Mojacar is one of the Most
Beautiful Pueblos in Spain. I have to say, I don’t know why: maybe it's an accolade you pay for.
The village itself is
certainly dramatic, with white cubist houses (almost all of them new or rebuilt
in the last twenty years) and narrow streets. The streets are too tight for cars, and the donkeys have all gone. There is little or no graffiti,
which is a point in its favour, but there’s a gigantic hotel of 294 rooms which,
from certain angles, takes up a large chunk of the view, and has been closed
since 2008. It belongs to a private bank from Madrid which occasionally puts it up for
auction.
Moving up to the main square,
La Plaza Nueva, we find El Mirador, a viewpoint which is the roof of an
unfinished building, meant one day to be the new town hall. It’s covered in
tables, and served by three different bars. On it, there’s a square box, which
will become the top of a lift-shaft.
The view is of the ‘Valley of
the Pyramids’ as the Tourist Office grandly (if erroneously) calls it. The
nearest thing to a pyramid being the hill of Old Mojácar, now seriously and
permanently disfigured by enthusiastic archaeologists searching for the
mummified remains of Walt Disney. The diggers have meanwhile found evidence of a
ninth century fortification, along with a few shards of pottery and a hash pipe. Even
the Tourist Office, which claims that Mojácar was once, in Greek times, known
as Murgis Akra (taking us back an extra two thousand years) must realise that
we are losing more than we are gaining by burrowing into the venerable old
mountain. It was never a settlement, despite some temple buildings, for the
obvious reason that there is no water there, its indefensible, there’s no place
for the animals, and there’s nowhere to run… unlike the mountain half a
kilometre away we now know as Mojácar (or its Moorish name of Muxacar). As to its age, I once found
a Roman coin there dated from AD200, a thousand years earlier than the subject
of the current dig.
Mojácar is, I think,
dramatic. It has harsh colours (much prized by artists): the blue of the sky,
the white of the architecture, the brown of the mountains and the red of the
sunburned tourists. The village certainly has its attractions – beyond the innumerable
souvenir shops with large picture windows, the neon bars and restaurants and
the amusing ‘running man’ exit sign up past the church.
Placed there, no doubt, just in case the Moors suddenly return.
The Fuente area at the bottom
of the village is not worth more than a glance, and no doubt the judges for the
Most Beautiful Pueblo in Spain were whisked smartly past the large urbanisation
down there.
The beach, where ninety
percent of the population resides (more properly described perhaps as ‘the
coast’), has its pros and its cons, with a nice sea-view, low two or three
storey buildings interspaced with a few massive hotels, and a large number of beach bars which
have universally moved away from the temporary structures of yesteryear
equipped with a fridge, some cold beers and a fresh sardine or two being scorched on a
hotplate.
The narrow beach-road, built
for a rather quieter time, is now to be reinforced with a second road which will
cut through the urban growth behind the Front Line, and allowing further
speculative building: as the municipality turns into a metropolis.
Mojácar was a poor village, in a poor province, and there is little sign of architectural excellence beyond the drama of the glorious tangle of cubed homes (painted white in the mid-sixties by order of Mayor Jacinto). It was briefly a bohemian place for foreigners and Spaniards alike to hide from reality, but later it became a place for tourism, urbanisations, hotels, get-rich-quick-schemes and family politics. If massive walls had to be built, or hills sundered, or land expropriated and promises broken; then, in the name of profit, so be it.
