White Towns of Andalusia - History

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.