El Chorro Natural Park

Today is a beautiful, warm and sunny day. An excellent day to visit the lakes area of Andalusia in the El Chorro Nature Park.

Although everyone refers to them as lakes they’re actually 3 giant reservoirs. As well as supplying Malaga city with drinking water they provide a great recreational space for water sports in the summer and as well as fishing and walking all year-round. People from all over camp here as the calm waters are a change from the Mediterranean.

We heard about this area, that is about an hour’s drive from Antequera, when I read about
a precipitous walkway in a gorge called the Caminito del Rey (the King's Little Path) that offers spectacular views but was not suitable for people who experience vertigo.

We originally planned to do this 8 km hike but when I checked online to book it, all the dates that we were interested in were full. It is a popular place and people book weeks in advance all year round!

Anyways, we decided since it was such a nice day, we would still go to El Chorro to see what all the fuss was all about.

From Antequera, we had to take a winding and narrow road through the mountains. There were signs that said to take care because “the next 5 km are dangerous”. Living in relatively flat Ontario doesn’t really prepare you for a road like this but Chris took it easy and did a great job. It helped that the road was in very good condition and there was little traffic. The big buses and trucks and take up a lot of room and whip around the bends are what scare me. Also when the scenery is sooooo beautiful and Chris wants to look at it. Yikes!

It all worked out though and we got to El Chorro where the big dam and reservoir are. It is also the starting and ending point for the hike so there were a lots of people with hard hats, there. Buses were coming and going and it was a busy touristy place.

We went into a restaurant that looked over the reservoir and had a coffee. Along with the Caminito del Rey, the reservoirs are one of the greatest feats of Spanish engineering in the early 20th century.

The area around the lakes is known for sports of all types but especially rock climbing. It is a world class rocking climbing area with more than 2,000 routes for all levels.

Our plan was to drive a little further and higher to an interesting site - the ruins of the 9th century settlement called Bobastro.

After paying a 3 euro entrance fee, we walked up a rough set of ancient stairs and twisted our way up the mountain to the site that had incredible views below us and Griffin vultures flying over us. Pine trees and rocks…

Bobastro is an archaeological site containing the remains of a number of different ruins, including a Muslim necropolis and a Christian Mozarabic Church. I learned that Mozarabic people were Spanish Christians living under Muslim rule (8th–11th century), who, while unconverted to Islam, adopted the Arabic language and culture.

Carved into the sandstone rock, the church is the only example of a temple erected by the Christian community during the Muslim rule of the Caliphate of Cordoba. Omar Ben Hafsún, who converted to Christianity, established Bobastro as the capital of his revolt against the ruling Caliphate in 880. About 1,500 revolutionaries joined him and lived in caves that they also carved out of the rock. The church mostly was destroyed later but originally it was a church in a cave.

Building the structures and the defensive walls that surrounded them, involved each and everyone of the inhabitants. It is said, that every person had to pay a yearly fee of a carved slab of rock, something that must have taken months of hard labour. The dimensions of each slab were carefully measured and each one was added onto the defensive walls or used in construction.

There was only one other family visiting isolated Bobastro when we were there so it was a peaceful spot to check out the incredible views over the beautiful countryside while trying to imagine the life of the people who lived here.

Actually, we don’t know how a group of revolutionaries could thrive in this place, so far from other people and under constant threat of an invasion. We did see evidence of the thick walls that surrounded the site as well as remains of ovens, grain storage places, a quarry and cisterns for water. The cave houses that we saw were shallow but they have gone through hundreds of years of erosion so who knows what they originally looked like.

We enjoyed seeing Bobastro and were happy that our afternoon was spent exploring this ancient place and being at the top of a mountain.Read more