There’s not much acknowledgment of history in Mojácar as a rule, so
we’ll gloss over the first few thousand years of the town and arrive,
breathless, in the times of the Mayor Jacinto Alarcón, in the early sixties.
That perhaps modest wave of artists, the Indalianos, mainly
from Almería (a city surprisingly wealthy in culture - you can see some of their work today in the
Doña Pakyta Museum in downtown Almería) had been and gone:
weekending in Mojácar, drinking and painting. They had introduced, or at least,
promoted, the local stick figure, which they called after themselves – the
Indalo.
Mayor Jacinto, in charge of a
moribund village, had been glad to receive them, and he allowed them to stay in
a few tumbledown houses. He instructed the artists, the poets and the writers –
go and tell people about our town. By about 1962 Mayor Jacinto had an even
better idea – to give away ruins or land to those who would fix them up
(bringing sorely needed wealth into the community).
Many came, and the town, with less than 600
inhabitants in 1960, began to slowly revive. A small hostelry, the Hotel
Indalo, opened in the Plaza Nueva, and, with its bar and first-floor
restaurant, it thrived. Some
mojaqueros,
living in Lyon, Barcelona, Frankfurt or Madrid, heard of the new growth in the
pueblo, and they returned.
The foreigners came. They found the village to be a thing of
beauty, and above all, cheap. A house in 1966 would cost five hundred or a
thousand pounds. A glass of beer, a few pesetas. They brought with them the
habits of the swinging sixties: the Beatles, free love and a stick of hashish.
The mojaqueros learned of these things
as they began to find lots of work in the construction industry. The unexpected introduction of the Almería
airport (Franco never liked the province) and the Mayor’s skills at Court bringing
us a Parador Hotel in 1964 helped immeasurably. Mojácar was on its way.
Mayor Jacinto was strict, insisting that houses should be
traditionally built – with small windows, flat roofs and whitewash. No
high-risers and everyone to have a view. The rules were broken by the first
hotels, the Mojácar, the Moresco and on the unexploited beach (land at one
peseta for ten metres, no takers), the Hotel Indalo. The tour operator Horizon
had discovered Mojácar and made it its flagship resort (before going spectacularly
bust).
Mojácar’s fame grew abroad. The Indalo was often seen in
London and Mojácar became a small phenomenon internationally. More foreigners
came and a couple of local families began to take over the local economy. They
became very wealthy. By 1990, they were multimillionaires –and friends of the
mighty.
Everyone lived together more or less agreeably (as they
still do today in Turre): the money was all foreign and it kept on arriving,
ending – sooner or later – in local pockets. As perhaps it should. Mojácar
itself, with the old mayor’s retirement in about 1978, began to change from a
residential town to a tourist resort. A Corsican businessman knocked down the
village carpentry in the square – a squat building connected by arches spanning
the narrow streets on either side – and built a three story nick-nack shop
called Sondra’s. The first ‘democratically elected mayor’ (the foreign
population of course couldn’t vote) also allowed the rest of the main square to
be demolished, including a beautiful theatre, and a furious scramble of more nick-nack shops appeared
on the three levels of the ‘Multicentro’: tee shirts, beaded wrist bands,
pottery from Nijar and junk jewelery from China. The old hotel, the Indalo,
that decrepit but key building that commanded the square, was similarly
demolished for even more ‘souvenir shops’. On the beach, the Pueblo Indalo was built. The
town had decided that tourism brought in more money than resident home-buying
foreigners. Tourists spend heedlessly and then they go away; home-owners stay
(and perhaps vote, or try and compete in jobs and businesses). Old Jacinto’s
call for ‘Mojácar, where the Sun spends the Winter’ was, for some reason,
ignored and the town became very seasonal. On the construction side (where the
real money lay), small apartments, good for a couple of mildly uncomfortable
weeks, were built rather than comfortable villas.
By 1985, as local
homes were demolished and rebuilt to architects’ designs, the village had begun
to change from ‘a beautiful Moorish clutter of cubist homes’ to a slightly ugly
town with narrow streets and a wonderful view. The foreigners themselves continued
to enjoy Mojácar (although its fame abroad was vanishing), and many chose to
live in La Paratá (on a high mountain overlooking the beach, ridiculously
British), or along the beach itself, still at apparently ludicrous prices.
Mojácar was a fine place: there was no Sky television and the only news came
from the World Service of the BBC – far off and, beyond the fluctuations in the
daily rate of exchange, of little interest.
The second mayor (third really, the age of ‘mociones de censura’ had begun) was
Mayor Bartolo, a PSOE man who had worked in the Turre Caja de Ahorros. Bartolo
was – one way or another – influenced towards the new president of the Junta de
Andalucía, Manuel Chaves, and, inspired to make Mojácar a modern town, he
brought back an architect called Nicolás Cermeño, by chance Chaves’ nephew, to
rebuild the old Mojácar fountain – La
Fuente.
It would be the beginning of the end of Mojácar and its easy
cohabitation.
Remarkably, an open meeting was held in the Town Hall to
discuss the plan for a new tourist fountain to take the place of the old public
one. The mojaqueros were against the
idea – one of them, José María (carpenter and undertaker), gave a famous speech
about how he had seen enough marble to last a lifetime and he was against an
austere gray marble fuente. We all
agreed.
Work began a few days later.
The foreigners were aghast. An early copy of ‘The
Entertainer’ (the English-language newspaper) has a picture of a local Brit
holding a placard which reads ‘Ninety Thousand Pounds to Wash my Knickers?’ (the
reference being that, in those days, the fuente
was used by washerwomen as a laundry). A few days later, the foreigners made a
demonstration in protest against the outrage. They were (unwisely) led by an
American actor and long-term local resident called Charles Baxter (who lived
openly with his Spanish boyfriend) together with Silvio Narizzano (whose sexual
perversions in Hollywood and London were palpably well-known locally, as was
his artist and playwright boyfriend Win Wells). I was warned by Antonio, a
local friend, ‘to keep clear’. It was well that he told me, because the
foreigners, amassed in the main square, were set upon by the mojaqueros and a fight developed.
Eventually, the Guardia Civil arrested Silvio (later to be freed: ‘unshackle
that man’, said the mayor standing outside the Town Hall. Silvio gave him a
large bunch of roses and a kiss). Shortly after the event, Charles Baxter – the
gray-haired dapper doyen of the foreigners – left Mojácar for good.
The
mojaqueros had
the last word – we don’t like the new
fuente
but it’s for us to complain – not you. The relationship with the foreigners was
broken.
A few months later, Bartolo used the same architect to
‘remodel’ the Castillo. No one complained.
...
Years after (in 2014), a local man called Francisco Haro,
the son of the old owner of the Hotel Indalo, wrote an astonishing homage to
the early foreigners who had brought Mojácar back from the brink of ruin, a
fully-illustrated book called ‘Mojaqueros de Hecho’ (Honorary Mojaqueros). Tales of Fritz the mad artist, Charlie Braun, Bill Napier, Paul Beckett, Ulf Dietrich, Ric Davis, the Polansky brothers, Salvatore, Geri, Theresa and many more who brought wealth, fame and fun to the area. The book was completely ignored by the current Town Hall which has, at best, an uneasy
relationship with the guiris. These
days, and despite the 60% of foreign inhabitants (more or less, depending on
the vagaries of the town hall padrón),
Mojácar is considered officially as a seasonal tourist town.
