Béznar: a tale of three bridges

The main reason for choosing to stay in Béznar this week was to be able to walk to the abandoned village of Tablate. During Muslim times, Tablate was an alquería (a small group of farmhouses) located at the one point where the villages of the Alpujarra could be accessed from the west: over the Tablate Bridge.

Amazingly, although two newer bridges have since been built to cross the barranco at exactly the same point, we were able to cross it today on the medieval bridge, the lowest one. What an experience! Robust and solid after all these centuries, its single arch allows passage over the river in a deep gorge between sheer vertical walls. Looking down, we could barely see the bottom. Directly above us were the 19th century bridge and the cable-stayed current bridge built in 2001. From the looks of the new road construction we saw yesterday, all three will soon be replaced by a tunnel farther up the barranco.

Everything that we had read ahead of time stated that the village of Tablate gradually depopulated during the 1960s when there were so many emigrants from Spain to other countries in Europe. The last permanent resident was supposedly a shepherd who died in the 1990s. So you can imagine how surprised we were when we got to the village today and the very first house we saw was clearly new and lived in, with laundry hanging on lines in both the front and the back.

The rest of the village, though, was very much in ruins. This made it easy to see the details of construction in the various buildings. The most interesting for us to see was the tower for the counterbalancing beam of an old olive oil mill. This is very similar to the beam tower we saw at the Benizalte Mill in Órgiva seven weeks ago.

All the Wikiloc tracks to Tablate show photos of a dome-shaped brick bread oven. We were really looking forward to seeing this, but it must have recently collapsed, because only the bottom part was still visible. All in all, though, it was easy to imagine life here and understand why the conquered Muslims tried to recover it in their unsuccessful War of the Alpujarras in 1569.Read more