Albacar Walls

Albacar Walls – Ronda

The Albacar Walls are located at the Camino de los Molinos, in the town of Ronda, Málaga province.

The walled enclosure of the Albacar did not have the purpose of defending people, but one of its assets, the flour mills (although its name also shows its function as a fence for livestock). Its walls preserve almos intact their condition and original factories, made in tapial. Although to be more exact, the ramparts are their elevations, because the baseboards on which they are built were built with Stone masonry. Its modest dimensions complement perfectly with the steep slope of the slope, thus enhancing its defensive capacity.

The most remarkable thing about this place is the characteristic shape with which its wall manages to sabe the irregularities of the terrain and the slope, by means of restraints, covering a drop of more than 25 m in height, for a space of more than 200 m length. A zipper layout in which flanking towers are not built even where the structure is weakest, as are the joints between canvases.

In the same way, the door through which the mills were accessed was very striking: the Arc of Christ. It is obvious that it did not serve as an entrance to the use, and that it seems to have been conceived as a door of clear propagandistic interest: the well-known “appliance doors”, which were used as a sign of the power that made them.

What is the Tapial: it is a technique that consists of building walls with clayey earth, lime and wáter, compactedto blows in which a sliding formwork is used to contain it, characterized by its stability and hardness. It is very typical of Muslim architecture although already in Roman times Pliny described how it was used in ancient Rome. In the case of the walls of the Albacar of Ronda, it is a calicostrated Rampart with two-sided mamuní caissons, that is, 80 cm high by 150 cm wide and 11 cm thick, in which still today you can see some of the traces of its manufacture and the elements used in the execution of this type of factories, such as the boards of the formwork, the nails of the sacks and even the outer rope or the tornapuntas to stabilize the walls.

Door of the Christ or Mill Gate

Wind Gate / Wind Door

New Bridge from the Wind Door

Walls

Tapial