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Antequera, Inland Costa Del Sol, Andalucia, Spain
Antequera
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Antequera extends over the side of a small hill,
between the Sierra del Torcal and an extensive agricultural plain. Crowned by
the walls of its castle and by the Santa Maria basilica, Antequera offers the
traveller who enters the Torcal road, an urban landscape, characteristic of
the great towns of Andalucia. Numerous church towers stand out among a popular
architecture of Arabic tiled roofs and chalk fronts. Antequera is a beautiful
old town, inland from the Costa Del Sol in the heart of Andalucia and is well
worth visiting.
The municipality of Antequera, the largest in the province of Malaga (798 km²), occupies the central area of the region and extends from the limit of the province of Cordoba, to the north, up to the vicinity of the Montes de Malaga, in the south.
Although the landscape is generally plain and not very rugged, Antequera has important sierras in the municipality, among them the Torcal. A limestone sierra, in which the stone has been moulded by the water, making shapes which the imagination can see as giants, monsters, screws, castles and even stone cathedrals. It seems as though nature's monumentality is competing with what man has left in the city.
On the plain, the landscape is a meadow of cereals and plots, splattered with country estates which presage the nearby countrysides of Cordoba and Seville. And further form the meadow, by the east and west winds, the relief waves and ends up forming small hills covered in olive trees. An oustanding landmark over the landscape of Antequera is the Peña de los Enamorados, a small sierra separated by the Guadalhorce river and the nearby mountains, and which standing upright on the plain, joins the attractiveness of its slenderness to the legend of the Christian man and Moorish woman lovers, who ended their lives here and with it the lack of understanding of their love.
The location of Antequera in the geographical centre of Andalucia and in the natural corridor which all along history has channelled the communications between the High and Low Andalucia, between Granada and Seville, has favoured an important passage of man and cultures all along history. Since the Bronze Age man decided to live in these lands, leaving his mark in Menga, Viera and el Romeral with funerial constructions, the population of Antequera has been continuous. In the past, the presence of the Roman rule outstands, to which the origins of the city of Antequera are due (the ancient Antikaria). Other towns surged around this city, like Arastepi and Singilia Barba, which were among the most important in the Roman Malaga.
In the 8th century, after the conquest of the city by Abdelaziz-Ben-Muza, the town became Medina-Antikaria, and later Antakira. The Arabs constructed the walls of the Medina and Alcazaba, with the Torre del Homenaje (homage tower). But regardless of all the defences built, the city fell in 1410 before the Infante Don Fernando's troops. Having become a frontier city, it passed a difficult period, but once the Arab menace was over, the city enjoyed a period of demographic and urban expansion, as a consecuence of its natural location and a series of royal privileges, with a tendency to favour its growth. In the second half of the 16th century, it assumes a moment of major cultural growth in the history of the city. Temples and palaces are erected and around them the area we now know as the old part of town, which reaches its final structure in the 18th century.
As an important contribution to the local economy in the 19th century, one would have to point out, the creation or boost in some cases, of the Antequeran industry of fabrics. During this century, the woolen industry was boosted together with other industries, such as tanning, iron and steel. But these attempts of industrialization could not compete with the imposing agrarian structure and tradition of the region.
Today, Antequera has gone back to combining the agricultural character of its region with the re-emergence of the industrial activity, basically located in the Poligono Industrial Comarcal (Industrial Estate).
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