Monday 15 th October
Graham
Hi,
San Pedro de Alcántara is one of the most strangely situated towns on the Costa del Sol , it is packed with restaurants, bars and has a vibrant social life, apart from having all the shops and schools that you would expect a town to have. Most towns like: Estepona, Puerto Banus Marbella and Fuengirola are located right on the coast, so why is it then that San Pedro is located one kilometre back from the shore line?
This version of the history of San Pedro was kindly related to me in our bar, by a Spanish customer, so if it is incorrect please let me know, so that I can put things right:
About 250 years ago there was nothing where San Pedro now stands and General Manuel Gutiérrez de la Concha e Irigoyen, first Marquís del Duero, came along and decided that San Pedro would be a great place to set-up an agricultural Colony, so without further delay he founded the Agricultural Colony of San Pedro Alcántara The Marquís del Duero, built himself a Manor house about 1km inland from the sea to make sure that he was away from the strong winds and the salt that they deposited on anything growing near the coast.
Apart from a nice big Manor House for himself and his wife, he also built rows and rows of tithe cottages to house his farm workers and a few bars or bodegas, as they were then called, to keep the workers happy after a 12 hour shift in the fields. He had no need to be near the sea, so the local community which built up around him and his house was also inland from the sea and the land between this settlement and the sea was worthless, as it was no use for farming or for any other gainful use.
The Marquis’s Mother had a favourite saint called Petra de Alcántara Irigoyen y de la Quintana, and that was the name she chose for the church they built and so the settlement became known also as San Pedro (de Alcantara).
It wasn’t until the early sixties that foreigners started to settle in the area and they chose to build isolated villas on the southern side of the N-340 road a few modestly constructed beach bars (chiringitos) popped-up to serve this new genre of foreign resident. Shortly afterwards a few urbanizations were built near the sea. At this time land near to the coast was very cheap and tended to be left to the women in the families, whilst the men inherited the more valuable productive farmland with the advent of organized tourism in the latter part of the sixties, land value started to rise.
About 10 years ago massive development of the coastal area was undertaken and now the coastal band is highly populated and densely developed. There are some bars and restaurants on the beach side of the N-340, but town of San Pedro with it’s churches, shops, cafes, bars and restaurants has not been modernised in line with the new development along the coast and continues to remain a quaint old agricultural town to this day.
Don’t be fooled by the odd boat or anchor which has been used to decorate some of the roundabouts or by the beach bars and restaurants draped with fishing nets, , they only fools the tourists into believing that San Pedro is a fishing town.
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