Amateur Archaeology and a Political Halloween

Last weekend our excursion was to Úbeda la Vieja, the ruin of an ancient city very close to the “new” Úbeda where I live.  A lot of the city is still buried under the olive trees, but there are places where the tops of walls stick up out of the dirt and you can find ceramic scraps every two inches on the ground.  The sad thing about it is that when people decided to plant olives here they just knocked down a lot of the walls that were still standing and piled up the rocks around the perimeter.


This is basically what all Spanish countryside looks like nowadays.


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Here is what olives look like on the tree.


Basically all that is left of Úbeda la Vieja.  There are stones from builders during many different ages here, beginning in the Copper Age and ending around 1100 A.D.


The largest structure above ground at this site is part of the wall that used to surround the city.

After wandering around the ruin we went to look for ceramic on the hillside where the inhabitants of the city threw all their trash.  I suppose you could say we went dumpster diving.  After we rooted around for a while we laid out all the pieces we’d found and David helped us classify them by age.  The coolest things I found were the petrified tusk of a wild boar that is estimated to be around 3000 years old and a primitive silex “knife” from the Iberian age that was used to grind up ochre to make paint.

When we were done playing archaeologists David drove us around the mini desert on the other side of the mountains that we can see from our terrace.  There was mostly sand, although there have been efforts to stop the desertification and many pines and olives have been planted in the last 30 years or so.  It was a geologist’s heaven.  There were fantastic rock formations that looked like sculptures and the dirt was all multicolored with blue, red, and yellow from the minerals in it.

For example:


We had a picnic in amidst the olives surrounding a little town called Cabra del Santo Cristo and then decided to explore some abandoned cortijos that we saw on the drive back to Úbeda.  A cortijo is kind of like a hacienda or a plantation - it’s a big mansion surrounded by some kind of farm (in this case olive trees) and usually has a separate area for the workers to sleep.


The first cortijo we stopped at belonged to the Torrubia family and was built in the mid 1800’s.  This one was all locked up because they were storing tractors inside.  I fed a momma cat and her kitten here.




Around back we could see that someone had used brick mortar and broken glass to keep people from climbing the wall.


The second cortijo we visited was called Villa Gutierrez and was built in 1884.  There was also a solar clock built above the front door.

This one we were able to enter and explore.  In places it was a little dangerous because the ceiling was fallen in:









Here you can see the second story from the ground floor.


David found this goat skull and gave it to me, having noticed that I was interested in bones.  Here you can see that a snail has taken the place of the goats eye.  I left the snail behind, but the goat skull now has a home as the center piece on the table of our terrace.

And then we had HALLOWEEN!!!

Halloween is not really widely celebrated here.  Usually little kids are the only ones who dress up but they don’t go trick or treating.  Also, everyone is under the impression that the costumes all have to be scary or macabre.  We had a halloween party with a whopping six people.  We planned to have music, drinking and dancing at our school but there was some big wedding and a birthday party in town so none of the Spaniards we invited showed up.

Here are our costumes:


Kate was a “Chica de la moda” or an in-style Spanish chick.  Yes, they actually dress like this here.  She was the only one who didn’t look like she was in costume and was able to score all of her clothes at a regular store.



Jackie was a medieval barmaid.





Tanya was the “Princess of the Future of America."







Yours truly couldn’t get ahold of a nun costume this year so I went as a bellydancer.  I was asked where I got such a fantastic costume and had to admit that everything I was wearing was from my own wardrobe.  And of course I did plenty of bellydancing all night long.









JuanPe, the school’s web designer, came as a very familiar person.  He had little slogans pinned to his jacket that said, “Make the war not love”, “Don’t eat too much candy”, and “Vótame o policía nacional.”  When we were wandering around Úbeda he kept saying, “¡Hola! Vota por Bush,” to everyone we passed.


David went as Death.  Here he is posing next to a graffiti that says, “Death to the Nazis.”  He also went around offering cigarettes to passersby.


David suggested that since we were so few we should go out.  I resisted, not wanting to wander the streets of Úbeda half naked, but eventually gave in.  People stare at us everywhere we go anyway so we might as well give them a reason to.  We went to a couple bars for drinks and tapas and then ended up at a place near our house that played music we could dance to.  A few people asked us what the hell we were doing but mostly they just stared.  Despite that it was actually a lot of fun and we stayed out until 3:00 AM. 

You can imagine the big political joke between us with Bush, Death, the machine gun-toting Tanya, and a very Arab-looking me.  Although we had a great time I really missed the U.S.  As Tanya put it, “We may not have Carnival, but we have a very healthy Halloween.”

That is all!  Write to me!

Marie