Torre del Mar
| Municipality of Vélez-Málaga: Torre del Mar | |||
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| coat of arms | Map of Spain | ||
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| Basic data | |||
| Autonomous Community : | Andalusia | ||
| Province : | Málaga | ||
| Comarca : | Axarquía - Costa del Sol | ||
| Coordinates | 36 ° 45 ′ N , 4 ° 6 ′ W | ||
| Residents : | 21,759 (2011) INE | ||
| Postal code : | 29740 | ||
| Area code: | 29094000900 | ||
| Location of the place | |||
Torre del Mar ( dt . : Tower of the Sea ) is a southern Spanish coastal town on the Costa del Sol , between Málaga and Nerja , which politically belongs to the city of Vélez-Málaga . It is located in the Andalusian province of Málaga , has around 20,000 inhabitants and is one of the most important seaside resorts east of the provincial capital of Málaga, 28 kilometers away. The current name can be traced back to a formerly mighty fortress with a high observation tower. The residents call themselves "Torreños".
geography
Torre is located on a coastal plain and is surrounded by agricultural fields. Originally the main industry of the city was the cultivation of sugar cane . Some factories and tower chimneys still bear witness to this today. Nowadays, however, mangoes , avocados , kiwis and other tropical fruits are grown. Like everywhere else on the Costa del Sol, the main industry today is the tourism and service sector . The months of July and August are high season and Torre is a destination for mainly domestic tourists.
To the east is the village of Caleta de Vélez , which has, among other things, a fishing and sports harbor. To the north inland is the city center of Vélez-Málaga . Torre del Mar is located in one of the most touristic regions in Europe, the Costa del Sol .
structure
Torre del Mar is divided into the five districts Viña-Málaga, El Faro, Paseo de Larios, El Tomillar and Las Malvinas.
climate
Thanks to its privileged location on the Costa del Sol, Torre del Mar has a very good climate in the subtropical zone with mild winters and relatively hot summers. The Mediterranean climate, which is humid but with little precipitation, varies in temperatures between 12 ° C in winter and 40 ° C in summer, resulting in an average annual temperature of 18 ° C.
history
The founding of Torre del Mar goes back to the Phoenicians . There are archaeological sites from the 8th century BC nearby. Discovered with a port, fisheries, houses and a necropolis . The Romans built a military fortification on the site of today's Torre del Mar, which later gave its name to the place, namely "Torre del Mar = Tower of the Sea". The reason for the construction of the fortress was the location on the bay, which is a natural harbor basin and was used as such for centuries. The former Roman fortification was then expanded by the Moors into a mighty fortress with a highly visible observation tower, the "Torre del Mar".
Between the 12th and 14th centuries, various Moorish authors, such as Al-Idrisi or Ibn Battuta , left indications of the extraordinary importance of the port “Mariyya Ballis”, as the place was still called at that time. They described how large ships on the beach were loaded with almonds and figs and shipped them to the then known world.
In 1487 the Moorish period ended in Torre del Mar with the conquest of the Catholic Kings . The castle was given to Ruiz López de Toledo , who renounced it in favor of Vélez-Málaga , the place to which Torre del Mar still belongs today. After the Moorish period, the fortress gradually began to decline and so Emperor Charles V (Carlos I, King of Spain) admonished Vélez-Málaga in 1517 that it would lose all rights to Torre del Mar if it did not turn the fortress into one would bring acceptable condition.
However, the fortress was not expanded until 1730, 55 years after the customs house of the American Chamber of Commerce with its seat in Seville was established in Torre del Mar in 1675, and trade with the colonies overseas was carried out exclusively via Torre del Mar. The coastal region was still relatively uninhabited at that time, because building outside of the fortifications was prohibited until then, and so the actual place Torre del Mar was only created at the beginning of the 18th century.
A few years earlier, in 1704 , Torre del Mar was the site of a naval battle. A War of the Spanish Succession was the reason for a battle in which Spanish-French and Anglo-Dutch armed forces with 145 ships and a total of about 45,000 men took part. However, due to its undecided outcome, the battle did not acquire any major significance despite the large masses of people and material at the time.
Overall, the 18th century was a heyday for Torre del Mar, because the monopoly in trade with the American colonies was retained until 1795. However, a plan to expand the natural harbor was not implemented, which was mainly due to Málaga's opposition to this project. The castle was almost completely destroyed by the Napoleonic Wars and an earthquake, which is why practically nothing remains of the once so mighty “Tower of the Sea”, which gave the place its name. The ruins of the fortress also served as a quarry for the construction of houses in the village, which now served as a center for the sugar cane farmers .
"El Ingénio Azucarero de Torre del Mar", a sugar factory , had already been built in 1797 , and the region around Torre del Mar, which had been a sugar-growing area for a long time, now experienced a new, violent, if brief, upswing. Sugar production consumed large amounts of wood, which initially led to the clearing of the nearby forest areas and after these were exhausted and the price of wood had soared, the sugar factory was no longer profitable. It was not until 1845 that the sugar industry received a new impetus with the establishment of a sugar company by Spanish producers, but this brought advantages above all for the larger farmers, as only they could meet the demands of society.
In Torre del Mar, a man, Manuel Domingo Larios y Larios , whose name is ubiquitous throughout southern Spain, seized the opportunity. He built a new sugar factory with an attached schnapps distillery, the administration building of which today serves as the mayor's seat in Torre del Mar, and soon employed around 400 workers on his plantations and in his factory. At that time Torre del Mar had less than 1000 inhabitants and so almost everyone in the village worked for Larios. This monopoly resulted in almost all farms being owned by Larios until the 1920s.
The second out of the sugar boom came in the 1950s when world market prices collapsed and business became uneconomical. Nevertheless, there are still some sugar cane farmers in the region around Torre del Mar. The tourist development of Torre del Mars, the branch of industry that is still the most important for the place today, followed almost seamlessly from the collapse of the sugar boom.
The Vélez-Málaga tram connected Vélez-Málaga with Torre del Mar from October 2006 to June 2012.
Political conflict
Formally, the city is (still) the southern district of Vélez-Málaga, capital of the Andalusian region of Axarquía and the Costa del Sol east of Málaga. Since 1990, however, the GIMPTM, the own party of Torre del Mar, has tried to gain independence from Vélez-Málaga and to become an independent city. Torre del Mar currently makes up about a third of the population of Vélez-Málaga.
Worth seeing
Wide, kilometer-long sandy and pebble beaches line the coasts and make it an ideal bathing resort, which is frequented by both domestic and foreign guests. The regionally famous, several kilometers long beach promenade of Torre del Mar (Spanish: Paseo marítimo de Torre del Mar ) runs along the beach, offering beautiful views of both the Mediterranean Sea and the hills and mountains in the hinterland of the Axarquía allows. The beach promenade is divided into a western and an eastern part, which are appropriately referred to as Levante and Poniente .
leisure
Torre has an adventure water park, a large shopping center with a cinema complex and a beautiful promenade in the center of the city, the Paseo de Larios . Torre del Mar is home to a few bars and restaurants that mainly specialize in fish and seafood. A 500 meter line of bars called El Copo is open until 4:00 a.m. every day in the summer. There is a summer night market along the beach promenade, where, among other things, handicrafts are sold.
Current
In addition, the sugar factories, some of which are already in ruins, are being restored and converted into museums. Several buildings of this long-abandoned industrial standing in Torre del Mar under monument protection .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ http://www.diariosur.es/20071109/axarquia/recuperar-origen-torre-20071109.html
- ↑ http://terraeantiqvae.blogia.com/temas/fenicios.php
- ↑ LAS RUTAS DE AL-ANDALUS: IBN BATTUTA (MÁLAGA-GRANADA); Antonio Angulo, Carlos Colomo, José Mª Hidalgo, Manuel Díaz (Editorial Proyecto Sur); ISBN 978-84-87387-95-1
- ↑ Historia de Torre del Mar. Retrieved September 28, 2013 (Spanish).
- ↑ Velez Malaga Spain. Retrieved September 28, 2013 .
- ↑ a b El Portal de la Axarquía. (No longer available online.) Formerly in the original ; Retrieved July 21, 2013 (Spanish). ( Page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
