Spanish Shilling

 I was a handsome young fellow in those days, un señorito if I say so myself. I was living in Mojácar in a society of older and generally rather drunken Europeans and a sprinkling of Spaniards who treated us, in those days, with a mixture of gratitude and respect, as we learned a few words of Spanish, built unimaginably large houses and drove astonishing cars (usually with the steering wheel in a novel place on the dashboard) and sometimes bought them a drink in the bar in the village square - the Hotel Indalo run by Antonio. Toma una copa conmigo, my dad would say.

Some of those cars would fall off the cliff as we drove home, sometimes with tragic results, but we were left alone by the police - we were bringing wealth to the village and it was sorely needed. Jacinto, the old mayor, his job awarded to him by the provincial governor, was careful to see that we were happy and that no one watered down the gin.

They were idylic times.

Franco, we said, if the subject came up, he's a good old thing - keeps the place safe. And it was true enough. The Guardia Civil were feared and when it came to it they were, let's say, suitably 'trigger happy'. Things were quiet enough in our small, forgotten, ignored and peaceful corner of a province that, during the Civil War, had been fiercely supportive of the Republicans. Every village had its stories of murder and executions: it had been a terrible time, now carefully put to the side and forgotten.

The Swedes up in Jávea went rather further than we did, organising one day a big (and approved) rally in the bull-ring, with home-made banners reading 'Arriba España' and 'Up Franco' (they meant well). But we were quiet enough - never talk about politics or religion was our motto. Antonio, un brandy por favor.

Then came word that the Old Boy was failing. He was put on life support in the Ruber Clinic in Madrid and lay in and out of a coma for several weeks as the world anxiously sucked its teeth and wondered what would happen next. The once and future king Juan Carlos was waiting with the rest of us.

Saturday Night Live in New York famously began its regular news-segment with the story that 'The Caudillo of Spain, Francisco Franco, is still dead'.

It's said that the crowds oputside the clinic would enthusiasticaly shout 'Adiós, adiós' and that the stricken dictator would ask a fawning courtier, 'what are they saying?' 'Goodbye, goodbye', said the lackey. 'Why, where are they all going?'

And then, finally, he went. On November 20th 1975, the Generalísimo breathed his last and Spain went into heavy mourning. Everything was closed down and quiet.

The small group of emigrés that lived in and around Mojácar naturally felt sorry for their kind hosts and thought that the best thing to do would be to show up at the iglesia for the mass to celebrate the soul of the murderous old sod. We trooped in to the church, dressed in shirts and ties (those of us who owned such things) and were faintly surprised to see that, apart from a couple of old girls dressed in that kind of black you don't normally see these days, and a startled-looking priest, there was nobody at all. The cura gamely got on with his pater nosters and we stood or sat, as required, while trying to look as sorrowful as we could. What will they do without the old swine? we wondered.

At last the service creaked to an end. We passed through the door of the church into the somber evening outside, where a large and evidently indignant group of Mojaquero males were waiting for us. A threanening pause. Then Alcalde Jacinto suddenly broke the hostile silence with exactly the best thing to say:

'Antonio, go and open up the bar, the extranjeros are thirsty'. With a groan of relief, we all scampered off around the corner to the Hotel Indalo for a welcome libation.
...
I found the newspaper featured at the top of this story while cleaning out a box of junk this morning.

Archaeologists have begun work on a new dig to discover precisely what lies under the town of Disneyville in southern Spain.

It is known that the settlement under the garish collection of today's souvenir stands and disco-pubs was once called Mojácar, but there is little left to guide the investigators into an idea of life in the town in the Twentieth Century.

Beginning at the foot of the hill, volunteers from the Granada School of Archaeology have been working diligently with spades, brushes and blue plastic buckets to unearth the secrets of the town that once existed here.

They now know that the 'Moorish Fountain' was built over the remains of the earlier 'Public Fountain', with a bounty of white marble in what was known at the time as the 'Bathroom China' style of reconversion. The fountain's earlier purpose of washing clothes, refreshing the livestock and providing drinking water (this in the halcyon times before the nuclear desalination plant) was largely sublimated in favour of a photographic concept, designed to seduce the weary visitors, with the erection of a peculiar and most ill-thought municipal art gallery and some other attractions of dubious historical value nearby. By the turn of the century, the area had become the centre of Mojaquero culture, with seven bars and a number of jolly festivals, usually including the ancient sport of delivering something pointy to a gaily coloured and beribboned hole from horseback (an early version of wham, bam and thank you Ma'am).

We drive up the hill on the Avenida Encamp (named after a town in Andorra famous for its foreign bank accounts) and past the venerable Hotel Moresco, which is one of the rare buildings that has survived the many changes to the settlement over the centuries. Originally built by the Phoenicians, the hotel has remained closed to the public now for over 65 years, glaring remorselessly at the passers-by from its location on the bluff. The owners are said to owe more money in taxes than the value of the building, while having remarkable connections in Madrid. So, an impasse.

Visitors would find it hard to imagine that, at one time, Disneyville was once thought to be an attractive residential village, with a small number of amusing bars, an elegant theatre, an open-air cinema, several romantic arches (including the Arco de Luciana), a single town hall building and sundry other wonders now lost. The surrounds of the old castle that crowns the hill was heavily reconverted in the late 20th Century, with the discovery of an ancient burial ground bulldozed quickly over, and is now the home to a worldwide association of graffiti artists. Another area used as an ancient cemetery was the Plaza de Parterre, rebuilt in an amazing mixture of styles, including Roman, Moorish and Neo-vulgarian. Above, archaeologists have located a strange plaza with what appears to be a tiny underground garage (evidently accessible only to those with impeccable connections who may have been allowed to drive through the pedestrian streets of the village before the introduction of personal fliers and other modern forms of transportation).

But, after all is done, the characterless buildings excavated to find the cultura popular underneath, we must move to the Plaza Nueva, so called, despite being erected in the early 16th Century. At the time, settlers, given land in nearby Turre by Royal Decree, could not stay overnight in that region, thanks to the irate mozarabes who dwelt in the hills above, so they would live in and around the main square of Moxacra - as the town was called by the departed Moors.

A few centuries later, now with a road of access built in the mid 1950s (the Generalísimo, later Avenida Horizon and now Av Encamp), the square became the main point of the village. A small hotel called the Hotel Indalo dominated the plaza (archaeologists have found traces of it under the remains of at least fifteen different nick nack shops) and diagonally across the square, the largest of all the emporia stands, three stories of tat. Previously, a modest carpentry evidently occupied the same space,  connected with attractive arches to the narrow street to the left and the wider pedestrian avenue towards the church on the right.

But, it's the viewpoint we focus our attention on: This was a three-storey car-park built by a mayor in the early eighties, with vertiginous ramps for the vehicles. The building was in one way a failure, but it was later used for some small purposes underneath, and a mayor purpose above, where its large marble roof became a perfect place for a number of competing cafeterias to fill with their brightly-coloured tables and dustbins. The viewpoint was an immediate success (substituting, as it did, the previous exactly-the-same view).

In 2016, the construction was demolished and another viewpoint was created to crown a fresh - albeit never completed town hall (paperwork and jobs, then as now, was a lively consideration of the local inhabitants). The view is marred somewhat by an earlier wave of archeologists, who disembowled the famous 'piramid mountain' in front, known in previous times as Mojácar la Vieja, which was later found to be empty.

The narrow streets of the earlier town were, generally speaking, preserved (except near the church, now a souvenir shop selling Chinese-made material, including small busts of one Walter B Disney, said to have been born here in the late 1890s). Some streets had been introduced, as it were 'from scratch', in the 1950s and evidence of earlier lanes, running in different directions, give an early example to the sometimes ingenious local planning. The earlier 'popular architecture' was replaced in the second half of the 20th Century by uninspired 'off the shelf' designs with untypical large windows, later used inevitably as shop-fronts.

One narrow alley gives evidence to a brief presence of a large number of pre-Brexit British settlers in Disneyville: a street which for around thirty years was called Calle Pedro Barato, named after an ex-pat scallywag who was known as 'Cheap Pete' by a grateful if poorly-informed mayor. The name of the street was quietly changed  in the early years of the current century to Calle Cal.

Disneyville hides many interesting anecdotes under the streets and rubble and is well worth a visit.