hunting

In late autumn, the sweltering Mediterranean air retreats as the Atlantic winds invade with their heavy clouds and blustery rains. This year, however, the two-week Christmas vacation happened to share its days with a rare phenomenon in Spanish winter: constant sunshine. We took advantaged of our reprieve from the dreary December and spent nearly every day of our holiday in the rocky green countryside just outside of town.

The dominant feature of this lovely landscape is the Castellar, a low ridge crowned with enormous vertical slabs of stone that appear to be bursting from the very soil. In past excursions to the top, Levi and I had discovered the ruins of rooms, walls, and foundations, and had learned upon asking around that a Moorish fortress had once watched over the town from those heights. But no one had much in the way of details; the Arab history of Zafra tends to be ignored or minimized in relation to the earlier days of Roman occupation or the later era of feudal Iberia, and no one I talked to seemed knowledgeable or even particularly interested in the crumbling ruin of the Castellar.

So I went hunting in the local bookshops and found a thin little publication by two local historian-archaeologists who had investigated the very limited remains of the fortress. With two weeks of sunny freedom at our disposal, I started exploring myself, climbing up to different sections of the ridge with the book in hand. Levi and I found the watchtowers, the entrance, and the curtain wall described in the book, all magnificent in their crumbling allusions former grandeur. But it turned out that these are comparatively new structures. The authors describe a pre-Moorish, even pre-Roman Castellar, where a scattering of small but sophisticated Stone, Iron, and Bronze Age settlements thrived.

My attention was immediately pulled to this more distant past, and we began searching, using the authors' descriptions as a map. We found stone houses, walls, fences, all under a foot high, all fractured, broken ruins, all the fruits of the labor of humble individuals and families who had no resources for or need of warlike fortifications. A stone-lined path connected them, and its little monoliths still stand, firmly planted in the accumulated dirt of centuries, forming a deteriorating but plainly discernible roadway.

The book then sent us to Belen, the hilltop chapel and community picnic area on one of the lower ridges of the sierra. The ruin we find is more complete than the ones on the higher, more sun-baked and wind-swept cliffs of the Castellar. We can make out two rooms and an oven or forge that the authors suspect was used for the melting of metal. But this place isn't isolated its rockier counterparts. It sits in the backyard of a manor house, a stately place that probably had its heyday a couple hundred years ago but has suffered roof collapses and the accumulation of beer cans and graffiti. Someone built a house right next to this ancient little place, perhaps on tops of parts of it, and then just left it alone. Soon after our arrival, the ruin was overrun by sheep and goats. We asked the shepherd, presuming he's familiar with the area, but he just shrugged, saying he knew nothing about either of the structures.

Some photos in the back of the book led us back to the highest peaks in search of cave paintings. I'd heard of these somewhere and had asked around, but had again been met with blank faces and shrugs. I was dying to find them, these little yellow suns and red handprints. There's no markers, of course, for any of these sites, no mention of them in any tourist brochure, no map to tell me on which of the thousands of rocks I might encounter these ancient works of art. So ultimately, my expeditions were fruitless. But one day, as I was scrambling around the dizzying heights of the top rocks, Levi called me down to show me a strange stone he had found. It's shaped a bit like a spade, thick in the center and gradually thinning to a point around its edge. It's curiously symmetrical and the edges appear unnaturally even. We took it home and started looking around online. We never found the paintings, but unless our research has led us very much astray, we now have an artifact of the same period. It appears to be a spearhead, carved by a hunter some 13,000 years before the Romans set foot on the Castellar.