Brian's Rick Steves' Tour of Spain Scrapbook
The gorge was especially menacing because of its history during the Spanish Civil War. When you stare out over the railing of the bridge your breath is taken by the sight of the great distance to the bottom. And then you wonder what it would be like to be thrown over the edge.
The bridge may be a little haunted. As far as that goes, perhaps all of Spain is a little haunted.
In Spain, the dead are more alive than the dead of any other country in the world.
Federico Garcia Lorca
After a time we made our way up to the new bridge (completed in 1793) that crosses the gorge from the new town developed after 1485 into the Moorish Quarter. Hemingway wrote about the site:
…On three sides of the plaza is the arcade and on the fourth side is the walk shaded by the trees beside the edge of the cliff with, far below, the river. It is three hundred feet down to the river. “…And they walked Don Faustino through the lines, holding him close on either side, holding him up as he walked, with him with his hands over his eyes. But he must have looked through his fingers, because when they came to the edge of the cliff with him, he knelt again, throwing himself down and clutching the ground and holding to the grass saying, ‘No. No. No. Please. NO. Please. Please. No. No.’“
Then the peasants who were with him and the others, the hard ones of the end of the line, squatted quickly behind him as he knelt, and gave him a rushing push and he was over the edge without ever having been beaten and you heard him crying loud and high as he fell.
From, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
A View From Moorish Quarter
The Fourth Side
Annie and I headed down toward the old bridge but the footing was very bad and Annie decided to wait for me as I continued on. Once on the old bridge I ran into Mark and Vivien who had descended on the new town side using the stairway. Mark was taking pictures. I mention this because his pictures, which he sent out to the rest of us, once we were back in the states on a photo-sharing site, were spectacular. National Geographic quality!
Farther down from the old bridge was the Arabic bridge, but I didn’t want to keep Annie waiting although I was tempted because you don’t get a full view of the new bridge from the old one. The round smooth rock juts into your line of sight and you lose a sense of the terrible chasm ripped into the earth by the gorge.