Excursion to Torcal and Antekera

The nature of El Torcal Reserve is very unusual. Because of the strong erosion, the karst rocks of Torkal have taken such bizarre forms that fantasy itself awakens in us and we are taken to invent names for these creations of Nature. That stone looks like a woman's chiselled head, proudly thrown back, and that stone looks like cookie mugs stacked on top of each other. Everyone joins in this game and ... now we all hold on to our stomachs and can no longer laugh - no strength! And here is something curious met right under the feet – an imprint in the rock, which was left by a mollusk of ammonite of huge size that lived hundreds of millions of years ago. Here is a natural history that took place in school, you can see firsthand. So it seems that you will pass a little more and find fossils of ancient lizards and dinosaurs. Well! And it happens here! Scientists around the world know this area not as a tourist route, but as a place where you can make many interesting discoveries about the flora and fauna of bygone eras.

And yet, near Antequera, megalithic constructions of our distant ancestors from the Bronze Age - dolmens were found. These are very mysterious structures, about which no more is known than the Egyptian pyramids.

Unfortunately, to date, scientists have not come to a unanimous opinion by whom, why and when these dolmens were built. The most common opinion of archaeologists is that the dolmen is a burial mound, but some scientists have expressed the opinion that the dolmen is an acoustic construction, in addition, there are opinions that the dolmens were altars or altars, astronomical structures, housing for animals or dwarfs, magical portals, ultrasonic emitters. To understand the question of what a dolmen is, it is worth visiting them. And we'll look at two, the Menga dolmen and the Viera dolmen. The first one is 5790 years old. The second is 4,500 years old. They are older than most Egyptian pyramids. (On July 15, 2016, it was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.) So you will come to see one of the oldest cities on Earth!

The city of Antequera is also interesting in its own way: there are majestic churches of the 16th century, and a castle, and snow-white houses of traditional Spanish buildings, crowded on the slopes of the mountains. (Actually, all the towns of Andalusia are located on the slopes of the mountains, the plains are rare.) The name of the town comes from the Roman settlement of Anticaria, which arose here in the time of the Caesars. But excavations show that people inhabited the area long before the Romans.

The inhabitants of Antequera saw many things: the battle of King Hasdrubal with the Roman legions, the invasion of Germanic tribes and, finally, the conquest by the Arabs under the leadership of Abd al-Aziz ibn Musa. The Arabs called this city Medina Antakira.

The dawn of Antequera, as a city, fell on the 16th-19th century. Palaces and churches were built, houses and chapels, as well as wool factories. Antequera lies at the crossroads of trade routes between Seville and Granada, as well as between Malaga and Córdoba. This city could have been the capital of Andalusia, but it didn’t work out.

Guide services. Transfer Malaga - Torkal - Antequera - Malaga