Peñarrubia, a Landscape Underwater

Underwater, only fish move swiftly. When a lake covers a city, it not only submerges the stones but also the lives of its inhabitants. The entire city becomes liquid and becomes part of another dimension where time and movements slow down. The town continues its constant flow, stretched over the lakebed, allowing silence to replace laughter, claps, and singing. Navigating its flooded streets is a task only for divers who know how to find the refuge of memory and bring it to the surface.

I meet one of them in a café in Santa Rosalía, where they serve pennyroyal tea in sugarcane glasses on metal tables, while three or four customers watch a second division soccer match with apathy. Juan Mora takes me by the hand to the old landscape of his village at the foot of the Sierra de Huma. Juanito is slim like a newt, his head covered by a gray checkered cap resting on dark glasses. He uses a pair of crutches to walk on land, but once in the water, he slips away with his polished voice and gill-like memory through which he breathes.

Peñarrubia, extinct village

Along the Campillos road, I delve into the two squares and nine streets of Peñarrubia. I reach the Plaza de España where Pedro's kiosk is located next to the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary. You can still hear the echoes of laborers who came in the early dawn to seek daily wages working in the wheat and barley fields or collecting olives to press in the oil mill. Meanwhile, the women waited with breakfast on the table so they could go off strong to battle the sun. In the market, the first cries were already heard: Fresh anchovies just out of the bay! Fresh anchovies! Lemons and oranges from the orchard! Isabel the butcher opened her shop, and so did Manuel the tile maker, who sculpted esparto and palm. Across the street, Rosco slid up the metal shutter to correct the rhythm of time in clocks.

Everyone knew that this landscape was destined to be overrun by the water of a reservoir, but it was such an ancient story that it had crossed the border of legend. It was well known that the surrounding villages suffered from a lack of supply and that valley, bathed by the Guadalteba, was ideal for storing water. Peñarrubia made the sacrifice.

The drought brings to light the remains of Peñarrubia

The project was signed on January 15, 1965, and construction began in April 1966. The residents were informed that the place where they were born, where they had played hopscotch, where they had kissed in front of the altar, where they had given birth to their children and where they had buried them, was going to sink to the bottom of a lake. The land they had worked and the pastures of their flocks would disappear. The evening strolls along Real Street or Rosario Street with clean clothes and a scent of soap, the afternoons of television in Cristóbal's bar, and the nights of improvised singing in Pepe's Bar would no longer be celebrated. Nor would bread and wine be consecrated at Sunday mass, nor would Cine Rodero unfold its chairs to project the indomitable Paul Newman. All that landscape would be submerged forever in the serene darkness of a reservoir.

Families began to be scattered across some towns in Málaga and northern Spain. One hundred thousand pesetas for men aged 18 to 70, sixty thousand for women of the same age range, and thirty thousand for everyone else outside this range. They forgot to quantify the rage and nostalgia. Most of the older people, after the first months of exile, stripped of their history and roots, drowned with their village tens of kilometers away. Juanito returned on weekends to trace its streets underwater. Some ghosts bubbled under the surface.

Peñarrubia continues to be inhabited by amphibious creatures that still claim their references squatting on the shore of a reservoir, waiting for the drought to at least return the plan of their childhood.