Plank Road: Dolmens, the Pink Haze and the Ochavada

Tomorrow we move to Granada for a few days. Granada was the last Moorish territory to fall to the Christians, so that means it will finally be time for another one of my history diatribes, more on that tomorrow.

As we needed to get things together and packed up, we decided to have a fairly easy day. We drove to visit the Dolmens of Antequera Archaeological Site. The Dolmens are very large mounded burial cairns. These megalithic monuments were built in the Neolithic period ~ 6,500 years ago. The farmers living in the fertile Guadalhorce Valley built the tombs.

We have visited a lot of tombs on Orkney, the incredible group of islands off the north coast of Scotland. These tombs felt very familiar to us and as is the Spanish way, there is a large visitor’s centre which is staffed, there is multilingual literature, films and the whole place is set up like an archeological park. The tombs have lighting and gravel on the floor for the visitors. We preferred the do nothing, take a flashlight or else of the Orkney tombs, but these tombs get a lot of visitors so there is a need for a bit of infrastructure.

The tombs on Orkney had low passageways, where one had to crawl or at the very least stoop very low to pass through. The Antequera tombs are really large with high passageways and very high chambers.

There are two dolmens at the first site, the Viera Dolmen and the Menga Dolmen. The Viera Dolmen would have had 16 upright stones along each side and huge stone slabs for the roof. The entrance is via a long passageway into the tomb. The roof slabs were then covered with tumulus, or packed dirt and stones. This dolmen faces east as was the case with other Iberian megaliths.

The Menga Dolmen is a corridor tomb with giant upright stones placed in the centre and 12 upright stones making up the exterior walls. This dolmen faces northeast, which is odd for a tomb of this time period. The theory is that the tomb is aligned with La Pena, a nearby mountain that is shaped like a human face.

The El Romeral tomb is located 4 km from the other two. It has masonry walls and is topped with a large slab of stone. This tomb faces south, southwest, it is rare for tombs on the Iberian Peninsula to face west. It may be aligned with the highest elevation of the El Torcal mountains.

There was a short film demonstrating somebody’s theory of how the tombs were built, although the film states things were done in a particular manner, we really have no way of knowing how they were constructed. The film is an animation of the building process which is quite well done, but we are generally skeptical of the modern take on what the ancients did or why they did it.

After leaving the dolmen sites, we visited a lugana or lagoon which is loaded with birds. A lot of elusive flamingos sit on the lagoon for several months raising their young. We like birds and photograph birds when they happen by, but birding bores us out of our minds. We saw a pink haze out on the lagoon from one mirador, the birds are cagey and stay way out in the middle of the lagoon. Soon fed -up with this bird sighting thing, we had our lunch and then took off.

Our last stop for the day was the town of Archidona, which has a very nice plaza, called the Ochavada Square. Architecturally, it is a baroque square that was built between 1780 and 1786. As it was siesta time, the square was virtually empty with the exception of a few old Spanish men chattering away on one of the benches.

We are off to Granada tomorrow.

The Menga Dolmen