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Torre
Atalaya, north of Vélez Málaga
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The long
vigil
Tony Allen relates
the history of Spain's watchtowers
Among
the most romantic sights in Spain’s majestic landscape are the
watchtowers strung along the coast like a necklace of rough-hewn gems.
Coming upon one silhouetted against an impossibly blue sky on a
distant headland, or perhaps framed by dark swirling storm clouds,
always conjures dramatic images of Spain’s turbulent past, and of
corsair galleys swooping on the terrified inhabitants of a coastal
village.
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Most of the towers we see
today were built in the 15th and 16th centuries to warn of attacks by the
Barbary pirates, but some are far older and a few stand on foundations
first laid by the Romans.
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We tend to think of Mediterranean
piracy in terms of Moslem pirates preying on Christian targets but
pirates were around long before Mohammed. Throughout the declining
years of the Roman empire, the Barbarian invasions, the expansion of
Islam and the wars of the Middle Ages, pirates found rich pickings on
the fringes of naval power struggles in the Mediterranean.
And at some periods pirates were as
likely to be Christian as Moslem, with both attacking their
co-religionists as readily as those of other faiths. In fact a number
of the towers which survive in Andalucia today were first built by the
Moorish rulers of Spain to guard against both Moslem and Christian
pirates - for example, the Torre de la Zambra north of Málaga was
probably built during the XIIIth century reign of Mohammed III.
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Looking west from Torre de Maro -
four other towers can be seen |
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Ramparts of Almuñecar's Castillo de San Miguel |
Mediterranean piracy
reached unprecedented levels after the reconquest; whole Moorish
communities fled to North Africa, and many threw in their lot with the
corsairs. Sale, near Rabat, was colonised by this exodus, and became a
major corsair base, growing wealthy on the fruits of piracy.
To counter this threat,
the victorious monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella set about improving the
coastal defences around the whole of the southern and eastern coast.
The Moorish garrison in the Gibralfaro at Málaga had surrendered after
a long siege in May 1487, and the Castillo in Vélez Málaga yielded
peacefully later in the same year. Both were well fortified and in
good repair, but the Castillo de San Miguel in Almuñecar which fell
after several weeks fierce fighting in 1489 was severely damaged. It
was extensively rebuilt, and modernised to reflect the growing power
of artillery. |
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Strong garrisons of
regular troops were established in all three towns immediately after
the reconquest and in other large centres of population along the
coast. Consisting of infantry equipped with arquebuses, cross bows and
pikes, as well as artillery and sometimes cavalry, these garrisons
were generally well able to defeat attacks in their immediately
surrounding areas. The force in Almuñecar, for example, destroyed a
pirate force which mounted a major attack on the town in the 1520s,
and was rewarded by Carlos V with a gory coat of arms showing severed,
turbaned heads floating in a bloody sea around an abandoned galley.
But these garrisons could
do nothing to protect the smaller communities along the coast from
hit-and-run raids. The swift galleys of the corsairs could appear from
nowhere, strike at an undefended stretch of coast, disappear over the
horizon and re-appear hours or days later in another vulnerable spot
far faster than any land based force, even of cavalry, could react. |
Gibralfaro's ramparts and
sentry post |
The only protection for most
people was to run and hide - either within the walls of the nearest
garrison town or simply by taking to the hills until the coast was clear -
until "no hay moros en la costa" - an expression which still survives
today.
Timely warning was vital - a
few minutes delay meant slaughter or slavery - and Ferdinand and Isabella
created a surveillance system covering every mile of coast. For the role
of the towers was purely to watch and warn - they had no heavy weapons and
most were manned by only a single watchman.
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As the sketch shows they
were normally round with a solid base to offer good protection against
canon fire and had a single raised chamber, a store below, and an
observation and signal platform above. The single entrance port high
on the tower was accessible only by a ladder, and if an enemy was
sighted, the watchman would raise the alarm, pull up the ladder, and
wait - doubtless shivering with terror - praying that the pirates
would head off for an easier target.
The alert was given by
smoke signals by day or a flaming beacon by night, possibly augmented
by an audible warning - blowing on a conch shell or firing a gunshot,
with a simple code to signal the number of ships seen and their
direction. But quite complicated messages could also be composed and
transmitted with remarkable speed over long distances, both along the
coast and, via towers like the Torre de Atalaya north of Vélez Málaga,
inland as far as Granada and beyond.
Manning the towers was,
unsurprisingly, an unpopular job, and a fascinating Royal Ordinance of
1497 ordered how this should be done and paid for. For lesser towers
like the Torre de Ladrones west of Marbella and the Torre de Isdabe at
the mouth of the Rio Gudalmedina, the local community was made
responsible for providing a permanent watchman with a daily wage of 25
maravedies (just under one real). By contrast, towers at more critical
points had a stronger complement.
The village of
Torremolinos was required to provide three men for the Torre del
Pimentel, one of them to be on watch at all times while the others
remained on call in the tower itself or another nearby tower. Again
each man was to be given a daily wage of 25 maravedies. One hundred
and seventy years later, little had changed; the Torre del Diablo near
Almuñecar was still occupied by a corporal and two men. |
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But this alarm system could only be a last resort.
The dreadful threat of the
Barbary pirates would hang over the coast for more than two centuries
after the reconquest. Everywhere they landed they seized crops,
animals, treasure and, most terrible of all, slaves. Fishermen,
isolated travellers or lonely goatherds were taken as they went about
their business, sometimes whole villages were dragged off to the
galleys, many of the men to be chained to the oars until they died;
the wealthy, the skilled and the women to be sold in the slave markets
of North Africa. At one time in the 17th century, there were believed
to be over 30,000 Christian slaves in Algiers alone.
Periodically, European
rulers sought to root out the pirates by seizing their North African
bases or strengthening their own navies to sweep them from the seas.
But after a while the |
Today houses creep up on the
towers |
efforts would be relaxed and
the raids resumed. The villagers would once more wait fearfully for a
signal from the lonely watchman on a distant headland.
Throughout the 17th and early
18th centuries, the economy of Andalucia grew steadily poorer as coastal
villages were abandoned or moved inland to escape the raids. Nerja was one
village whose population dwindled to the level where new settlers were
brought in from the Basque Country, Valencia, Galicia and Málaga.
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The ruins of Nerja's Torrecilla |
At times when the pirate
threat began to ease the watchmen grew less vigilant and many of the
towers fell into disrepair, only to be refurbished a few years later
as attacks resumed. However, a final wave of rebuilding took place in
the late 18th Century to guard against a new enemy as Britain, France
and Spain fought the wars of the Spanish Succession and then the
Napoleonic Wars. The Royal Navy now posed a more pressing threat to
the coast than the corsairs.
This threat continued even
after Britain and Spain became allies in the fight against Napoleon -
the Royal Navy now harried French garrisons in southern Spain. In May,
1812, HMS Hyacinth attacked and destroyed two of the gun batteries
protecting Málaga harbour, where the pirate leader Boabdil, apparently
an ally of the French, was sheltering. She then sailed east to Nerja
to destroy the Torrecilla watchtower and the guns on what is now known
as the Balcón de |
| Europa.
In Nerja her Captain established contact with local Spanish guerrillas
and went on with two other ships to attack the Castillo at Almuñecar
causing such severe damage that the French garrison abandoned the
fortifications and fled.
In 1815 Europe was finally
at peace - but the Barbary pirates continued to plague the
Mediterranean until they were finally suppressed when France occupied
Algiers in 1830. The long, lonely vigil of the watchmen in their
towers was finally over, and the towers themselves passed into the
hands of the Caribineros and then the Guardia Civil, before most were
eventually abandoned.
Today, they stand
mostly silent and deserted, some crumbling, some hemmed around by
smart urbanisations, others on lonely headlands with a beauty that
belies their violent, tragic history. |
Torre de Maro stands on a
magical headland |
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