Getting Out of the Fast Lane

For the first time since last Sunday we woke up as late as we wanted and we moved slowly.  Had breakfast at home, left the house at about 11.  Headed to Motril, about a half an hour to the east. Parked successfully (having a car can be a mixed blessing, for sure) in an underground garage and looked for the tourist information office.  It was not quite obvious enough for us so I went into a farmacia and used my pidgin Spanish and got directions.  Not much English spoken in this town, especially not by the people in the shops.

Views from our balcony, toward to sea ...

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... and toward the mountains

We headed for the only museum of this type in all of Europe -- a museum of pre-industrial sugar cane production.  Motril was the capital of sugar cane in the 15th and 16th centuries.  The Moors figured out about 500 years before that it would grow here, and somehow it arrived from New Guinea via India and Persia.  The warm weather and abundant water here is perfect for it.  Sugar cane pushed out all the other normal food crops and took over the economy of the area, but it was mostly exported or eaten by the very rich. It was a huge amount of work making sugar:  cutting it by hand with a machete, stripping the leaves, loading it onto donkeys, taking it to the mill, putting it through giant rollers powered by water, then resquishing all the smashed cane again by using a huge press (a lever with a fulcrum near one end; a man at the far end of a beam twisted a giant screw, lifting his end and exerting downward pressure at the other end about 40' away...the smashed cane was stacked just like the cider press at home, with layers sandwiched between, and they squished every last drop out), then boiling it over a hot fire, making a syrup, taking out the impurities, getting it hot enough to crystallize, then packing it into these ceramic jars to make a sugar loaf. Every single ceramic jar had to be broken to get the sugar loaf out, so someone had to make hundreds and hundreds of those cone shaped pots with a hole in the bottom (so the molasses could drip out). It was hard to understand the quantities, but they said this particular sugar mill made 822 tons of sugar (a year?).

There were many downsides to this enterprise, both ecological and societal.  It used up all the wood in the whole region eventually.  The sugar was taxed so heavily that the people who were making it really didn't benefit from the money that was flowing.  Eventually the New World became too competitive with its slave labor and vast capacity for production, plus someone else discovered sugar beets which was a whole lot easier than sugar cane.  The industry died out, was reinvigorated when steam power was invented, but ten years ago the very last sugar mill closed.

Motril is another port town, full of regular people doing regular shopping and work.  We did not find a quaint city center but there were certainly narrow streets lined with classic looking residential buildings, and fountains and squares, just nothing that looked ancient or precious. At about 2:00 the whole place closed.  We walked around trying to figure out how to find a wifi connection (the one at the library was too weak) and eventually found an open network when we were sitting in a plaza.  Jon discovered there had been no major crises at work. Then we had some lunch at an outdoor cafe even though it was getting cold and grey out.  I can order food as long as I don't have to construct a whole, coherent sentence.  

It turns out all those acres of plastic greenhouse structures are filled with a variety of vegetables and fruits.  Apparently about 20-some years ago this whole region started growing produce under cover during the winter months. It is too hot in the summer. The guidebook moans that this is unaesthetic and has lots of issues, but I would say that if they are producing most of the fresh fruits and vegetables in the winter for Northern Europe, more power to them.  They must have figured out that this works best, although it must create a different kind of problem-solving.  They work on some intensely steep slopes in this region.  I don't think there are many farms in the US that would attempt that.

Instead of going straight home we went up a long and winding mountain road to see the town of Competa, famous for its Muscatel wine and probably other things. By the time we got up there I didn't even want to get out of the car. It was getting dark and looked like rain and it was about 15 miles back down the same switchbacks all the way to the coast.  It was certainly picturesque, tucked up in the mountains -- the guidebook said that about half the residents are expats from Northern Europe.  

A "white" town: like little boxes rolled down the hillside until they stop, one on top of another.

Back at home, I finished reading Hotels of North America and Jon took a nap and read a Nero Wolfe book on his phone.  He says what we have been missing is all the Trump news.  Ah well.