There’s a road that begins at a small, gray plaza just beyond the boundaries of the old city wall. A gritty little watering hole called Bar Taxi sits at the northwest corner of this square; it’s the kind of place where you can expect to encounter drunken retirees by noon every day of the week. Just beyond the bar the road loses all marks of the urban as the pavement gives way to dust and dirt and the sidewalks narrow until the street is flush against the doorsteps. The row of dingy white stucco structures terminates in a house whose strange swaths of color add confusion rather than cheer to the dreary block. The place was gutted but the project went no further; the rusted padlock on the splintering front door hasn’t been touched in years.
A tangled mess of telephone wires droops near the house’s eaves, casting its angular shadows on the low, mossy stone wall of the neighboring pasture. Here on the ragged edges of urban life a distinct world reveals itself. Modernity once briefly took hold here, but the signs of its indifferent destruction lie everywhere. The twenty or so sheep grazing in the pasture munch grass from overgrown concrete patios and fallen metal fence posts. A porcelain bathtub propped against its only remaining foot and draped to its rim in weeds serves as a trough. The farmhouse itself, long abandoned for a cozier spot within Zafra’s limits, has lost most of its southern wall and an enterprising oak has taken notice, extending a spiny arm deep into the building. A vine later wrapped itself around that branch, climbed to the second story, burst out through a window, and forked in two. One prong now reaches back around through the gap in the wall and the other, having punched through the glass panes of the front door, creeps over countertops and around banisters.
Beyond the house lies a mile of similarly crumbling structures. Stone walls cut the hilly pastures into the odd geometric innovations land disputes will inspire. Rotting trash accumulates in clumps that stick on the protruding rocks of little streams.
A highway breaks up the countryside at the foot of the Castellar—it’s all uphill after this road. The bottom half of the mountain is organized into tidy little farms. Aging but well-preserved houses, barns, and pig compounds line the narrow dirt road that zigzags lazily from one end of the hill to the other, edging toward its peaks. The breeze smells of swine and wet earth. Rows of olive trees extend for acres, their boughs forming grayish green scribbles against the cliffs.
Around the halfway point the grass thins and the soil gives way to rocky sand and small boulders that have lodged themselves in place. A few intrepid farmers have given the place a go but eventually retreated to lower ground. The places they left behind are in absolute ruin and at first glance appear intriguingly ancient. Closer inspection invariably reveals modern drywall, nails and bricks; neglect in these harsh elements destroys a structure in a few short years. The results are eerie. One house near the summit, now little more than a vaguely quadrilateral pile of rocks, sits at an uncomfortable slant and seems to lean down the hill. It’s surrounded by the mangled remains of a barbed-wire fence whose makeshift scrapmetal posts have been entirely encompassed in rust. Impaled on one of these stakes is the filthy head of a plastic doll, presumably intended to scare off thieving birds. Its long, sun-whitened hair has fallen away in clumps. The bleached bones of a sheep or goat are strewn across the yard, scattered by vultures.
Higher up the grass disappears altogether and the hiker meet with the bases of the tall stone slabs of the Castellar. The only traces of the fortress are imbedded in the highest rocks, just a couple barely identifiable walls and one underground room now missing its roof. The wayward sheep who wander this far stand little chance, and their bones lie at every rocky level to the very crests. So hot is the sun and so numerous the vultures that the bones have been stripped of their meat and bleached perfectly white before the wool has had time to rot or blow away; it lies in sad, ragged piles on the rocks, bloodstained and muddy.
Zafra is a messy terra cotta cluster from here. The wind rushing in from Portugal silences the bells.
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