History
The area has been settled since prehistoric times, and some of the local caves have ancient rock paintings. Many cultures have left their mark on the region, but the most influential was that of the Moors. The narrow, winding streets have a distinct, Arabic feel to them, though each village has at least one Roman Catholic church. Reasons for whitewashing buildings have variously included the chemical properties of the alcaline whitewash, which is antibacterial, to the socially cohesive appearance a wholly whitewashed village presents. However, it is nevertheless a fact that there is no evidence that the majority of the villages listed below were whitewashed before the 1920´s, indeed, it seems that heritage projects that have investigated paint layers on the buildings have discovered that few were whitewashed before that time, and further, that an array of pigments were added to the annual whitewashing activity, chiefly red and yellow ochres. Some decorative effects were also recorded, from the eighteenth century onwards, in a number of villages. These coloured buildings survived until the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera, when it appears, an instruction was passed to the leader's local political allies to suppress differences in villagers' choices and disallow any deviation from a politically-engineered appearance of normality.
Read more about this topic: White Towns Of Andalusia
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimized—the question involuntarily arises—to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“History is the present. That’s why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.”
—E.L. (Edgar Lawrence)
“Look through the whole history of countries professing the Romish religion, and you will uniformly find the leaven of this besetting and accursed principle of action—that the end will sanction any means.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)