Lanjarón: Adarves, fuentes, and tinaos

Lanjarón is known for its healing waters. It has 23 fuentes that can supposedly cure almost anything - blindness, anemia, arthritis, liver problems, kidney problems… We set out to make a Wikiloc track with the historical information from the ADR fichas about the fuentes on the east side of town today and found eleven of them.

As a totally unexpected bonus, we ended up walking along Calle Hondillo, a lane that leads through the oldest part of town, and found ourselves ducking under one tinao after another. We’ve seen a lot of tinaos in various villages over the years, but this is by far the densest concentration of them we’ve ever experienced. For about eight long, deep blocks, the only way to access the housing units that face the interior of the blocks is through tinaos that serve as adarves. That is, they are essentially dead-end tunnels that lead to the inward-facing houses. You can picture it like a wormhole that travels from the outside crust of a donut into the center hole. (In the Alpujarra, an adarve is not the parapet walk around the top of the defensive walls of a castle. That’s a different meaning of the word.)

We were delighted…astounded…dumbfounded…as we kept finding one tinao-adarve after another. What beautiful gems. One preserved the original door, constructed with row after row of studs and at least five feet wide. Another led to an interior garden where a thoughtful resident had set up a bench facing a post with a notch carved in it to hold a phone so you could take a selfie (see ours!) Every tinao led to a fascinating warren of doorways and greenery.

We think Lanjarón should be at least as famous for its tinaos and adarves as it is for its mineral water!Read more