Antequera by Public Transit

I woke up at six o’clock in the morning with a burning desire to test the public transport network in the greater Málaga area. My mum’s house lies around forty minutes by foot from the centre of Sayalonga, and I read that there are four regular departures for Málaga on weekdays. The bus stop was not particularly easy to find. It is marked accurately on Google Maps, but there are no evident markers or noticeboards nearby. I only became sure that I was in the right place when a fellow passenger came to stand beside me. To my great surprise, however, the bus arrived by this roadside stop in a Spanish village on time, and it reached Málaga just a few minutes behind schedule.

According to the website of Renfe, Spain’s national railway, there was supposed to be one train from Málaga to Antequera at 9:17 and another at around half past. I thought I might make the earlier train, but I lost my way at the train station trying to find the ticket office, and once I found it, I had to wait in a queue to buy a ticket. Somehow, there was another service at 9:25 which was not displayed on the website, and the ticket only cost me around eight euros (the price of the service at half past nine was, at least according to the website, over thirty).

I arrived in Antequera around ten o’clock and set off immediately for the hilltop hermitage of Veracruz. The winter sun rises quite late in Spain, as the country follows Central European Time despite being on roughly the same lines of longitude as Great Britain. This meant that the light was still quite sharp by the time I climbed up to the hermitage, and much of the surrounding countryside was still in the shadows of the mountains. There was not much to see inside the hermitage itself beside a few empty rooms and broken decorations, so I climbed back down again and made my way to Antequera’s most famous attractions.

Antequera is best known for its dolmens, which were – along with several other sites – recently declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The two dolmens (the Dolmen de Viera and Dolmen de Menga) lie within easy walking distance of the city centre. I was surprised that I did not have to buy any tickets in advance, as I thought the site similar to Ireland’s Brú na Bóinne complex, which is immensely popular. In fact, I did not have to buy any tickets at all: I was only handed a free ticket at the museum, which I then showed to the employees in front of the first dolmen.

Reaching the third site proved more difficult but not too taxing. In front of the dolmen complex, I found a signboard with bus departures, which indicated that a bus would be leaving from in front of a nearby school in a few minutes. Again, the exact spot was not marked, but the general area was relatively obvious, and my guess proved close enough. Upon boarding, the driver jovially but firmly cautioned me that I would have to quickly gulp down my apple, as food is generally not allowed on municipal transport in Spain. With my mouth full of fruit, I bought the one-euro ticket to the final stop at the hospital on the eastern end of the city.

After reaching the hospital, I followed the Google Maps instructions to reach the Tholos of El Romeral. These had me walk along the road for some twenty minutes, which was not very comfortable and entirely avoidable: on my journey back, I crossed the train tracks into the sugar factory complex and walked straight back to the hospital without making an unnecessary loop. The bus back, I read on the signboard, departed every half an hour, so I did not feel overly pressed for time before continuing to Plaza Santiago and the rest of the medieval city.

The Tholos of El Romeral is very different from the dolmens. The Dolmen of Viera consists of a long corridor that leads to a rectangular chamber and the Dolmen of Menga is a long barrow structure supported in the middle with pillar-like megaliths. The Tholos of El Romeral also begins with a corridor, but this corridor leads to chambers with corbelled walls. Instead of being proper domes, their arching walls are capped with large stone slabs, similarly to the structure at Newgrange but with finer stones resembling brickwork.

From Plaza de Santiago, I walked to the Convento de Belén and the Puerta de Granada, after which I began to ascend to the imposing Moorish fortress. On the way there, I passed by the Iglesia del Carmen, which had just closed for an extensive lunchbreak, and the Real Colegiata de Santa María la Mayor, a decommissioned church that at the time of my visit housed, for reasons unknown to me, an entire exhibition on Disney characters. I only spent a few minutes there before buying my tickets and walking around the Alcazaba (the Moorish fortress).

The last point on my itinerary was to find a nice view of the Alcazaba with the faraway Peña de los Enamorados (the Lovers’ Rock) looming above it. Looking at my map, I thought I might have to go as far as the Pinar del Hacho, but there turned out to be a pathway just above the camping van parking lot that had optimal views. After taking my pictures, I walked all the way to the northern end again to catch a train back, but I found out there would be no direct train for another two or three hours. Instead of waiting around, I hurried back to find the bus, which was just about to depart and which, in about an hour and ten minutes, carried me all the way to Málaga again.