Day Trip to Antequera

We ended up with 11 days in Malaga at the end of our trip, more than planned but we managed to fill them with some interesting excursions, in between serious rain events.

We had discovered last year that it is easy to bus to nearby towns for the day, towns that we would not want to bike to. Last year we took a bus to Ronda for the day. This time I had a few on my list of possibilities: Antequera in the mountains, Frigiliana above Nerja, Nerja and Fuengirola on the coast. However, weather only allowed us to visit one town - Antequera. Jim had checked out bus schedules on line and we saw that the Alsa bus line that we were already familiar with had numerous trips a day there from the central bus station in downtown Malaga. The weather cooperated with a day that would allow us to meet up with biking friends John and Darlene who would be arriving there that same day en route to Cordoba and Seville.

We took an early city bus downtown and managed to just catch the 9 am bus to Antequera as it was pulling out of the station. You purchase your tickets from the the driver, cash - €6 each person each way. We saw that there was a 5:30 pm bus back - perfect. The trip there was just over an hour and the spectacular scenery en route reminded us of why we would not want to bike there.

Montes de Málaga is a mountain range in Málaga Province. From the seafront in Malaga you look up at these mountains. The Guadalmedina River flows through the Montes de Málaga and is a river subject to high seasonal variations with five well defined tributaries which have their sources in this range. Though typically all of these rivers are dry most of the year, they certainly were not now as the Costa del Sol and other parts of Spain have been hit hard with storms this winter. Located in the mountains, the Limonero Dam on the Guadalmedina provides water for the Malaga area and it was even releasing water it could not hold.

As mentioned before, the mountain slopes and valleys were unusually green and we could see water flowing down in many places. The bus followed the major auto-route, the A-45 directly north from Malaga. I took a few photos from the bus and hoped I could sit on the other side coming back to Malaga for different views.

It became a lovely sunny day and we roamed around the town while waiting to hear that Darlene and John had arrived at their hotel. Antequera is well worth a visit - and a stay of a few days. It would be a great base for vigorous hiking/climbing in the surrounding hills. Part of the area of the Montes de Málaga is a protected area under the name Montes de Málaga Natural Park located within the range. There is a saltwater Fuente de Piedra Lagoon, due to the saline nature of the substrata, which is home to the largest colony of flamingos on the Iberian Peninsula, second in importance in Europe after the French Camargue. I would love to see that on a return trip. We had a coffee in a little cafe across from the public market building that appears to be the original old building now beautifully restored.

With a population of something over 40,000, Antequera is small in size with a compact old town but has many interesting buildings, small squares and a dramatic alcazaba, a Moorish fortress built over Roman ruins in order to provide a defence from Catholic forces. At an elevation of 575 m, you would certainly be able to see invaders coming! Having toured a few alcazabas, we didn’t go inside but really enjoyed walking around the perimeter of the walls and the big plaza outside the old church where there were various spectacular viewpoints of the town below and the countryside beyond, as well as the remains of Roman baths that you could look down into.

I went in the old church located by the Alcazaba. The recreation of this terrifying Baroque monster called a Tarasca, half serpent and half woman that would have led the 1760 Corpus Christi procession was startling indeed. The seven heads of the dragon or serpent represent the seven deadly sins, dominated by the representation of Faith, the woman. Really a nightmarish vision and I am not sure “Faith” would be enough to manage all these sins.

From what I read, Antequera has always been an important place due to its location near other major centres like Seville, Cordoba and Malaga. It has been home to Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Visigoths, Moors and Christians. The city was known to the Ancient Romans as Anticaria or Antiquaria and the layout of the town is basically Roman in design. For 200 years, under the Moors, Antequera was attacked repeatedly and finally fell to the Castilian forces in 1410.

There is a burial mound complex on the outskirts of the town (which we did not have time to see) known as the “Antequera Dolmens Site" and is a World Heritage Site. The two Bronze Age burial mounds are the largest such structures in Europe. The larger one, Dólmen de Menga, is twenty-five metres in diameter and four metres high, and was built with thirty-two megaliths, the largest weighing about 180 tonnes. After completion of the chamber (which probably served as a grave for the ruling families) and the path leading into the centre, the stone structure was covered with earth and built up into the hill that exists today. When the grave was opened and examined in the nineteenth century, archaeologists found the skeletons of several hundred people inside. The third one is Roman.

With a humanist university which became a centre for important writers and scholars of the Spanish Renaissance, agriculture, crafts including schools of sculptors and poets and textiles, Antequera was called the "Heart of Andalusia" by the early sixteenth century. Mosques from its Moorish past and houses were torn down, and new churches and houses built in their place. The oldest church in Antequera, the late Gothic Iglesia San Francisco, was built around the year 1500. Many churches and convents were built into the eighteenth century (there are 32 in the city altogether), as well as palaces for the members of the aristocracy and the wealthier citizens, in the Spanish Baroque style.

But Antequera's prosperity slowly came to a close at the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth. Spain lost its American colonies and a number of crucial military conflicts in Europe which led to a deep economic crisis. Church, aristocracy, and the upper middle class who had been the clients and patrons of the creative arts, lost most of their fortunes and could not afford to build more churches or palaces. Now, tourism has become a main economic driver, though it certainly was not at all crowded the day we were there.

Antequera played a role in the rise of Andalusian nationalism: it was the site of the drafting of the Federal Constitution of Antequera in 1883, and also of the so-called Pact of in 1978, which led to the achievement of autonomy for Andalusia. It was considered as a possible headquarters of the Andalusian government, but lost the vote in favor of Seville.

It seems Antequera has something for everyone, with lots of accommodation, cafes, restaurants and shops. Several shops were selling the beautiful dresses women wear for the traditional ferias or fairs that will be coming up later in the year. After leaving the Alcazaba, we were on the lookout for possible restaurants for lunch. John and Darlene’s hotel was in the newer town area and we found a well-reviewed Chinese restaurant nearby. I had been craving Chinese food for awhile and was very happy when John and Darlene were keen too. It was delicious!

After lunch, we walked back with them to the old town where John and Jim chatted with some locals and then we found a nice sunny spot to have a coffee before we headed back to the bus station for another very scenic trip back to Malaga. We were happy to sit for awhile as we did a major amount of walking and climbing that day in Antequera.