is a town in the south of
Spain. It is about 100 km inland from Malaga,
and yet you can get amazing fresh
fish there every day of the week
(except Sunday). During the post-christmas/new year period 2003 myself
and 10 other friends went on a two week
climbing trip to this region of
Spain. We stayed in a hamlet about 15km from Antequera and visited the
larger town a few times.
It is a delightful place founded, I think, by the Romans. It has great
tapas, and higgledy piggeldy streets. The 17th century churches were
decorated with funds generated from plundering the New World and tell
immense stories about the hold of religion on the people at that time.
If you go to visit be sure to visit the churches. Just on the edge of
the town is a small park with a Roman burial site. An old man will bring
you through a hole in the fence and tell you about them, for a modest
contribution, if you please!
I was inspired to write a short series of poems about Andalusia and the first of these
is about this town.
Antequera -
White patches of buildings cast hard against the mountainside
A weight of their numbers
A wave of them, a wave of them breaking
hard on the mountainside
My sight is cluttered by Antequera.
The Casas, clustered together,
no line left unbroken
shoehorned onto every corner
wedged down onto every flat patch
clinging like goats, precipitous Antequera
Your buildings have barnacled themselves onto bedrock