One is good, but very long; another is short, but very bad; a third is both circuitous and bad, but across a most interesting and picturesque country. We made choice of this last, which proceeds by way of Velez, Malaga, and Alhama.
Of the other two above-mentioned, the first is an excellent carriage road, that is directed in the first instance upon Loxa, and will be travelled over hereafter; the second (a mere mountain track) leaves the coast at once, and proceeds straight to Alhama.
The distance from Malaga to Velez, although reckoned six leagues of Spain, is only about eighteen English miles. For the greater part of the way, the road is conducted along the Mediterranean shore; sometimes ascending and crossing the low, rocky promontories by which the coast is indented, but seldom stretching inland more than a quarter of a mile. It is tolerably well kept, and is at all seasons passable for carriages.
The coast is rugged, and thickly set with towers and casa fuertes,[129] but is marked by no picturesque features until arrived within a short distance of Velez, when the road, turning away from the sea-shore, enters a flat and verdant valley, wherein stands the old town, shrouded in groves of orange and lemon trees, and backed by hills, clad to their summits with vines. A fine stream, bearing the same name as the town, serpentines through the valley, fertilizing it by a deposit of rich soil, swept from the sides of the Sierras of Loxa and Alhama. A kind of delta has thus been formed at the river’s mouth, stretching some way into the sea; so that Velez, which probably, in former days, stood upon or near the coast, is now upwards of three miles from it.
The town is slightly elevated above and on the left bank of the stream, and is commanded by the neighbouring hills. The streets are wide, clean, and well paved; but the thriving commerce, and abundant market, naturally looked for in a place once so noted for the productiveness of its orchards and extent of its export trade, are no longer to be seen; and the number of inhabitants has either decreased very rapidly, or has been greatly exaggerated of late years, when stated to amount to twelve thousand souls.
There can be little doubt but that Velez is the town of Menoba, mentioned both by Pliny and in the Itinerary of Antonius, though there is a slight discrepancy in the two accounts; for, whilst both place Menoba to the eastward of Malaca, the latter states the distance between the two places to be only twelve Roman miles, and the former says it is on a river. Now, there is no stream that can be called a “river” between the two towns, excepting that of Velez itself, and it is full eighteen Roman miles from Malaga.
In the days of the Moslems, Velez was a place of considerable strength, as well as commercial importance, and only fell into the hands of the Spaniards in the spring of the same year that the “catholic kings” possessed themselves of Malaga, A.D., 1487.
The investment of the fortress was attended with much risk to the army of Ferdinand, which at one period of the siege was cut off from its communications with the interior. The king himself also—for he personally directed the operations against the beleaguered city—incurred great danger in repulsing an attempt made by the Moors to relieve the place; his life having been saved only by the devotedness of his attendants. The armorial bearings of the town commemorate this event.
We had been informed that the only thing for which Velez Malaga is at the present day celebrated, is its breed of fleas; and certainly we could not in this instance say, “nunquam ad liquidum fama perducitur;” for never in my life—and one retains a lively recollection of these matters—did I see a more active, nor feed a more insatiable race than that which is perpetuated in the floors, walls, and bedding, of the Venta Nueva. The camphor bags, with which, at the recommendation of our Malaga friends, we had come provided, were thrown away as useless.
Nothing loth, we started for Alhama with the earliest day. The road ascends very gradually along a fine, open, and highly cultivated valley, all the way to the venta of Vinuela, distant about eight miles from Velez. For the first few miles the road is good, but afterwards it is so cut across by water channels as to offer serious impediments to quick travelling; for these aqueducts are formed by high banks, composed of mud and fascines, which, though bridged across and kept in good repair during the winter season, when the mountain torrents come down with great force, yet in summer are suffered to get out of order, and must, therefore, be scrambled over as the traveller best can.