The Rise and Fall of the Arco de Somera

This blog post is dedicated to our lost heritage, great and small, wherever it may be.

Sometime towards the end of the fourteenth century and the beginning of the fifteenth, a stone archway was constructed across a narrow alleyway in the Andalucian town of Alfacar, and above it, a store room with a narrow balcony off to one side, a tall shuttered window, and a tiled roof to protect it from the elements. Nobody knows the names of those who constructed it, nor whether they went about their work cheerfully and stood back to look at the results with pride, or if they grudgingly hauled the stones and timbers into place while dreaming of a better life elsewhere.

 

Arco de Somera, Alfacar.

However it came into being, it endured. Over the years and the decades the plaster cracked and the timbers weathered. The searing heat of midsummer rippled in the alleyway, the fogs of Autumn made of the arch a forbidding dark maw, and winter snows muffled the sounds of doors and windows being closed tight to seal out the cold. Repairs were undertaken, fallen tiles replaced, owners came and went. And still it endured.

A multitude of voices were heard beneath its span and from the windows and gallery that overlooked the narrow street. Voices of infants bawling in their cots and mothers scolding their children, voices of merchants and tradesmen, voices speaking in Arabic, Hebrew, Castillian. Kisses were shared between lovers sheltering from the rain, whispered secrets never to be known beyond this narrow private place, harsh words of unforgiveness and a thousand other human dramas left their echo in the air and their imprint on the stone. Homecoming adventurers passed through the arch, made rich by plundered Aztec treasures from the Americas during Spain's magnificent Golden Century. The weary tread of soldiers returning from war in the Low Countries echoed in its confines. A hundred newly wedded couples made merry as they passed under the arch and into a new and unknown adventure of life, and a hundred sombre funeral corteges left behind them a hushed solemnity of doffed hats.

Into the 20th century and times of fear and dread came to the town. Civil War, neighbour set against neighbour in the madness of political strife. Night after night, gunshots reverberated through the alleyway from the nearby hills as the Nationalists executed their prisoners and threw the corpses into mass graves. There were years of repression, arrests, assassinations, and tears of pain and loss were shed in the gloom of the arch.

Then came modernisation. Electrical cables crisscrossed the alleyway, and the first television sets brought tantalising visions of other worlds to the town. Democracy came, and with it, new hopes and new challenges. At some point, the arch and its ancient storeroom were designated as worthy of preservation; a marker on a metal post was erected at the mouth of the narrow street. This was something precious, something that the authorities deemed worthy of protecting against the onslaught of the construction boom that was devouring the heart of old Alfacar.

But the centuries had not keen kind to the Arco de Somera. Mortared walls cannot endure forever without attention, timbers crack and sag then give way under the slip and slump of crumbling masonry. Yet nothing was done. It is true that in times of economic crisis, the protection of ancient buildings is not a priority when you have to put food on the table. Yet it seems that those same authorities that had once recognised the arch as noteworthy, were now turning their backs on its increasingly deeperate plight.

 

The Arco de Somera today.

And so to 2013. Finally, the storeroom that had survived the centuries was unable to hold up any longer against the persecution of age, nature and neglect and it began to collapse into the alleyway, a dangerous situation that put everybody passing below at risk of injury. Who knows if even then what remained could have been conserved by a rapid intervention. Whether the owners approached the relevant bodies and requested their help to preserve one of the last, iconic fragments of the town´s fascinating history, I do not know. Bot one day, the alleyway was closed to the public and the storeroom was pulled down. The rubble was carried away in a skip, to be dumped who knows where. Five hundred years of passion and joy and sorrow and life and death, thrown onto a rubbish heap and forgotten.

The bare skeleton of the archway survives, capped off with ugly grey cement. The marker remains too, but who now would go out of their way to visit these sad remnants that today speak eloquently of our disregard for the past? And lest I be accused of singling out Spain in this respect, this is a scenario that is repeated a thousand times every day across the world, where the little treasures of vernacular architecture are being lost because they are supposedly too expensive to maintain, while at the same time, multi-billion pound/euro/dollar excrescences of metal and concrete are being frenetically thrown up in a wild crusade to rid our towns and cities of character and atmosphere.

Rest in peace, Arco de Somera. You live on only in paintings and drawings and memories, and your loss should be a reminder that the loss of our historical, architectural and natural heritage diminishes us all.