History and Pearl’s Hotel

A long, long, long time ago humans first began to live where I live today, the village of Béznar in the Valley of Lecrin in the province of Granada, Spain.  No one is precisely sure how long ago because no one remembers that far back.  Historical accounts tell some of the story, but not most of it, not really. You have to look at the archaeological records to get an idea.

I have written a little about recent times.  For example, a few years ago I wrote about the brave Bezneros of the sixteenth century.  They rescued Bezneras from the Alpujarreños, who had taken the damsels captive in a daring raid.  Some say the kidnapping by the Alpujarreños was retribution for their forced exile from the city of Granada in 1492.  I imagine, however, that there were multiple motives for the Iberian men of Islam to kidnap Christian women back in those days.  Mercifully but with blunderbusses blazing, the mosqueteros de Béznar retrieved the women successfully.  The rescue is still celebrated in Béznar every year.  But, when it comes to human history hereabouts, that story hardly scratches the surface.

Romans built a bridge in Béznar.  I drive my car across that bridge several times a week.  The engineering and construction of the bridge has met the test of time.  I never worry about it collapsing in an earthquake or being washed out in a deluge.  More than one one-thousand-year storm has blown through here since humans first crossed it. Those storms must have streamed torrents down the Sierra ravines strong enough to uproot not only trees but also giant boulders.  The flood careening helter-skelter through gully and gorge would make for international headlines today. But the Roman bridge did not budge.

How many earthquakes have rattled its foundation in two-thousand years?  Quite a few, I am sure. This is earthquake territory.  The African Continental Plate pushes up against the Eurasian Continental Plate right here.  Every so often the pressure builds to the point that something below the surface has to give.  When it does, the entire province of Granada has a fit and shakes uncontrollably for seconds or, if it is bad, a minute or two while the earth’s crust reconfigures itself to a more comfortable arrangement of hardened stone. When the land rumbles, the Sierra Nevada elevate another meter at least. Despite multiple tectonic ruptures, the Roman bridge has remained in service.

Extremely recently, just last month, city workers cut a trench in the surface of the bridge to connect the sanitation of some isolated housing to the rest of the system in town.  I do not believe the city planner batted an eye about whether the trench would impair the integrity of the bridge.  I know him.  If I had ever expressed any doubt to him about this public works project, he would have politely scoffed. It really is a marvelous bridge.

The Roman bridge, however, while ancient in some minds, does not go back all that far into local human history.  The Phoenicians came here two thousand years before the Romans arrived.  They sailed across the Mediterranean Sea to get here.  They landed their boats somewhere around Motril…. Oh, did I mention that the Carthaginian Hannibal came through here with his elephants on his way to Rome? Yes, this land played a part in the Punic Wars.  The Phoenicians established Carthage on the coast of Africa while they were also colonizing the Iberian Peninsula. This land has been a busy place.

An argument can be made that civilization arrived here with the Phoenicians, but that may be a mistake as well.  There were people here long before the Phoenicians showed up.

The evidence so far does not appear to support the smithing of copper or iron before the Phoenicians, but that does not mean the stone age peoples hanging around were uncivilized. See, e.g., Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything (2021). Homo Sapiens from North Africa migrated to the Iberian Peninsula during the Neolithic and Mesolithic Ages—and before.  When the Phoenicians got here, the Magdalenians, the Solutreans, the Gravattians, and the Aurignicians had arrived and assimilated over twenty thousand years. I myself have visited the Cueva de Nerja where the Solutreans left cave paintings behind for us to find.  We got here first! might have been their message.

But the Solutrean claim, if that was their message, would have been erroneous if not out-and-out fraud. For if we broaden the scope of humanity just a pinch, plenty of evidence demonstrates the Solutreans were actually late arrivals. The Neanderthals roamed all over the Iberian Peninsula before the Iberians ever arrived, let alone the Phoenicians.  Indeed, as recently as 1994, six hominin skeletons were discovered in the Cueva de Gran Dolina in the Atapuerca region of Spain.  That’s up north a ways, but still on the peninsula. The skeletons date back 1.2 million years.

When I think about how long we so-called sentient beings have been cultivating an existence right here in this valley, I have to wonder.  Since Spain’s Sierra Nevada were formed during the Tertiary Period (65 to 1.8 million years ago), it looks like we may have moved into the valley not too long after the geological renovation was completed. 

I guess if you discover a nice place to live, why not make it your home? Of course, over the years, some people found this valley so attractive that they decided to move in even though other people were already inhabiting it. The Romans pushed out the Phoenicians. The Visigoths pushed out the Romans. The Moors pushed out the Visigoths. The Christians pushed out the Moors. Except, of course, for the mixing of all these tribes along the way.

I sometimes wonder if the older residents of Béznar don’t feel that way about me.  And I’m not the only foreigner in town.  We have residents from England, Denmark, Belgium, and Canada.  In a village of only three hundred, a dozen or so outsiders might seem like an invasion.  So far, however, the natives have not shown any signs of restlessness.  Perhaps they see that we pose no threat, that we have conformed. Well, everybody except the Belgian.

About two weeks ago, the dump trucks started rolling up and down the calle San Antón.  That’s my street. Empty, they came down the street, proceeded across the little bridge (not the Roman one, but also one of ancient vintage), headed back up over the adjacent ridge, and disappeared down the narrowing lane to the next ravine.  When the trucks returned, they were full of dirt.  One after another for over a week.  No one seems to know where all that dirt is going.

What on earth was going on?  There’s nothing in that neighborhood but agricultural land.  Over there, our street, already a single lane in most places, narrows to a precipitous dirt lane at its dead end. There, another small creek flows but only seasonally. No one ever even bothered to build a bridge over it.

When I finally walked over to investigate, I observed huge portions of the hillside carved out by a backhoe.  I took some pictures.  You can see them below.

The next day I ran into the local gendarme, Francisco, on the Calle Real, our main street.

“Can you tell me what’s going on over there?” I asked as I pointed to the south.

“A hotel,” was all he replied.

I was astonished and tried to get more information out of Francisco, but he was utterly uncooperative.  He ignored me. 

“You’re joking, of course,” I tossed at him as I walked away.

But Francisco was serious.  He usually is. 

The man building the hotel is from Belgium.  They call him la Perla—the Pearl. I have seen the Pearl once or twice.  The last time was last week on my street when my car came nose to nose with his SUV. There was not enough room for us to pass by each other, so I motioned for him to back up about fifteen feet so I could pull into a wide spot.  He looked very disgruntled and motioned for me to back up instead.  If I had backed up, I would have had to go about two hundred feet.  His request was ridiculous.  After a stalemate of a minute or more, the Belgian relented and put his SUV in reverse.  It took him all of seven seconds. I got out of his way just as quickly.  He stared straight ahead as he drove past, another dump truck of dirt right on his tail.    

I did not know then who he was or where he was from.  I only learned about his origin and nickname a few days ago. Carmen and I were out for an evening stroll when we ran into Sergio, who lives next door to the ambitious and impertinent resort project. He identified the name and nationality of the developer and complained rather bitterly about the dust the project had deposited on his house. 

“If I had that kind of money,” Sergio decried, “I would spend it in any other endeavor except that one!”

“My sentiments exactly,” I responded. “Who in their right mind would build a hotel there? It’s fishy.”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” Sergio said. “But it makes no sense to me.”

“He has a nerve,” Carmen added. “His truckers demand that we keep all our cars off the street as if they owned it.  It’s not right. If they had asked us politely to move the cars, that would be one thing.  That would have been the right way. But they tell us we have to move them.  Who does the street belong to anyway?”

Sergio smiled and nodded. 

In over a million years of hominid habitation, there has never been a hotel in Béznar. To boot, now that Béznar is getting its first hotel, it is being built in the most absurd and inauspicious place in town.  I don’t know who will ever stay there, but I think they will be very disappointed…if they can even find their way to it.

As reluctant as I am, I may have to ask for a meeting with the mayor. In a million years, sometimes it looks like we haven’t learned a thing.

I readily admit, however, the world has a lot more dire concerns than one hotel development in a small village in southern Spain, a village that still cannot even boast a single stage treatment facility for its sewage.  But don’t you already know about those other problems? War, famine, pestilence, and, dare I say it, delusional politics? For you, in honor of the holidays, I send news of a silly hotel (under construction), news you can easily digest.

Feliz Navidad y Próspero Año Nuevo

UFA

Don Hergumino