Juan showed me the olive oil mill, several dolmens in the ravine between the Castellón Hill and Las Peñas, and the baptistery. At about the same time as his priceless gift - I can find no other way to describe it, gander notwithstanding - I was walking on the hill with two women from Oxford University who were staying in one of my houses, when I met him grazing his goats. We were near the tombs, at the foot of the high-tension pylon which his son-in-law - the owner of the farm - installed when he electrified the farm. "There's un niño carved in the rock over there", he said gruffly. "Must be another invention of those damned moros".
The next day I was there with my two guests, equipped with a scrubbing brush and a jerrycan of water from the spring below, to remove the moss and wash the stone clean, so that we could see what we had. As the reader may have guessed, I have been in love with the thing ever since.
First of all, we should consider the protrusion of rock in which it is set, standing a meter above the ground and forming a natural altar. Around the carving which my friend called el niño there are 15 symmetrical holes, about 8 centimeters in width and 8 in depth, forming a sort of wreath around the child, which could have been filled with oil to make lamps. Outside this magical circle are two other, much larger holes, bored at an angle, one to the west and another behind the feet of the child, although there is certainly a third one to the east, where a bush has taken root. Three tree trunks could have been inserted in these holes, tied together at the tops like a wigwam and covered with branches to form a chapel of boughs. All of these holes are perfectly bored, as if an iron bit had been used.
The child is also perfectly chiselled in the stone - allowing for 1,000 years of exposure to the elements - in the tapered shape of a mummy, with a small, symbolic "head" and squared "feet". When we filled it with water, the reflection of the sky on the surface made this shape even more unmistakable. One of the women with me was a student of theology and explained that the early Christians baptized by immersion rather than sprinkling. We imagined a ceremony held at dawn, with the parents standing in front of the stone, and the priest kneeling on top of it before the font, lowering the shivering baby into the cold water, brought up from the same spring as ours, but in an earthenware jug.
The Archaeological Museum of Madrid possesses a child's sarcophagus of soft, porous stone from the 13th century, found in northern Spain, which has a detail strikingly in common with our font: the small, symbolic head, giving it the same mummy-like appearance. Otherwise, our "child" is in every way more valuable than the one in the museum: it is many centuries older, because we know that the hill was abandoned at the turn of the millennium; it is surrounded with the mysterious array of holes; it is in far better condition because the stone is harder, and, above all, it is too shallow and exposed to be a sarcophagus, which means that it can only be a baptistery, and therefore far more precious.
Later, when I was doing the research for my book, I organized an official visit to the hill, with Antoñito, the Mayor, several of our schoolteachers, and the chief archaeologist of the University of Granada who, as a student, took part in the excavation of 1980-81. She seemed quite embarrassed to have to admit that no one in her team had never noticed either the olive oil mill nor the baptistery, and when I showed her the latter, she stared at it for a long time and muttered, "I have never seen anything like it", declining any further comment. Which means, if it really is a baptismal font, that el niño del Castellón must be the only known example of a rupestrian baptistery that has come down to us from the Moorish period.
Sadly, the Professor, who shall remain nameless, never returned to the site accompanied with experts, as she promised the Mayor and me. Down in the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, the professors and students of archaeology, almost all of them the daughters of distinguished families - beginning with the directora herself - are too busy labelling the cabinets full of pottery found on their expeditions in the region, which are so rich in remains of every sort and period. There is no definition that fits the baptistery of Montefrio in their manuals, and nothing similar to it in their collections, and therefore, for them, it simply does not exist.
My academic friends have even maliciously suggested that the Professor would be reluctant to publicize finds which she herself failed to notice during an entire winter of visiting the site every day, and which had been discovered, not only by a simple shepherd like Juan, but, by a writer who would not remain silent if she were to take the credit for herself.
This said, I invite lovers of history, art and science everywhere to help me unveil the mystery of this haunting message from the past, scratched over 1,000 years ago in the stone of an Andalucian hilltop.
Rogelio, our region's Mozarabic martyr
The great difficulty in writing the history of our region is that there are very few documents and testimonies that shed any significant light on the subject. In fact, there is nothing from before the Christian conquest in the late 15th century and very little after that either. This is the fate of a farming village, whose landholders - these being the only people who could have left written commentaries - usually lived in the cities and only left them to claim their due from the peasants.
Nevertheless, one name associated with the region, if not with Montefrio itself, has come down to us from the darkness of the centuries, that of Rogelio. This austere 9th century monk lived in a hermit's hut on the southern flank of the Sierra de Parapanda. He was, therefore, one of the many Spaniards who clung to their Christian faith under the yoke of the Moors.
In the year 850, the Christians of Cordoba revolted against the Emir, complaining about religious persecution. The Muslims responded by massacring hundreds of monks and nuns, leading Rogelio and several companions to journey to the Moorish capital to share the sufferings of their brothers and sisters. Obviously, such a mission could only end in martyrdom, which was precisely what Rogelio and his friends sought.
In Cordoba, they entered the Great Mosque disguised as Moors. Once the prayers had begun, they tore off their robes and cried out to the people, exhorting them to give up the cult of Satan and embrace the True Faith. As expected, the Emir had them beheaded the same day, in front of the entrance to the mosque - the famous mezquita, which had been a pagan temple under the Romans, a Christian church under the Visigoths, and was yet to be transfigured once more as a Cathedral.
Rogelio became a legend and was consecrated, after the conquest of our region by the Christians, as the patron saint of the neighbouring town of Illora, the ancient Ilurque of the Romans.
The Romans in "Hiponova"
The Roman fortress in Las Peñas de los Gitanos overlooked and protected the roads, farms and mills of the valley, all of which were built over the centuries in which the Empire regarded Betis - the southernmost province of Spain and the richest in natural resources - not only as a cornucopia of minerals but also as an enormous bread basket. But in Parapanda Valley - which may well be the site of the settlement designated as "Hiponova" in a document of the period - the Romans found, as well as fertile land to grow wheat, a deep, well-watered gorge near the source of the grain itself, ideally suited for the construction of mills.
The basin of Parapanda Valley sheds water into a deep gorge, which drops sharply between the floor of the valley and the Vega de Granada, at 900 and 700 meters respectively. By diverting the water from the river bed along relatively short channels and aqueducts, the Romans could keep the wells, or "penstocks", of each of the six successive mills - which formed six "water steps" - full, and these columns of water created the pressure needed to turn the wheels beneath them.
It is my belief that these mills were, since the time of the Roman colony until the definitive arrival of the industrial era which, in remote areas of southern Spain, did not occur until the 20th century, the driving force of Montefrio's economy, and I do not think that it is too far-fetched to say that without them - and, consequently, without the gorge's ideal hydraulic conditions - the town as we know it today would never have come into being. The old folks here all remember how busy and crowded the gorge was 50 years ago, with its fábricas de pan, or "bread factories", since each mill had its oven as well. They describe how, early every morning, mules laden with warm loaves wended their way up the valley and over the hill into Montefrio. Later, when it became cheaper to grind the wheat with electrical machines in the town - at the máquina installed in the old Franciscan convent - the mills were gradually abandoned.
Since I published Roads and Trails of Montefrio, many experts in mills and archaeology, and people simply interested in the history of technology, have come here to visit the gorge, and they largely support my belief that the mills were built by the Romans. However, this model of mill, known as the molino de cubo, after being invented by the Romans, was copied in water-poor areas such as ours down through the ages, only becoming obsolete, as I have said, with the advent of electricity. There is one nearby in Alomartes, on the Duke of Wellington's domain - given to the General, among other sumptuous gifts, by the Spanish Crown, to thank him for his help in defeating Napoleon's army in Salamanca - and we know that it was built in the late 18th century. There is yet another 30 kilometers away in Almedinilla, built at the beginning of the 20th century when an Italian company set up a factory there to mill and process a species of wildflower used, before the invention of synthetics, for the manufacture of parachutes and tents!
There were no British Dukes or Italian entrepreneurs in Montefrio, so the only other theory that seems plausible is that the mills might be part of Carlos III's modernization project, carried out at the end of the 18th century. My reasons for sticking to the Roman explanation are variously inspired: first, like any historian, I would like to see my theory proven right, since otherwise there would be less support for my belief that their presence here was more important than commonly assumed. Second, the mills, when compared with the others I have mentioned - the Alomartes mill is baroque and pompous in style, as could be expected in a work of the time of Carlos III, and the Almedinilla mill was clearly made to serve commercial purposes only, much larger and rougher - have a more Roman look about them. They are strictly functional and without any concession to display, but sober and elegant like the aqueduct of Segovia, to name a universally known example. Third, there is the telltale proximity of the Roman fort looking down on the mills, and, as we shall see, the Roman road leading away from them towards Montefrio.
Last but not least, there is the distinctively Roman-looking stone column which I found lying, in two fragments, near one of the mills of the gorge, notched on the top to bear the characteristic cross beams of a Roman porch. It had a stone socket which we dragged out of the bushes nearby, in which its base fits perfectly in a tongue-and-groove arrangement. The column was given to me by the owner of the mill, and I took it away with the help of a crane and team of men. The pieces were cemented together and it now stands, with a vaguely phallic air, in front of my old home, El Cortijo de los Siete Olivos, overlooking the gorge where it spent the past two thousand years.
The Roman mills
Leave the Puerto Lope road, on the track which forks off to the right, just before the bridge. One kilometer along you will see the gorge below you, among the poplar trees. Cross the bridge over the stream and turn right, following the course of the water. The only mill of the gorge which is intact and fully visible - the second one functioned until quite recently, but has been covered by a more recent construction - belongs to a family living in Granada, for which reason I call it by the owner's name, the Molino de Peinado.
For years, on my afternoon walks in the gorge - and before I began to take a serious interest in the town's history - I wondered what the strange-looking ruin could be, lying just below the road next to the stream, with its two picturesque arches and narrow "bridge" leading out from the hillside to join the solid stone column standing all on its own among the trees. None of the old-timers seemed to know that it even existed, so I took a closer look and realized that it could only have been a mill.
Before crossing the narrow aqueduct, you can see the remains, largely lost in the bushes of the slope, of the stone-lined channel which drew water several hundred meters upstream. The aqueduct itself has lost its trough, but the surface is covered with the cracked remains of a type of clay the Romans used to waterproof their hydraulic systems.
The most impressive part of the mill are its twin wells, the interior of which is formed of superimposed rings of stone, each one carved out of a single block over a meter wide. The sluice gates which sent the water into one or the other of these reservoirs are also the work of experienced engineers, carved with precision and elegance. The holding tanks, or "penstocks", were kept brim full in order to maintain constant pressure on the jet of water which was released at the bottom, turning a wheel fitted with small wooden blades, which in turn moved the horizontal mill stone. Alfonso Mazuela, who until his dying breath faithfully guarded the church of La Villa, told me that while the second mill of the gorge still operated, the jet of water which it produced was powerful enough "to go through a man's body". My dear friend's boyhood memories may have become exaggerated with time, but when a tower of water eight meters high escapes through a hole no wider than a child's wrist, its force can easily hurt a man, if not perforate him.
From here, you can make out the white metal hangar covering the dig at Los Castillejos, high up on the cliffs to the north. The Roman fort stands a few steps from it, so the sentinels there would have had an excellent view of all movements around the head of the gorge.
There was at least one other such mill and its ruins can be seen in Montefrio itself, next to the bridge at the top of El Paseo. Its double column is identical to the ones in the Arroyo de los Molinos, and now supports the balcony of a private home. It has been very much swallowed up by its surroundings, but you can see it by crossing the bridge and walking a few steps up the hill in the direction of El Tocón. Looking back over the stream you will easily distinguish the great square column under the porch which juts out over the ravine. Its feet, which plunge down into the vegetation at the bottom, have the same two arched drains as the Molino de Peinado.
The Roman road
We know that fragments of a Roman road were found on the other side of the mountain, near Alomartes, but there was no proof of its continuation through Montefrio... until the day of the official visit of the profesora from Granada. While the dignitaries were examining the mill - on the subject of which, with her usual discretion, the lady preferred not to say anything which might compromise her professional reputation - a farmer came up, saying that there was a "strange road" on the other side of the stream which might be of interest to us.
I wanted to follow him immediately, but one of our schoolteachers doubted that a peasant could be trusted to distinguish antiquities and opined that it was not worthwhile. Personally, I think he didn't want to get his shoes dirty, which he had polished up for the occasion. So we went straight to the restaurant, where the profesora tasted some local dishes and promised us that she would soon send up the appropriate experts in Mozarabic baptisteries and Roman mills, whom we have been awaiting ever since.
The reader will already have guessed the rest: the next morning I was back to get the farmer out of his house, and 15 minutes later, found myself in front of 100 meters of genuine Roman road, identical to the segment on the other side of the mountain near Alomartes!
At the last bend in the road, before the final stretch down towards the bridge, there is a rough track leading off to the right. After several hundred yards you will pass a farmhouse, and just beyond this point, you will observe how the road forks in two. The current road is in fact a deviation from the original one, taking a gentler slope to the right, whereas the old Roman road continues straight up the hill, much more steeply.
The principle is the same as the camino medieval which we followed on the Castellón Hill, except that here, because we are in open country, the supportive "cradle" is created with wedge-like upright slabs half-buried in the earth to keep the flagstones from spreading. I still find it astonishing that such a long stretch of paving in the middle of the fields, having been superseded by the new dirt road and forming a considerable obstacle to farming operations, should have escaped the bulldozers.
In Roman times, there was a trading road which began at the port now called Almuñécar and ended in Priego de Córdoba, not far from Cordoba itself. We know that it went through Montefrio because of the Roman bridge over the Milanos River, to the west of the village, but no trace of the road itself had been found nearby until my discovery in Parapanda Valley. Clearly, the road ran along the southern side of the mountain at Alomartes and up through the gorge before reaching Montefrio, on its way to the north-west.
The Roman Bridge
We know it simply as El Puente Romano. Long ago, it became clogged up with branches and the stream began to flow around it. For many years it was almost completely covered in dried mud, but now it has been cleaned up so that the water can flow underneath once again, enabling us to admire this charming construction which, with its single arch, is said to be the smallest Roman bridge in Spain. To get there, take the road to Algarinejo, towards the west, and immediately after crossing the modern bridge over the Milanos River, turn right on the dirt road. The Roman bridge is 300 meters upstream.
The meaning of the name of the stream and its valley has intrigued historians. A milano is a sort of swallow, but ancient deeds of title, and even some of the old-timers call the place not Milanos but Vilanos. This suggests that Milanos is in fact the corruption of a Latin-derived medieval name, which refers not to swallows but to the farmers or villains - the peasants, or inhabitants of the Roman villae - who lived in this fertile valley. Like the meaning of the name Montefrio itself, it is a mystery which may never be solved.
Parapanda, "the mountain which gives bread"
The name of the mountain - la Sierra de Parapanda - which, at its 1,602 meters, towers over the fertile valley and the Gorge of the Mills, shows us how highly valued these lands were.
When, at the end of the 15th century, the region was taken over by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, they ordered the peasants who came with them to plant wheat, or "bread", as they said then, to feed the troops, wherever it would grow, "hasta en el monte, que para pan ha de dar - even on the hillside, which must give bread".
The orders were followed and, inspired by the historic phrase, the mountain was called "para pan da", which translates literally as "it gives bread". Later, when the meaning had been forgotten and the phrase lumped into a single word, the accent was shifted from its logical place, the verb "da" at the end, to its normal one in a Spanish word, the second from the last syllable.
And so the name, translated into English, must stand as "the mountain which gives bread".
Our Favourite Fiestas
What with all the holidays in the Roman Catholic calendar and some of our own local ones to boot, even the townsfolk with their love of a good fiesta could not possibly observe all of them, so over time a certain number have taken root in their hearts, to which everyone looks forward and celebrates with enthusiasm.
The biggest holiday for north Europeans, Christmas, is simply one of many others here, the pure and innocent - and voiceless - Virgin Mary being far more popular than her ill-fated Son, with all his do's and dont´s. And we don't celebrate it on the 25th, as in Britain and America, but on Christmas Eve, called Nochebuena - The Good Night. It is the family feast par excellence, when all but the most faithless sons and daughters come from afar to share the traditional supper of pepitoria, a ragout of chicken in almond sauce, and endless rounds of anisette and plates of mantecados, a sort of shortbread, very good for your figure! Gaggles of kids go about the streets singing the flamenco-flavoured carols called villancicos, so if you are staying in one of the Casas de Lorenzo and are called to the door by three or four urchins with piping voices, have a few coins ready for them once they have sung you their song about el niño Jesus. They may be playing a traditional instrument which is only used at Christmas called the zambomba, and you can see it on sale in the local market the week before. It is a sort of bottomless clay jar with a piece of leather stretched over one end and a reed glued to the interior. The player puts his hand inside the cylinder and rubs the reed back and forth producing a squeaky noise that accompanies the carols. It is the Iberian forefather of the Brazilian cuica, without which no carnival is complete.
Christmas Day therefore is quiet, with everyone behind closed doors and windows sleeping off the juerga of the eve - except our gypsy women, who over the past thirty years or so have given birth to a sui generis fiesta of their own, which you can see on Christmas morning in the Plaza, and read about in my story "Christmas of the Gypsies".
Spain's equivalent of April Fool's Day is on the 28th of December, el día de los santos inocentes, the "day of the holy innocents", when Herod had the Jewish babies slaughtered, hoping that Jesus would be one of them. One would think that this would be an occasion for anything but fun-making, but the sense of the thing somehow got twisted around over the centuries and it became a pretext for inocentadas or practical jokes, such as asking a friend for a loan and then using the money to stand everyone to a drink, on his bewildered behalf.
New Year's Eve is called Nochevieja, Old Night, being the last one of the year, and we celebrate it by going down to the Plaza and eating twelve grapes, one for each month of the coming year. You don't even have to bring your own, because our kind Ayuntamiento gives out kits complete with paper hats, horns and, of course, twelve fat Malaga grapes. Too fat for me ever to have been able to eat them all at one go, in any case!
If you take a shine to a local child and would like to give him or her a gift, don't do it on Christmas Day but on el día de Reyes, Epiphany or "the day of the Kings", the three Magi who came from the Orient to visit the new-born Messiah. Traditionally, three men dress up as a Moor, a Persian and an African and ride into the Plaza on their horses tossing sweets - caramelos - to the crowd of kiddies awaiting them. In Granada this is an elaborate affair and what with all the immigrant workers from Senegal and Mali, a real Negro sits in the saddle rather than a Spaniard in blackface, and the costumes are fabulous. But in Montefrio, where the public coffers rarely overflow, it is scarcely worth going down to the Plaza to witness the sorry little show. Over recent years the horses which make up la cabalgata, or cavalcade, were first replaced with mules and finally, outrage of outrages, a pick-up truck with the three Reyes
Magos standing in the back tossing out sweets like strangely dressed farmhands! But since most of the people scurrying to pick them up are old folks, it can hardly be said to shatter any infantile illusions. Today's kids are unlikely to get up from their video consoles for the fun of chasing after toffees, anyway.One of our best loved holidays is Candlemas - La Candelaria - on February 2nd, celebrated with the burning of bonfires everywhere. Mary, according to Jewish law, was purified 40 days after giving birth by burning torches and candles in the temple, and her ritual has been celebrated ever since, in Spain where we like to do things on a big scale, with hogueras lit in front of the family home. Each family's broken chairs and tables are saved to serve as firewood throughout the year, and the children go to the country to gather thyme and aromatic bushes to use as kindling. On the night of February 1st the bonfires are lit in all the town's plazas, and the darkness all around is dotted with flames casting their glow on the whitewashed cortijos.
Semana Santa - Easter - is not nearly as lavish in Montefrio as it is in Seville and Granada, with the spectacular processions which wend their way through the narrow alleyways, their Christs and Madonnas lurching forward on a sea of flowers, hooded capes and silver lanterns. There is only one modest parade on the evening of Viernes Santo - Good Friday, and now that the great Manuel Avila is no longer with us to sing his heart-rending saetas from the balcony of El Casino, the only musical accompaniment is that of our Banda Municipal, which provides the appropriate dirge with military efficiency. The ladies of the town dress in full mourning with black peinetas and mantillas, each carrying a long candle, as they move slowly up the Calle Alta from the church on the Plaza. Since the cobbled streets were cemented over this has created a major hazard, turning the pavement into a skating rink on which, in the days after the event, many bones have been broken, so it is now obligatory to fit the base of the candle with a cone of tinfoil to catch the drippings, much like the metal ones which are inserted into the hams one sees hanging in our taverns, which tend to "perspire" in the summer heat.
Another great day in Montefrio as in all the Spanish world, although one cannot really call it a fiesta, is the Día de Finados - Day of the Dead - on the 2nd of November. In the last days of October you will notice, as you drive out of town on the way to Granada, clutches of village matrons making their way up the hill towards the cemetery, carrying pails and brooms to clean the graves of their loved ones so that they will look their best when everyone comes to pay their respects on the holy day. And as you approach Granada you will see, all though the month of October, beds of crimson flowers called siemprevivas growing alongside the highway among the cabbages and cornstalks, which are sold the day before the holiday so that those who have not yet given in to the convenience of artificial flowers can decorate the tombstones and the glass doors of the multi-tiered nichos, or crypts, where most of the townsfolk are buried these days.
The Día de la Cruz - Day of the Cross - is not a national holiday, but it is not a strictly local one either. Rather, it is celebrated, on May 1st, in Granada and all the villages of the province, as a tribute to the crucifix, la exaltación de la Cruz. Crosses are set up in the plazas and crossroads by the neighbours of each barrio, and decorated with almost everything imaginable, with the usual Andalucian love of loud colour and flamboyant glitter - nothing to suggest suffering and martyrdom, in any case! Some are encrusted with seashells, others draped with mantillas and flowers, as each barrio vies with the other for the most eye-catching crucifix, in the hope of winning the cash prize given by the Ayuntamiento. On the evening of May 1st, the townsfolk, after witnessing from their couches how the trade unions and left-wing radicals in Barcelona and Madrid have spent the Día del Trabajador protesting in front of the TV cameras, stroll about admiring the various efforts which grace los barrios populares such as El Lavadero and San Cristóbal, congratulating the proud artists who fuss over the white linen and candlesticks. Since the end of the Franco regime, when any kind of public gathering was strictly regulated, the fiesta has, in Granada, degenerated into a drunken binge with gangs of noisy youths roaming the city, leaving a trail of broken beer bottles in their wake, but in Montefrio it is still a very quiet and innocent affair - ¡gracias a Dios!
We have two holidays which are ours alone, since they celebrate miracles which took place in Montefrio, and I have described both of them already, El Señor de las Roscas on May 4th, and El Día del Rayo, on the last Sunday of May.
Perhaps the best-loved holiday of all in Montefrio is El Día de San Marcos. Since St. Mark is always represented in Catholic iconography by the head of an ox, he is especially dear to country people, and here each family honours him by preparing hampers of food and drink and heading for the hills, to have a picnic on some meadow or on the porch of an old cortijo. The village bakers make a ring-shaped roll of bread called a rosco - not to be confused with the sweet, but similarly shaped pastry of the aforementioned Señor de las Roscas - which, on this day, takes the place of our daily pan. The traditional dish is remojón, which roughly translates as "the big dip", a very juicy salad of tomatoes, cucumbers, hard-boiled eggs, oranges and bacalao, salt cod. It may seem strange but the chopped up chunks of orange and the big flakes of salt cod, when soaked in the tomato juice and olive oil, make a delicious and highly nutritious meal. Everyone gathers around the big bowl and goes to work with a fork and a rosco to sop up the sauce. Salt cod from Norway and Newfoundland, it should be explained, was a staple of Spanish and Portuguese mariners in the years of discovery, and has ever since been prized as a delicacy throughout the Iberian world.
I must confess that I am a bit of a hermit myself and not much of a fiesta-goer, but there is one, el día de San Isidro, which I always enjoy, perhaps because it is held at a tiny country chapel called La Ermita de Ruiz Pérez, on May 15th. In olden times these "ermitas" were actually inhabited by a wise old hermit who would be venerated, and fed, by the local peasantry. You can see the chapel as you pass the junction where the road from Montefrio forks towards Puerto Lope, on the left, and Illora, on the right. It is the curious, windowless building standing on the rise to the south, high and narrow in shape. It contains the effigy of Saint Isidore - San Isidro - who, legend has it, was a farmer who suddenly discovered that he had a vocation to preach. Since he couldn't take care of his crops at the same time, some kind angels came and did the work for him while he wandered about the land teaching the Gospel. In Montefrio, his statue is taken out of the chapel on his feast day to bless the fields so that they will provide a bountiful harvest, and paraded up and down in front of the chapel, with the priest and the band leading the way. Curiously, the procession takes place not on the country lanes but on the asphalted highway itself, perhaps because the farmers' wives and daughters have put on their best high-heeled shoes for the occasion and the surface is easier for them to walk on. At night there is a baile - ball - in front of the chapel with the usual noisy band and well-stocked bar which somehow find their way into even the remotest romerías.
Two major holidays, las fiestas de junio and las fiestas de septiembre, no longer really deserve to be called ferias de ganado - livestock fairs - since jeeps, trucks and motorbikes have long since replaced the horses, mules and donkeys which I saw in such great numbers 40 years ago. Apart from some displays of horsemanship, these two events, the first of which takes place in the second week of June and the second in the third week of September, are simply carefree pretexts for having a good time, with lots of sevillana dancing and more bailes and barras. They are held on the fair ground to the north of the town, around the public swimming pool, and each of them lasts four or five extenuating and deafening days.
But "the big one" is without question el día de la Virgen, The Day of the Virgin Mary, officially known in the Catholic calendar as Assumption Day. On this day, Christ "assumed" or took his Mother to Heaven, a miracle which is celebrated in every Spanish town by parading the effigy of the local patrona around the streets. Ours, of course, is the Virgen de los Remedios, and she is dressed in her finest cloak for the occasion. Many are the montefrieños who return from their current homes in Barcelona and even further afield to be here for the dramatic moment when she is carried down the church steps, since she means something very special to the pious and the irreverent alike, rather like the Queen to the British.
(the second half of the paper book contains my Stories from Montefrío, which you can find separately on my website www.donlorenzo.com)
