Mojácar
is a beautiful town located on the coast in the Province of Almería in the
south-east corner of Spain. It is small, relatively unknown and is home to
several thousand northern European and Spanish settlers which, between them,
make up about half of the population. The municipality is said to enjoy a
micro-climate: not too hot in the summer nor too cold in the winter. The
community is traditionally divided into el
pueblo, the upper town; la fuente,
the fountain (the lower reaches of the town) and la playa, the coast, where in fact around 80% of the population
lives. Other quieter areas exist – such as las
huertas (the orchards) and the small hamlets that form part of the 72
square kilometre municipality such as Sopalmo, Agua del Medio, Las Alparatas and
so on. Behind the pueblo, there are
mountains to climb and forgotten sites to see. The beach itself stretches for
around 17 kilometres and has, as might be expected, everything from
full-service well appointed Blue-flag beaches with bars and restaurants,
life-guards and public showers, to quiet empty beaches where the only
interruption comes from a curious seagull.
Mayor
Jacinto Alarcón is remembered as the man who re-invented Mojácar. ‘It’s where
the sun spends the winter’ he said in 1965 with satisfaction, as the first
trickle of tourists began to visit the village. Some of these early visitors
bought houses or land, at what today would be thought of as ludicrously cheap prices.
They stayed and their culture and ideas were somehow assimilated into Mojácar.
The
village grew slowly, as new houses were built. The beach, a little-used area
reserved mainly for the tomato growers, finally became urbanised as well.
Some
of the new settlers were artists. They were attracted by the remarkable
village, built as it were to look like a scattering of sugar lumps on the final
mountain of the Filabres chain, as it plunges from the interior of the province
of Almería into the blue Mediterranean below. It is a harsh beauty: Jacinto had
insisted that all the houses must be painted with whitewash and the dramatic tumble
of flat-roofed white houses with narrow streets adorning a hill some 200 metres
above sea-level, in the most arid surrounding, remains irresistible to artists,
poets and writers.
History
The
hills that today are adorned with the white cubist village have been inhabited
for thousands of years. In nearby Cuevas del Almanzora, Major neolithic remains
were discovered around a hundred years ago by a Belgian archaeologist called
Louis Siret: Mojácar can probably claim a similar longevity. The nearby pyramid
mountain of ‘old Mojácar’, a steep indefensible hill visible from the Mojácar
viewpoint off the Plaza Nueva, may give a clue to Mojácar’s name. The hill
appears to have had a religious significance, and it seems that the Roman name
‘Mons Sacra’, sacred mountain, was later transformed by the Moors who held
Mojácar for many hundreds of years until the end of the XV Century into
‘Muxacra’, and from there, it changed again with Christian tongues into ‘Moxacar’
and eventually Mojácar.
Back
in olden times, the sea was a potential enemy. Pirates could arrive on the
beach at any moment, and villages were generally built away from the immediate
coast, to make it easier for the defenders and correspondingly more difficult
for the pirates – generally issuing from the Barbary Coast in North Africa
(although even the Vikings managed to infiltrate the Mediterranean as far as
Valencia back in the IX Century).
It
was best to keep the settlement hidden, and Mojácar originally grew behind the
hill it now crowns. In the event of an attack, the defenders had the option to
flee inland. Watchtowers along the coast, ready with fire and pitch, would give
first warning of any incursion. Some of these watchtowers and forts, carefully
restored, can be seen today locally, including one of each along the Mojácar
coast to the South.
The
fall of Mojácar to the Christian Kings, los
Reyes Católicos, in 1488 is remembered colourfully in a local festival that
occurs on and around June 12th each year. Mojácar, an important local
Moorish-held town, was on the route that Queen Isabela of Castile and King
Ferdinand of Aragon were taking towards Granada, the final capital of the
Moorish empire in Spain (which fell in 1492, the same year that Columbus
discovered America). The story has it that the interview for the surrender of
Mojácar (to avoid a siege and probable slaughter by the overwhelming Christian
forces) was held at the Fuente (the
Fountain) between Captain Garcilaso for the Christians and the Muslim leader
Alavez who was asked for the surrender of his town. According to legend, this
is his reply:
‘We are as Spanish as you. We have been here
for seven hundred years and now you tell us to leave. We have never raised arms
against the Christians; I think we should be treated like brothers, not like
enemies and we should be allowed to continue to work our land. But know this:
before we surrender like cowards, we will die like Spaniards’. Brave words!
In
1530 Emperor Charles V received such support for the house of Hapsburg from
Mojácar that the city was awarded the coat of arms of a two-headed eagle.
Later, Philip II added the slogan: La muy
noble y muy leal ciudad de Mojácar, llave y amparo del Reino de Granada:
'The very noble and loyal city of Mojácar, key and guardian of the Kingdom of
Granada'.
Mojácar
was important locally during the following centuries and is recorded as reaching
10,000 inhabitants in the XVIII Century. Another source records a population of
6,000 people in 1870.
In
1911, a local census records that Mojácar had 4,979 people on the town hall
register, and the town had just installed public lighting (run on acetylene).
There was a café, a ‘cantina’, two
butchers, a carpenter’s, three food shops, a pharmacy, a post office and a bookshop.
The pueblo
maintained this number of inhabitants until round about 1920 when, slowly, the numbers
began to fall, speeding its descent in the 1930s. Through the various local
vicissitudes of the drop in the local water-table, the end of the local de-forestation
(due to an unexpected lack of trees), a peculiar plague of locusts in 1901, the
end of the local silver, copper and lead mines in the 1920s (run for 40 years
in the surrounding hills mainly by the British) and the troubled times of the
Civil War, the area in general eventually became depopulated with mass
emigrations to Barcelona, Algeria, Germany and even Argentina, and Mojácar
itself began its long descent into what was, by 1960, a moribund village of
just 600 souls.
A
local legend, impossible to prove or otherwise, says that Walt Disney was
either born in Mojácar, or perhaps born in Chicago to a disgraced Mojácar girl,
who fled the town for America around 1899, pregnant and afraid.
Modern
History
By
1960, as the population fell away, there were only a few hundred people left;
but one of them was the irrepressible Jacinto Alarcón, chosen by the provincial
governor as mayor. At the same time, attracted by the light and the views, a
school of Almerian artists called ‘Los Indalianos’ (named after a Spanish
saint) were frequent visitors to the forgotten pueblo.
Happily,
the mayor and the artists welcomed each other. The artists named the local
totem after themselves – the Indalo: a figure of a stick-man that appears to
hold a bow or a canopy over its head as protection. Used in Mojácar for
centuries and previously known as ‘the little Mojácar man’, the totem to be one
day known as the Indalo was painted over the lintels of houses for good
luck.
Jacinto
began to give away houses and land to those who agreed to settle and to invest.
A number of foreigners began to take up his offer and, at one point, a number
of foreign ambassadors owned houses in Mojácar (giving rise to the street
called ‘Calle de los Embajadores’).
Jacinto also managed to contact the minister for tourism in Madrid to ask him
to build a Parador government hotel in Mojácar, which to everyone’s surprise,
was granted.
The
beach, now known as Mojácar Playa,
began to attract home-buyers. Houses and later urbanisations were built. A
hotel chain came to Mojácar in 1975, bringing ‘package tourism’ with them. The
town’s fortunes were guaranteed and Jacinto retired, giving way to the
democratic mayors which followed Franco’s death.
Today,
Mojácar has some eight thousand inhabitants, rising in the summer months to
perhaps as many as twenty five thousand.
Gastronomy
Mojácar
has never truly been famous for its fish and there is no port. Hobby fishing
and, more importantly, the next-door port of Garrucha nevertheless supply
Mojácar with a bounty of fresh fish and molluscs. The traditional Mojácar fare
is based mainly around the pig, with many types of local sausage, and of course
the many products of the fields and orchards. Try the Wednesday market in the
parking area behind the pueblo for
the freshest local produce. For eating out, a number of local bars will offer
tapas, those small nibbles that come with a beer or a glass of wine.
There
are local restaurants which serve delicious meals, whether simple salads and
fish on the hot plate, or chicken, pork and mutton dishes, or of course paella: that famous Spanish rice-dish.
There are other restaurants who favour ‘modern cuisine’, inspired by some of
the World’s greatest chefs, where Spanish ingenuity in the kitchen is a byword.
Then,
we have a plethora of fine foreign restaurants, each anxious for your
patronage. We have food from Germany, Thailand, the Middle East, North Africa,
Argentina, Mexico, China, France, Italy, Ireland, the UK, Holland and India.
Everything from a simple pizza to the best of fine-dining.
Mojácar
Today
With
the arrival of the first foreigners in the sixties, Mojácar’s hidden life was
lost. The village soon had a number of foreign bars and restaurants, and the
silver Indalo medallion was better known in far-off London or New York than was
the province of Almería itself. This helped to make Mojácar a cosmopolitan town
and, as more restaurants, beach bars and hotels sprung up on the beach, the
town became in short order an internationally-known resort. Today, there is a
mixture of local and foreign citizens, with the multicultural junior school as perhaps
a worthy symbol of this high level of integration.
Mojácar,
indescribably beautiful, has been chosen to join the select group of ‘Pueblos más Bonitos de España’, the most
beautiful towns of Spain (there are only six in all Andalucía).
Fiestas
and Attractions
There
is always something going on in Mojácar. Concerts are organised both by the
Culture Department in the Town Hall as well as by the many bars and beach-clubs.
There are more of these during the high season, which stretches from Easter to
late September. Other attractions include art exhibitions (there is a municipal
art gallery and some other commercial ones). There are any number of sports
activities, from aquatic sports to lawn bowls, golf, padel-tennis and
bicycling: clubs and teachers/trainers are easily found. There are also walking
clubs, gyms and yoga groups. There is, of course, any number of boutiques and
shops to suit all tastes.
The
festivals organised by the Town Hall include the Carnival week, a picnic called
‘la Vieja Remanona’ and the Romería de San Isidro. These take place in the
first months of the year. Later come the Easter parades and the colourful and
famous Moors and Christians celebrations in the second week of June. This
festival sees the townsfolk divided into half a dozen different groups, known
as cábilas, and they will dress up in
astonishing period costumes and will party for three days straight. The summer
continues with regular concerts in the Town Square and culminates with the town
fiesta of Saint Agustín on and around the 28th of August. The final dates on
the calendar are the Virgen del Rosario on and around the 7th of October and then
the Christmas, New Year and Twelfth Night celebrations.
How
to Get There
Mojácar
is 13 kilometres off the A7 motorway, leaving either at the Vera or Los
Gallardos exits. The Almería airport is around 50 minutes and the Alicante
airport is about three hours away. Other airports within the region include
Murcia, Granada and Málaga.
