It’s funny how you can live here for a score or more years and still find somewhere new just seven kilometres behind La Herradura. I’m talking about los Cervales, which is a small cortijada (hamlet) – two really, because you have El Cerval Bajo and El Cerval Alto. It wasn’t that long ago that the hamlet had no paved thoroughfare, no electricity and certainly no telephones. Now, of course, there is a paved road that peters out before it reaches the coast via Rio Jate. If you were to continue up past the village then you would eventually come to Peña Escrita. As is to be expected, there is a small smattering of foreign residents there, amongst the slightly larger smattering of locals.
The hamlet does boast its own little chapel called, La Ermita de los Cervales, enclosed within a gravelled precinct. It’s very collejo or, quaint. Los Cervales must be nailed to the very steep hillside – how else does it resist gravity and not slip down into the stream/river. El Cerval Alto also sports its very own horned cow – and you don’t see many of them down here on the coast! We stopped to chat with an old lady who was laboriously making her way up the steep road. She was obviously grateful for the opportunity to have a rest. We asked her the name of the village, how many people lived there and the inevitable, ‘Has it changed much over the years?’ She sighed and even the puppy that accompanied her and which had been sniffing round us lay down expectantly for the lengthy reply. “It’s changed a lot. Before we had a little school here but that’s long gone. Of course, we had no electricity and we used to go down to the river for water. There was a lot more water in it before because it used to rain and rain. Now we’re only a few old ones and some foreigners that have bought houses here – but you don’t see them much. When I was a child we very rarely went down to the coast and it was always a big event. After the war the Maquis (hill bandits) caused a lot of problems and many neighbours moved down to La Herradura because it was safer.” We asked if the chapel was open and she said that the precinct was but the chapel itself is always kept locked (a sign of the times). For all the signs of civilisation: telephone poles, electricity pylons and a big Japanese 4×4’s parked outside somebody’s house, the hamlet retained an air of remoteness and tranquillity. We said our goodbyes and avoided running over the dog, which had approached the front wheel of the bike with the intention of leaving the canine equivalent of ‘Thank you for your visit!’ on its inviting tyre.
