Nerja Museum: Some Things I Didn’t Know; Some Things They Didn’t Tell Me
The town of Nerja on Spain’s Costa del Sol has a modern, well thought out museum. It stands fairly inconspicuously in, and partly under, one corner of the vast Plaza de Espana, a forlorn development of mainly empty buildings set round a paved open space that is largely deserted except for fairs at fiesta time.
The Museum is set over several floors, the upper of which tell of the town’s history from, roughly, Phoenician times to, roughly, modern times.
Beneath ground level, appropriately, the exhibition is devoted to the famous Caves, setting out the story of human use over some 40,000 years – a series of periods involving climate and geological change, rising and receding seas, all calculated to overwhelm any attempt to calibrate to one’s own meagre timescale. In any case, why spend too much time on exhibits about the Caves, when the Caves themselves are just up the road? As I said in a post several years ago “Go see”.
The museum’s interest to me lies in the records of more recent history. I thought that I knew a fair bit about Nerja – but here are some facts, new to me, that the Museum presents. (One must bear in mind that from the C8 to the end of the C15, Nerja was a village or town in Moorish Andalucia.)
- The Museum claims, with straight scholarly face, that the Moorish prince who started the Moorish conquest, fleeing into exile from a bloody dynastic feud in Damascus, first landed in Spain on Nerja’s Burriana beach.
This beach is now the foremost visitor beach, with every amenity, rows of restaurants on the front, surmounted by dense developments of apartments and villas covering the cliffs and spilling down the steep roads behind.
There’s no memorial to this alleged great landing – almost Columbus-like in its effect. There is, however a memorial to the director of the popular 80s Spanish soap, Verano Azul, filmed largely in Nerja (an undisputed event in the town’s history also commemorated in the Museum).
- Moorish Nerja was not on the site of the present town, but 2 or 3 kilometres inland, towards Frigiliana, which is undeniably of Moorish foundation.
- After the general expulsion of the Moors (or Moriscos, as they had become through forced conversion to Christianity), at the end of the C16, no one lived in the old Nerja for many decades. The modern town was founded in the C17 to house itinerant agricultural workers drawn to the area by the new sugar cane cultivation.
What’s missing? (According to my limited knowledge)..
- The great earthquake at the end of the C19 that devastated the town and led to a visit by King Alfonso. It was he who called the town’s jutting cliff top promontory “El Balcon de Europa”, and whose statue stands there.
- The huge (over)development of Nerja’s second home and tourist industry in recent decades, and the feasibility of maintaining the town’s character given the relentless expansion – to which the Museum’s own home, the Plaza de Espana, stands as a grim monument.
- And, of course, DON’T MENTION THE WAR… There’s a tiny video about the anti-Franco maquis in the local sierra, and role of the Guardia Civil in hunting them down.
But there’s nothing about the events of 1936/7, when, initially, Nerja’s republicans exacted retribution on the town’s Franco supporters; the grim retreat of the Republicans after Malaga fell in February 1937, when the columns of refugees along the coast road through Nerja were mercilessly shelled and bombed. Nerja was duly taken and retribution against liberals and leftists duly exacted in turn.
There’s not even the interesting anecdote concerning the famous Eagle Aqueduct near Maro, to which the Museum gives a prominent exhibit. During the flight of the Republican refugees, a nationalist gunboat shelled the aqueduct, supposing it was a road bridge, the destruction of which would have trapped the Republicans.
The actual road bridge was, and still is, nearby and very low and out of sight in the barranco.
There’s an interesting footnote to all this hidden recent history. Until recently (2017) there were a couple of streets in Nerja named after Francoist generals, including the one who commanded the attack against the Malaga refugees. The then socialist council renamed these streets. According to the BBC, on whose website I read about this, there lives or did live on one of these streets a Francoist minister, who, in 1974, sanctioned the last execution by garrotte in Spain.
In Cordoba, a new conservative council has reversed street renaming.
Last year, the socialist central government had Franco’s body removed from the Valley of the Fallen monument near Madrid. Will that decision one day be reversed?
Franco may be dead, but one suspects that the legacy of his times is not yet buried – or, indeed, properly acknowledged.
Jan 2020
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