Mojácar goes back a long long way.  Earliest traces of a settlement there are from the Bronze Age, around 2000 BC.  The first colonists were Phoenician traders. They were supplanted, first by the Greeks and then by the Carthaginians, who arrived about 1100 BC. The geography of the whole area was significantly different then.  The surrounding land was lower, the Mojácar, Gurrucha, Vera plain was part of the Mediterranean and the main port for the area was at the base of Old Mojácar.  The Carthaginians later developed it into an island fortress and it became the main western port for the silver and mineral mines in the area - and between them, Old and New Mojácar where to change the course of world history three times.

The first was to kick start the Bronze Age, an essential way station on man's long pilgrimage to the present post modern day (whatever that means) – and it could all easily have been down to lucky geography.  Situated almost exactly midway on the early trade routes between the tin mines in Cornwall and the copper mines of Cyprus, there is much provenance to the claim that the first actual smelting of a bronze alloy took place in the Mojácar area.  A profusion of ancient cave drawings of Indalo man's is thought by many historians of the period to represent bronze age blacksmiths working the new alloy that was shortly so completely to transform their world.

The second epoch making event in world history occurred during this Second Punic War between Rome and Carthage. The Romans under Scipio Africanus  turned the Carthaginians (then commanded by Hannibal’s impetuous but less effective brother, Hasdrubal) out of their main fortress and regional capital, Cartagena, and then, in a series of bloody engagements, forced them west of a line running between the present day Mojácar and Vera.  Much more significantly, Carthage lost control of the rich silver mines around Villaricos.

The loss of the mines had critical long term consequences for the future of the Carthaginian Empire (and world history) as the loss of these minerals eventually rendered Hannibal’s spectacularly successful campaign in Italy ultimately untenable.  His successful transit of the Alps (with the famous elephants) to take Rome in its very heartlands - and the spectacular series of victories that followed in mainland Italy not withstanding, he eventually ran out of money to pay his largely mercenary army – or to acquire  the heavy siege equipment needed to breach the walls of the fortified Roman cities - and such was the invulnerable confidence of the Romans that a piece of land outside the city walls of Rome itself, made its asking price in an auction - despite the Carthaginian army being encamped on it at the time.

But for a time Hannibal's impact on Rome seemed cataclysmic, especially so after the battle of Cannae, with the simultaneous destruction of two Roman armies, amounting to 86,000 dead, a slaughter not equalled until the atom bomb at Hiroshima 2000 years later.  But they were ultimately to be paper victories.  The Romans held their nerve and with the loss of the income from the mines in Spain, Hannibal's mercenary soldiers went unpaid.  However you view the working of history, had the Carthaginians held onto the mines at Villaricos, world history could easily have been very different.

The latest world shaking event happened seventeen hundred years later and ten years after the reconquest of Spain by the Catholic Kings, Ferdinand and Isabella.  The Kingdom of Granada, which included Mojácar, was the last to be freed in 1499. The Moors, dispossessed and now back in North Africa, organised a secret revolt amongst their own people in Mojácar and still in the majority - planned to coincide with the landing of a Moorish army from Oran in North Africa. 

The plan depended on the gates of the city (Mojácar was a city in these days) being opened to this invading Moorish army.  It wa planned that Mojácar would then become an important base for the further reconquest of all of Spain.  This uprising, now known as the first Moorish Revolt. was to be directed against and then centred on the upper Alpujarras.  Mojácar was strategically critical to its success.  But Mojácar, although still controlled by a Moorish Alcaldia (mayor) had sworn loyalty to the Catholic Kings ten years before in a historic ceremony at the village Fuente (fountain).  True to his word, he refused to join the insurrection and the attempt to recover Spain for Allah failed. 

Another facet of Mojácar at the time was that from the time of the completion of the Christian Reconquest in 1492 until the final expulsion of the Jews (a long process that began a year later and roughly coincided with the later gradual exodus of the Moors) Mojácar was famous for the harmony in which the three religions coexisted and indeed intermingled and married.  It was even at the time spoken of as a model for the rest of Spain - until politics at a higher level made this impossible...

Visitors to this part of Andalucia often wonder at the traces of a huge and long  departed population.  Dense parallel terraces crowd the south side of almost every mountain, some reaching almost to the top. An awful lot of people , must have lived there at one time.  Where did they all go? The answer is truly a warning from history.  They became the victims of other peoples  success - and of their greed.  With Columbus's discovery of the New World (maybe the biggest event for Europe since Charlemagne turned back the Saracens almost eight hundred years before) there began a mad race to colonise the Americans. 

Ships were needed, more and more ships, and that meant trees.  When all the surplus lowland trees had been felled, the ship builders turned their attention to the woods that capped every terraced mountain. But these trees were much more significant than those further down.  They were there to catch the rainfall and then to regulate the slow year round filtering down of the rain water to the terraces below. Without these trees there would be no irrigation and no crops - no food! 

So they were very careful.  Only a few trees were cut down to begin with - and it didn't seem to affect the irrigation cycles.  So more were removed and still all seemed okay.  And so on they continued, carefully, incrementally, cutting trees down, until one day, quite suddenly, the irrigation channels began to dry up.  They stopped cutting the trees, of course, immediately - but it was too late.  A silent hidden tipping point had been passed and the terraces continued to dry. And as in all such disasters, a chain reaction then set in, compounding and accelerating the deadly drying process - and each unforeseen event promoted the next - until famine inevitably arrived.

And for the people of eastern Andalucia, of course the geography was against them as well.  Western Andalucia and Seville still had the  monopoly of the huge and growing trade with the Indies and North and South America.  Castile, as always, had its rich wool trade with the Low Countries - while Catalonia, looking eastwards into the Mediterranean, was unaffected. But all this area of eastern Andalucia had, was a hostile Moslem coast directly opposite - and a sea rendered almost impassable by  Barbary pirates…so no help there - or from anywhere else for the next 500 years.

Could these chain of events be a warning from History - and applicable to our times and to the whole planet this time...?  Time will tell! 

And more recently a poignant note from the Civil War and its aftermath. Building work on the top floor revealed a secret room. Only a couple of metres square and tiled in a fashion that looked very thirties, it was likely a hiding place for some poor soul from the loosing republican side in the Civil War and relentlessly pursued by Franco, to quote, '...a murderous little Christian gentleman..' and his fascist followers. How many years/decades did some poor soul exist in that damp windowless back room? Another reminder of the Thirties, that, ‘...low dishonest decade...’