I know I am going to sound a little crazy, but hear me out: for all its fame, I believe that Marbella is insanely underrated. I don’t care much for its super touristy seafront, and I have nothing charitable to say about Puerto Banús, its harbour, its luxury shops, or its peculiar brand of holiday-makers, but I do love the old town of Marbella.
Perhaps because the first time I truly learnt about architecture was in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria with a brilliant professor who had decided that the best way to teach us about the Counter-Reformation was to get us out of the classroom and to actually show us how it shaped the city, or perhaps for an entirely different reason, I have a soft spot for early-modern Spanish towns. Especially in the early afternoon (relative to the Spanish definitions of both “early” and “afternoon”), when it is very warm and everybody else is busy keeping in the shadows to avoid the heat, silence falls all of a sudden. There is a stillness that is unique to those places, and I lowkey believe that if there is indeed a better place for us to go to when we shuffle off this mortal coil, then that’s exactly what it looks like.
Plaza de la Iglesia
Less famed than the Plaza de Los Naranjos, but at least as pretty in a more understated way, the Plaza de la Iglesia (“Church square”), with its manicured citrus and palm trees and its white façades is full of that early-modern charm I was just telling you about. It is a small secluded square, locked on one side by the white church walls, and on the other by the long wall of Torre Blanca on the corner of Calle Carmen. The wall in itself is a fascinating affair, a patchwork of materials and construction methods. If you spend enough time there, you will see Roman chapiters as well as ashlars1An ashlar is a finely cut stone that has been worked until squared and is one of the most ancient forms of refined masonry, already found in Mycenaean architecture. from the Caliphate period2Al-Andalus, 711-1492. embedded together.
In the streets
I don’t know about you, but I like good tilework. There is something awe-inducing in the dual nature of glazed ceramic which oscillates between simplicity and complexity; it requires a high level of skill, and it is one of the most ancient crafts. It tells us about our history, in a long line that starts with antique mosaics and culminates, I’d argue, with Iberian azulejos. Each of those small squares, which are barely larger than the palm of your hand, so smooth, so perfect, carries with it the entire history of the Peninsula. There is pleasure in seeing a motif repeated seemingly ad infinitum, each unique but all the same. It feels like a whole philosophy turned into ornaments. And if you know where to look, Marbella abounds in those small parentheses of unadulterated joy.
As for the rest, the narrow streets, which the inhabitants decorate and maintain with taste and consistency, are filled with luxurious pockets of greenery jumping from pots, climbing on walls, and spilling from windows. In the late summer, while the oranges and lemons ripen lazily on their trees, the town is invaded by the strong smell of flowers of all sorts; nature, it seems, is reclaiming the place, inch by inch, without noise, so that the humans that live there will only notice it when it is too late. It is beautiful, like the early signs of an inescapable floral revolution — bougainvillaea, jasmine, trumpet vine, honeysuckle, creeping from every interstice, coming simultaneously from above and beyond, everywhere, magnificent and exuberant, curated and wild.
Plaza de Los naranjos
That controlled explosion of vegetation culminates at the very heart of the Old Town, on the Plaza de Los Najanros (“the square of the orange trees”), where large angel’s trumpets, luxurious palm trees, birds of paradise, and citrus trees shelter café terraces. Of course, it is all very touristy, and the atmosphere is that of a performance of what an old town should feel like, but just like you do when you attend a good play, you gladly suspend your disbelief and soon accept that this is the reality of Andalucía. Life is good under the orange parasols.
It is easy to forget that on this very square stood Fascist troops not even a hundred years ago; that the town was a haven for Nazi scum like Léon Degrelle3Belgian Nazi collaborator, later neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier; he was stripped of his Belgian nationality and sentenced to death in 1944, which prompted him to take refuge in Spain. He died in Málaga in 1994, unbothered, at the ripe old age of 87. and Wolfgang Jugler4Head of Hitler’s personal guard, he was granted protection by Franco at the end of WWI. He too died at almost 90 in 2011., that without Falangists like José Banús, it would not have developed into the Spanish Malibu that it is nowadays, that underneath the peace and quaint beauty, there is a lot of ugliness, and many wounds that remain open — such is the human tragedy.
Down the narrow streets, down the stairs, down, down, down, all the way to the seafront, escorts in towering heels are putting their business cards under the windshield wipers of luxurious cars parked in a row next to frankly gaudy yachts. The complicated, dangerous games that unfold at night are about to start on the patios of nightclubs where repetitive music is already blasting. “You Russian? Come to my club!”, a young lad half-shouts with a smile as he hands me a coupon for a free cocktail. A Bentley is blocking the street while its owner is downing a bottle of overpriced mid-range vodka with his friends on a nearby terrace; I have a feeling that the absurd car will stay there for a while. Marbella by night, by the sea, with its clubs and its hookah bars, is set in a different dimension from daytime Marbella, up there around the old wall, with its orange trees and its tame cafés. I know which one I like best. I feel old, all of a sudden, like those small streets where bougainvillaea is grown to hide the cracks in the walls.
All texts and pictures ©Ms. Unexpected.
- 1An ashlar is a finely cut stone that has been worked until squared and is one of the most ancient forms of refined masonry, already found in Mycenaean architecture.
- 2Al-Andalus, 711-1492.
- 3Belgian Nazi collaborator, later neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier; he was stripped of his Belgian nationality and sentenced to death in 1944, which prompted him to take refuge in Spain. He died in Málaga in 1994, unbothered, at the ripe old age of 87.
- 4Head of Hitler’s personal guard, he was granted protection by Franco at the end of WWI. He too died at almost 90 in 2011.