Andalucia on My Mind

by Terje Raa

Taking notes is for me part of traveling. I do find scribbling a bit tiring though, so on a trip to Andalucia in Spain, I switched to mindmaps. That means no sentences, only little drawn lines each with a keyword or two, splitting into new lines, exactly like the associations created by my travel impressions.

My trip includes one of the major cities, Malaga, and the towns of Antequera and Ronda. It’s a round trip in the Malaga province, the southern part of the Andalucia region. Antequera is my first stop, and to verify its central location, I let my eyes wander on a regional map, first from Seville to Granada, then from Cordoba to Malaga, in both cases touching Antequera. As is right and proper for the subject of a mindmap, Antequera also occupies the center of my paper, spelled within a circle, from which lines will grow out, imitating the branches of a tree.

Visitors to Antequera usually come via Malaga. The surprisingly short distance between them, 45 km, is a useful key on a dotted line pointing to Malaga. The fertile plains surrounding Antequera soon become strong yellowish branches on my mindmap, sporting little twigs named September, for the season is an important detail. Beyond these plains, as a refinement, I sketch out the profile of a particular man, possibly the good Lord himself, who rests day and night, always smiling contentedly. He’s a natural monument,  the shape of a greyish face-like mountain.

History deserves its own branch, with years and periods as keys on its twigs; 1410 to mark the Christian conquest over the Arabs, then two whole centuries, the 16th and 17th, Antequera’s golden age, leading to a most crucial theme - monuments. Commerce and art, developing simultaneously, gradually furnished Antequera with Renaissance and Baroque public buildings, richly decorated private palaces and a large number of churches and convents. To such a degree that 75 percent of the province’s cultural heritage is found in and around Antequera.

A street plan reveals that the regional government has also adopted the mindmap idea, by drawing red lines in streets that contain historical buildings, their tiny images dotting the map. They simply put a mindmap on top of a traditional map! That leads me to the circular center of Antequera, Plaza de San Sebastian, and the neighboring Municipal Museum where I know who is waiting - a naked adolescent Roman boy in bronze from the 1st century, Efebo, so guarded that his 1.43 m body is normally locked up in a closet.

Scary Ronda

Efebo does travel occasionally to show the world his striking beauty, but the idea of going to Ronda with me doesn’t appeal to him. So I head westwards alone, by train up into the mountains, Serrania de Ronda, on a belated lookout for a certain category of men who roamed these mountain ranges - smugglers, robbers, warriors, some of them gentlemen and heroes, several surviving in films and novels and at Ronda’s bandit museum, El Museo del Bandolero.

Another bronze sculpture catches my attention in Ronda; a fuming black bull outside the bullring, Plaza de Toros, so lifelike that I fear it could leap off its plinth and start butting tourists. In this very bullring from 1785, one of the oldest in Spain, the legendary matador Pedro Romero climbed down from his horse to fight the bull on foot - the start of modern bullfighting. During the annual Feria de Pedro Romero, actually ending a few days ago, the special Corridas Goyescas with participants in century-old costumes attract enthusiasts from all over Spain and a great many of the 35,000 Rondenos.

I must not forget my Ronda mindmap. Its middle section gets a bit crowded; the theme circle, then an attempt to illustrate the circular beauty of the bull arena’s arched galleries, and the black bull symbolizing such imminent danger that I withdraw to Plaza de Espana, the nearby official center. Busy tourists rush across the square to Puente Nuevo, the New Bridge completed 1793, to lose themselves in an eroded gorge, Tajo de Ronda, awe-inspiring with its walls dropping a steep 98 m down to the river Guadalevin.

The bridge leads into the old town, La Ciudad. Carefully, I zigzag hundreds of slippery steps to the bottom of the gorge, through La Mina, a narrow shaft below the Casa del Rey Moro, House of the Moorish King. The street of Arminan, traversing the old town, has more scares in store for me - witchcraft and the horrors of the Inquisition at the Museo Lara; animals lying about stone dead, some reduced to skulls and horns at the Museo de Caza, a hunting museum; one guillotine and a headman with his sword lifted, in a church exhibition about martyrdom. Scared, I take refuge among bandits in their intimate Museo del Bandolero.

Malaga in Green

Heading for Malaga 113 km southeast, I expect the Andalucian countryside outside the bus window to be my last impressions of peace and beauty, now that the big city with half a million people is going to envelop me. I’m proven totally wrong, for in the middle of the city’s roaring traffic, Malaga has its own tropical paradise, Malaga Park, made up of asphalt, marble and exotic plants imported to Spain from tropical and subtropical corners of the world.

It’s a living green carpet, stretching 800 m along the harbor between two main squares, Plaza de la Marina and Plaza del General Torrijos, an area reclaimed from the sea. Famous sights like the Picasso Museum, the Cathedral and the Moorish Alcazaba Palace are all close by. The traffic is led across the carpet on Paseo del Parque, with broad marble-clad promenades on either side, easily transferred to my mindmap, whereas my crayons cause me problems when trying  to outdo Picasso.

The Park’s main section is a thick belt where spectacular plants take me from one continent to the other. Palm crowns are waving above, hibiscus open their large red flowers and strelitzia look at me as were they birds; multicolored in blue, orange, white and a touch of purple. Jacaranda trees compete to be more blue than the sky, though slightly more violet. Sculptures abound, one of them a dragon tree, the others more mundane ones in metal and marble. Everyone is considered; benches and miniature lawns for tired feet, a pond for the swans and ducks, a children playground and a pavilion for human songbirds.

Pondering what effect those mindmaps had, I feel they stored my impressions in themes: Antequera, the congestion of monuments; Ronda, certain scares; Malaga, this green paradise. And as a side effect, I doze off into a dream; seeing Efebo de Antequera, the bronze boy, enter Malaga Park riding on the black bull from Ronda! Efebo softly plays a lyre now but is disturbed by a fleeing young man, followed by a screaming tourist, “Stop the thief!” That makes Efebo strike his lyre powerfully, thus signaling the bull to run after the pickpocket. Waking up, I realize that it takes a dream to set my associations perfectly free.

Illustrations by Zofia Hedvard and Terje Raa