Postcard from... Cabo de Gata

By Paul Scraton:

The walk took us through the desert town of Rodalquilar, past the abandoned mine workers’ cottages and the remnants of the goldmine on the hillside, until we reached the ridge and dropped down towards the green valley below. The road, built for the trucks and other vehicles that moved between the different mines of this corner of the Sierra de Cabo de Gata, was wide and rocky, the preserve not only of walkers and mountain bikers, but also families in their cars, rocking over the rough terrain on an Easter day-trip through the hills.

We stopped, just before the mountain trail turned the final corner to meet the cabbage fields of the high valley, to follow a tunnel through the rock to discover mine buildings abandoned in 1936 at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Mining continued in the area after the conflict, with over 1,400 workers living in Rodalquilar and earning their living from the gold and minerals pulled from within these mountainsides. This lasted until the 1960s, when calculations showed that the constant scraping and digging at these hills no longer made financial sense, and the buildings were left to crumble beneath the sunshine of Europe’s driest corner.

This was a place of stories. In the high, farmed valley, a straight dirt track lined with prickly plants between the cabbage fields led us to another abandoned building. The Cortijo del Fraile is the farmhouse of Federico Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding, based on a true story from 1928 of a young bride-to-be running away with her cousin, only to meet the would-be groom’s brother at a crossroads where the eloping couple were gunned down. The cousin died, but the young woman survived, living in a nearby village until the 1990s. She never did get married.

Later, after the events depicted in Lorca’s tragedy, the farmhouse provided a suitably atmospheric backdrop for scenes in A Few Dollars More and The Good The Bad and The Ugly, but now it is collapsing in on itself, surrounded by fencing to keep visitors experiencing deep Ruinenlust from stalking the now overgrown rooms of the old farmhouse or stepping through holes in the walls. We sat for a while next to the farmhouse beside it’s old water-tank – the only part of the complex that has been renovated – and watched as the Easter day-trippers climbed out from their cars to wander the perimeter. From a valley beneath the mines to the theatres of Madrid, and now, ninety years on, a destination for those still fascinated by the stories of the past, whether they get there on foot, by bike, or behind the wheel of an increasingly dusty SEAT.  

Paul is Elsewhere’s editor-in-chief and wrote about Cabo de Gata in Elsewhere No.02, available in our online shop. Paul’s book Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast is out now, published by Influx Press.