Acinipo is literally a ruin, there is no town left to give any idea of what the place must have been like in Roman times. These days its a hillside with numerous piles of rocks and just three excavations, one of which is what's left of the Ampitheater.
We drove up there yesterday because the sky was a lovely clear blue which doesn't happen here very often. You see being up on the mountains between the Mediterranean and the Iberian plateau the clouds get stuck here and tend to sit quite low meaning we often get really bad haze even though there is no smog. Yesterday then should have been a rare opportunity to get some great snapshots.
Unfortunately, we didn't realize that the reason the sky was so clear was because the wind had turned, so instead of balmy winds of the south, we were not getting freezing cold winds from the north. And Acinipo sits at the top of an escarpment that is as exposed as you can get in these parts. I pity the poor buggers who had to live there a couple of thousand years ago when they didn't have gore-tex or central heating.
Have you ever stood on the edge of an escarpment and felt the biting cold sting of the wind as it rushes up the cliffs and smacks you in the face? Or understood the terrible fury it has and felt its icy claws angrily try to blind you into falling off said cliff? Cold, fast wind is barbaric, you need to have your wits about you.
So there we are trundling around the piles of rocks that used to be houses and other buildings, desperately trying to get our fingers to work, I think the other half's fingers had turned to solid ice by this time, and to make matters worse, a couple of tourists turned up who seemed to think it was quite OK to walk in front of our lenses, and they kept following us around, Grrrr!
So that I don't lose the thread of where I'm going with the story, let me give you a bit of history of the place. About 3000 years ago Acinipo was occupied by copper and then bronze age people but it wasn't until the first century BC that it started to become an important trading post, first with the Phoenicians, then the Romans under whose control it became an influential town in Roman Iberia, even being granted the right to mint coins by Emperor Vespasiano. Anyway, a few hundred years later the city was in ruins as it is today, which is kinda nice because it means its a tourist mecca outside Ronda.
There are a lot of Roman ruins around Europe, lets face it, Europe is old compared to Australia or the US where so many of you live, so I guess being this close to history that happened a few thousand years ago really opens your eyes to the tapestry of life that has gone before us. Except if you happen to be standing on the plateau at the same time as us and you can't open your eyes because the wind is so cold.
This is the view of Acinipo that most people photograph, there are a couple of excavation sites as well but none of the archeologists were were working at the time so we might have to go back. Also, the cold wind I briefly mentioned earlier prevented us from walking around a bit more meaning we didn't see the bronze age excavations.
Jillian said,
Friday, March 7. 2008 at 13:18 (Reply)