The Travel Stories of Béla Soltész
Béla Soltész is a writer and social researcher living in Budapest, Hungary. In August 2022, he participated in Travel Factory Andalucía's trips and wrote about his experiences in a four-part travel report. Read about Nerja, Frigiliana, El Acebuchal, the Río Chillar gorge, Setenil de Las Bodegas, Ronda, Comares and the Karma Guen stupa through the eyes of a seasoned backpacker
The Hidden Streams of History: Nerja, Frigiliana and El Acebuchal
The protagonist in Nerja is of course the sea. The beautiful, cobalt blue Mediterranean can be seen from this small town, as if we were looking at it from a terrace. This is the most important attraction of the continent's southernmost coast: the view. The Balcón de Europa, the extended promenade of the town's main square, indeed stretches out over the sea like a balcony. This is where we would have started sightseeing if we were not participating at an organized tour. You don't need an organized tour for the panorama, nor do you need a guide to wander among the snow-white houses. But you definitely need one of you one to have a glimpse under the surface.
This is why Manu, our tour guide at Travel Factory Andalucía did not start the walk where it would have been the most obvious. Instead, we stopped a few hundred meters away from the Balcón de Europa, in a similarly balcony-like part, but less crowded. There, not only the fantastic view was interesting, but also what was under our feet. Leaning over the railing, we could see thin streams of water and tiny waterfalls trickling from the rock. Nerja, the city built on a high plateau above the sea, has many underground watercourses. These hidden streams of the surrounding fertile hillsides reach the sea here and dribble down the rocks from a height of twenty or thirty meters, creating a special microclimate where fig bushes and reed grow. All this in the middle of a bustling tourist town.
The stories that Manu was telling us were just like these hidden streams. They revealed an underground current under the touristy face of Nerja. Because this small beach town, before it became a tourist destination, was home to Greek, Roman, Arab and Jewish people, among many others. It was besieged by every army that passed by. The famous Balcón de Europa was originally a fortification – having survived the Napoleonic Wars, it was damaged by an earthquake and was converted into a lookout point at the suggestion of King Alfonso XII. Those visitors who only enjoy the view will hardly know all this.
An even more interesting story is related to the name of a minuscule beach, Playa del Salón, hidden in a small corner next to the Balcón de Europa. Manu told us that according to one theory, the small huts of the fishermen who lived here did not have enough space, so they lived their family life on the beach as if it were their “salón” (living room). According another theory, the expelled Sephardic Jews, who had no place to stay in the Kingdom of Spain after the fall of Al-Andalus and due to the ever-increasing persecutions, boarded their ships here. Shalom, this is how the Jews said goodbye to the place that was their home for centuries. And on the lips of those who stayed there, it turned into the word “salón” over the centuries. It is a melancholic story of fading out and forgetting: I am inclined to accept this latter theory.
Arab and Jewish stories are even more strongly present in the village of Frigiliana. From Nerja, we reached the snow-white settlement built on the hilltop in a quarter of an hour. Our visit here was at the beginning of August, and the village was already preparing for the Festival of Three Cultures, organized every year in late August, which displayed its heritage and identity. Frigiliana is one of the most beautiful and well-preserved medieval villages in Andalusia, whose unique architecture was formed at a time when Christians, Muslims and Jews lived together in peace. Symbols that the uninitiated visitor might not recognize appear here as well. The doors have finely crafted knockers in the shape of women's hands. The “hands of Fatima”, as tradition calls them, are named after the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad, whose beneficent hand repels evil. It is fantastic that this tradition has survived for several centuries! But what one of our hiking companions, an American Jewish man with Eastern European ancestry, told me was even more exciting. He noticed that the knockers were placed not straight, but at an angle on several doors. This made him remember that in Jewish homes, the house blessing, the mezuzah, is placed on the doorpost at an angle, as tradition teaches. Could this also be a centuries-old tradition from the time of Al-Andalus, which has emerged here as a hiding stream?
Frigiliana was a truly special place, but the real highlight of our tour was just ahead of us. It was also a high point in the geographical sense, because we just went up with the van, on the side of the mountain, driving higher and higher. Manu said that this road once connected Moorish Granada with the fertile plains around Nerja and the port. Today it is hard to imagine this: the main road goes the other way, and the road we were on seemed less and less travelled. There was nothing around, only rocks and conifer trees! But Manu smiled and said that we were at the very turn where his passengers used to say that the place was “off the map”.
And then, after one of the turns, El Acebuchal, or as many people call it, the “lost village”, appeared on the hillside. It was always a tiny hamlet: in its heyday, no more than a hundred people lived here. But in the middle of the twentieth century, after the civil war, the tiny village, which actually consists of two streets, was completely depopulated. Fortunately, one of the old residents moved back in the nineties, and some of the abandoned houses were turned into hostels and inns by the descendants of the former owners. It was a very special experience to walk in such a hidden, almost completely forgotten village, which reappeared from oblivion. We certainly wouldn't have gotten here without guidance!
We met one of the re-settlers, Don Antonio, whose family had lived in El Acebuchal for many generations. He has a small shop where he sells products made from local ingredients: spicy olive oil, liqueurs, jams. We chose mango, guava and aniseed fig jam, each of them super tasty! The names of the flavours were written on the labels in gnarled handwriting – we could hardly have got a more authentic gift from Andalusia than this.
We headed back down the hill. The sea could be seen in the distance, and olive trees, figs, and orchards dotted the foreground. We left the coast only for a few kilometers of a tour, yet we traveled centuries back and forth in history. We were already well into the afternoon and still had an hour to go back to Málaga, but two of our tour companions, both Spaniards, were snuggled up in the back seat of the van, as if something was weighing on their souls. Then they brought up the question: “we know that it’s a bit late, but… couldn't we stop to see Chanquete's ship?”
Manu nodded. “Of course we'll stop and see it”, he said. I had no idea who Chanquete was, but I expected another interesting story. I was not disappointed: we stopped to see a fishing boat on the outskirts of Nerja, which was not rocking on the water, as I had thought, but on dry land, towering on a platform in the middle of a park. One of the main storylines of the Spanish TV series Verano Azul, which were filmed in the 1980s in Nerja, was the friendship between the children vacationing here and Chanquete, an old fisherman living on his boat. The old man, who was being evicted from his boat La Dorada due to a real estate development, died towards the end of the series. The shouts of the child actors burned into the consciousness of an entire generation: “Chanquete is dead!” Actually, this series was a warning sign that the Spanish coast would lose its original character as it was becoming a tourist centre. But, as our Spanish travel companions were discussing it on the back seat of the van, this approach did not seem so obvious at the time they were watching Verano Azul back in the days. Only now, from the perspective of a few decades, does it become apparent that Chanquete warned of the danger of touristification ahead of his time.
Fortunately, the rich cultural heritage that characterizes the Nerja area has not disappeared. It is less visible on the surface that is covered with hotels, restaurants, and souvenir shops. But beneath the surface, like a hidden stream, there are the old stories, from forty or even four hundred years ago. You just need to know where to look.
