Tourism Albox – Almería

The Sierra’s insides ache because it longs for the silver that has been taken from it for thousands of years. The Phoenicians were the first to trade the silver of Spain on a large scale, says the engineer Luis Siret: “Spain, a new and ignorant land, Tarshish, rich in silver, explored by the trade, the audacity and the weapons of the Phoenicians, its booty enriching Sidon and Myceras, here is the picture at the end of the Neolithic period. cios, their swag enriching Sidon and Myceras, this is the picture of the end of the Neolithic period drawn by the excavations”. The Phoenicians knew of the existence of rich deposits of silver, the value of which was unknown to the natives and which they bought at a very low price to resell at a very high price in Asia or Greece, and such was its abundance on the market that, unable to load it on their ships, they even cut their lead anchors to exchange them for silver ones.

The part of Spain dominated by the Phoenicians, says Siret, coincided with present-day Andalusia, and its axis, the Guadalquivir, through the mouth of which they could enter, although this obliged them to flank the Pillars of Hercules and made navigation much longer, so they wanted to find a more direct and shorter route by following the riverbeds, which were generally dry. That is why they wanted to look for a more direct and shorter route by following the riverbeds, which were generally dry. Once Bario was founded, they may have thought of following the course of the Almanzora, but this had two disadvantages: the difficult landing stage at Villaricos and the lack of a good defensive position in the Almanzora basin. I have gone up the valley,” says Siret, “and I have only found several Neolithic villages of no strategic importance.

We quote these words of Siret because we think that we cannot rule out the possibility of a second route of penetration following the valley of the Almanzora up to the confluence of the Rambla de Albox to follow the bed of this tributary, cross the sierra through the Bocas de Oria and reach the valley of the Guadalquivir in the village of Vertientes.

In support of our hypothesis, let us say that, until the last century, this route was used, as is demonstrated by the file documented in the municipal archive concerning a brawl with muleteers from Cuevas de Almanzora who carried their beasts loaded with barrilla to sell it in Andalusia as a detergent and made their journey along the Rambla de Oria. This could very well be the route that Siret was looking for and on it we can find several Neolithic fortifications that he did not locate because he may not have explored the Rambla de Oria, since, if he had done so, he would have found no less than four of them in a very small area that ensured the control of this passage to Andalusia: El Picacho, a natural tower defended by a dry stone wall to the N – 0 and inaccessible from the West, to fall in a beak over the wadi in the rest of the enclosure.

Next to the previous one is the village of El Villar, where we find the ruins of two fortifications called El Castellón and Castillo de la Balsa Vieja. The former is a Neolithic settlement with abundant water, citadel, citadel and necropolis, defended by a wall over 500 metres long. The Castillo de la Balsa Vieja, which is less well preserved, is close to the former on a mountain that is difficult to access, but the most important is undoubtedly the Castellón de Olías, close to the former, fairly well preserved and almost impregnable.

All these fortifications, so close to each other, must have been related to the route that connected the Mediterranean coasts with the Guadalquivir valley. Thousands of years ago man began to struggle for life on this land. So abundant are the testimonies that he has left us of his passage over it, that the whole of the Almanzora valley could be considered an immense open-air museum.

This abundance of materials, which often comes to the surface, is crying out for the creation of a regional museum that should house so many scattered samples in the hands of simple amateurs, if not profiteering dealers. There were several stone axes collected in the Saliente cave and in the Cerro de las Copas, microliths from the Partaloa gredas, remains of Neolithic, Iberian, Phoenician, Greek, Roman and Arab pottery found in the Cerro del Castillo.

There was also an Argaric vase of the same origin, a bronze axe, Iberian, Roman and Arab copper coins, and a beautiful gold coin with the Star of David on the obverse, which made its Hebrew origin very clear. Let us hope that the new generations will be able to carry out this undertaking before the still existing archaeological remains and the ethnographic material, most of which has already been lost, disappear for good.

Are there still any of the four hundred looms that existed in Albox in the middle of the last century? Have all the espadrille-making tables or the wheels used by the spinners to make the hemp twine disappeared? The name of the trade is still preserved in one of the streets of La Loma! Man learned to write and History began: Iberians, Celts and Celtiberians, Greeks and Phoenicians, Carthaginians and Romans, Vandals and Byzantines, Moors and Christians. 0 well: Hannibal and Scipio, Marius and Sulla, Caesar and Pompey, Muza and Don Rodrigo… And our land continues to be watered even if it does not rain, because, in the absence of rain, spilt blood is good. It is the same old story!

That is why we are going to leave history behind and try to take the pulse of past life. We will not look for it in the historical foam collected by historians, but in those unpublished chapters of the “Infrahistory” which, as Unamuno said, keeps the essence of the people.

In those dusty, yellowed sheets we were able to surprise the panic of a people who abandoned their houses, half-ruined by the earthquake, to sleep in the open air on the banks of the promenade, the patriotic enthusiasm of a people who acclaimed Ferdinand VII and prepared to fight against the French invader, which appoints its “Junta de Defensa y Fortificaciones” and prepares for the coming struggle, which creates two companies of “honest militia” and which presents us with figures such as Juan del Pino y Riquelme, captain of the second company, who will fight under his command against the imperial troops throughout the Almanzora valley and in the Sierra de Filabres.

There we find evidence of passive resistance such as that of Felipa Castillo, single, “of honest state”, Esteban Navarro Granero, Sebastián Alfonso Olier, Domingo López García, Benito Galera Cerrillos, María García García, Andrés Pérez García, Juan Porcel García, Francisco González (soldier) and two more unidentified men who died at the hands of the French troops, so they did not receive sacraments or make a will, as recorded in Book IX of burials of the Parish Church of Our Lady of the Rosary of Albox, from folio 278.

We draw attention to their surnames, which are still alive in Albox today, and to the fact that they were simple countrymen, people from the village, among whom there were two women, as it is stated that one of them was a soldier. The fight took place on the 20th of July 1810. In the file there is an official letter from General Blake to advise Freyre, General Commander of the Cavalry of Lorca, to admit Juan del Pino to the command of the guerrilla group of Albox and to indicate “the villages where his service could be of more use to them and of greater harm to the enemies”.

The pragmatic nature of the people of Alboja was evident in the Junta held in the square on 21 March to raise funds to help the departure, ruling that “those who did not attend this meeting should pay a fee equal to the highest that had been voluntarily assigned for an object so just and recommended by humanity and for the common defence of the homeland”. The struggle of the Albox patriots was not in vain, as on 24 July a dispatch was received from Intendant Ibarrola, signed in Vera, requesting that the towns not occupied by the enemy participate in the elections for deputies to be held in August on the island of León, which shows that the invaders had already abandoned Albox, although they reoccupied it in August 1811 by the 16th Dragoon Regiment. The invaders were insatiable. See an example: “Having presented themselves in this town, the imperial troops asked for the sum of 58,750 reales of extraordinary monthly payments of Generals and, not being able in any way to meet this request, due to the scarcity and hunger of the natives, they took Don Juan García Navarro and Don Luis Navarro Cazorla as hostages”.

To remedy the famine, the sub-prefect of Baza orders the cultivation of the potato which, in fertile countries replaces the lack of several healthy wayss and which produces two or three harvests each year. The sub-prefect of Baza says in another writing: “It has been very strange and scandalous to me that that municipality… forgetting in everything its duties… has not only disobeyed my orders but has not even acknowledged receipt of them… I have come to understand that in that town there are many ill-intentioned neighbours and lovers of anarchy and disorder whose occupations are to spread false, revolutionary and subversive news of good order and to seduce the dispersed to engage in abrigandaje and insurrection”, or: “The captain of the imperial troops having presented himself in this town, asking for 1. 500 bushels of wheat and 200 bushels of barley, whose delivery he ordered, threatening with the troops under his command, to be carried out within twenty-four hours and that, otherwise, this town would be handed over to his troops”.

This was the last agreement of the City Council appointed by the intruding government, taking account of the previous threats. It was the 14th of September 1812. The invasion had ended in Albox. But other no less dangerous invasions had not ended, such as the spread of epidemics, famine, the appearance of banditry or the dreaded floods.

A file of more than a hundred pages records the incidents of the yellow fever epidemic, the initial outbreak of which began in Cartagena and spread, relentlessly, reaping lives, through all the towns of the Spanish Levante region. There are Dantesque scenes and sad situations such as those of the parents who cannot welcome home their son who has returned from the war badly wounded because he has to stay in quarantine in the rambla, or the doctor from Albox, who, once convinced that he already had the symptoms of the disease, asks the Health Board for permission to go to the Cerro Fabián lazaretto, where his wife and children, already affected, were staying.

The famine resulting from several years of war brings the aftermath of banditry, represented here by a certain Feliciano, who, together with Hermenegildo González, from Orce, captains a band of bandits who commit multiple robberies in the region, for which the Subdelegación de Policía de Baza issues a search and capture order for them, threatening with severe punishment anyone who helps them or does not report their presence in any place as soon as they know of it. A terrible flood devastated this town on 11 September 1892. To defend against them, a wall was built which was able to withstand the force of the waters in the last floods of 1973.