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A Moorish legacy in the Sierra Nevada

The twisting mountain roads of Andalusia are a thread through history Our car inches back slowly. Outside, robust, local women shout excitedly in animated Spanish, arms gesturing wildly. Their foreign cries are unintelligible to us.
1516travel

The twisting mountain roads of Andalusia are a thread through history

Our car inches back slowly. Outside, robust, local women shout excitedly in animated Spanish, arms gesturing wildly. Their foreign cries are unintelligible to us.

“I told you not to go this way,” I reprimand my mother, who is lightly sweating at the wheel of our rented Peugeot. “It’s one way.”

The alley is flanked by white walls of solid stone. In a small window above, a bushel of brilliant red peppers hangs to dry in the crisp, mountain air, the sill adorned with colourful flowerpots. Overhead, laundry flaps quietly in the light breeze, oblivious to our plight.

This small cluster of white, boxy homes that clings to the stepped slopes of the Sierra Nevada Mountains of Andalusia is evidence of the long Moorish occupation of Spain. In the year 711 AD, under the leadership of Tariq ibn-Ziyad, a Berber Muslim army from North Africa boldly crossed the Strait of Gibraltar, its collective eye firmly fixed on the sizeable landmass to the north, what we presently call Spain and Portugal.

The Iberian Peninsula was taken from the Germanic Visigoths quickly and with relative ease. The Moorish conquest ended at the Pyrenees Mountains, finally halted in 732 by Charles Martel, the Frankish leader of the time. It was a significant event in that it may have arrested the Muslim conquest of much of Europe. Thus began the 780 year Moorish occupation of Spain, and subsequently, the “Reconquista”, a long and tedious campaign by the Christians to reclaim Iberia, an objective that was not realized for three quarters of a millennium.

Evidence of the Moorish occupation of Spain is most noticeable in the southern part of the country, known as Andalusia, whose white towns, or pueblos blancos , are reminiscent of those found in North Africa. This was the last stronghold of the Muslim kingdom, which finally surrendered its southern city of Granada to the Catholic Monarch, King Fernando and Queen Isabela, in 1492, marking the end of the Reconquista, or re-conquest of Iberia. In January of 1567, reforms were published banning Arabic dress and speech, and forcing all Muslims to convert to Christianity. The export of woven silk was heavily taxed, an industry upon which the Moors relied. Many fled back to North Africa; others to isolated mountain towns where the warm climate of southern Spain combined with abundant rain water running off the Sierra Nevada Mountains created fertile, albeit steep, farmland. The Moors terraced and irrigated the land, successfully producing grapes, oranges, lemons, persimmons, figs and almonds.

The narrow and winding strip of pavement that climbs ambitiously through the Sierra Nevada Mountains passes through countless quaint little villages, their flat roofed, whitewashed homes huddling together on the hillsides to create a confusing labyrinth of steep, narrow roads between them. It can be a foolish endeavour to attempt to navigate these villages by car. What begins as a reasonably sized main street will gradually peter into something of an alley flanked by parked cars and noisy pedestrians. Soon, face to face with an oncoming vehicle, at a dead end or an impossibly tight corner with little prospect of turning around, you realize, in something of a panic, that you have essentially driven yourself into a trap!

• • •

I craned my neck to see out the back window. Not far now. A substantial lineup of cars had formed in front of us, all waiting patiently to pass. The flurry of activity among the excitable Spanish women had subsided as we neared the beginning of the one-way street. But where to turn around? Branching off to our left was a narrow cobblestone alley that shot downhill at an alarming angle before veering off sharply, the buildings obscuring its destination.

“I am not driving down there!” My mother stated firmly.

“But you have to!” I cried, distressed. “There is nowhere else to go!” The lineup of vehicles was slowly managing to inch past our car as we debated our limited options, cursing our decision to drive into this village. These little mountain towns were clearly built before the motor vehicle had been thought of!

• • •

An uneasy truce had existed for some time between the Christians and the Moors, however it was not to last. The Spaniards suspected that they hadn’t truly converted to Christianity, doubted their loyalty to Spain and feared an Islamic attack. In 1568, in retaliation to the new reforms, the Moors revolted and unrest swept across Andalusia. The mountainous terrain made a troublesome battleground, and the rebellion continued unabated for three years.

But it was all in vain. After almost 800 years, the Muslims were expelled from Spain. Displaced from their mountain villages by the Spanish king, Phillip II, and replaced by Spaniards from the north, the newcomers possessed little or no knowledge of how to work the steep terraced farmland or the irrigation systems carefully developed by the Moors. A few families were ordered to remain in each village to teach them how to work the land.

The Arabs of the Iberian Peninsula may be gone, but their legacy lives on, high in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada. Having finally disentangled ourselves from the confusing web of narrow laneways, impossibly tight corners and one-way streets, we found ourselves once again on the winding strip of mountain highway. Terraced farmland rose and fell from either side of the pavement, and every corner brought into view yet another cluster of boxy, white homes clinging to the hillside. As we ascended, the air grew cooler and a light, high mountain fog rolled in, alternately revealing and obscuring the land ahead. We were nearing Trevelez, the highest town in Spain, whose three barrios clambered unsteadily up the mountainside and gazed down upon a deep valley. Its dramatic location combined with the bright white of its buildings contrasting sharply against the brown landscape was too much to resist. I turned to my mother as she focused on the winding road ahead.

“Maybe we should just pop in for a quick look,” I suggested casually. “Looks like an interesting place.”

Overcome by curiosity and the anticipation of new discoveries, our earlier predicament was temporarily forgotten. Soon we were off the highway again and shifting into a lower gear to climb an absurdly steep, yet, reasonably sized main street….