Local History

Introduction

In 1984, Nicholas Luard published “Andalucia: A Portrait of Southern Spain”. In the book he describes his experiences starting in 1963 of living in El Cuartón and traveling around the area. I had access to a copy of the book for a short period of time and excerpted the following.

History of El Cuartón

“The upper section of the [Guadalmesi] valley was named El Cuarton. Six months after I first saw it [Autumn, 1963], a Spanish property company had been formed and the 4,000 acre El Cuartón estate had been bought.”

[Written within the context of Spring, 1963: First discussed the housing development between Millais and Elwes.]

“The chief entrepreneurs behind the company were [Hugh] Millais and [Dominic] Elwes. Starting with an almost virgin tract of forest their plan was to develop the land slowly and carefully. Totally opposed to the ugly, cramped schemes already scarring the coast, both were the sons of considerable painters and both were exceptionally gifted as artists themselves, they envisaged a time when El Cuartón would have a small number of widely spaced houses, an Andalucian-style village of studio-apartments linked by cobbled streets, a Franciscan monastery, and a little harbour at the valley's foot – all without violating the intrinsic beauty of the landscape and trees.”

“It was a bold and almost quixotic vision, conceived with a flair and style typical of the two, but it never quite worked out. Fifteen years later the first arm of the Andalucian studio-village, a scattering of houses and a few roads had been built, but most of the valley was untouched. The monastery, the harbour, and many other features of the original plan remained dreams.”

“[Fifteen years later] Dominic Elwes had died and Hugh Millais had moved on to employ his formidable talents in other fields and the company they had created was a shadow of its brave beginnings."

"The valley was too remote and the world's economic climate too harsh for the venture to have succeeded..."

"As a small network of roads began to spread through the forest and a few more houses were built, El Cuartón's management company instituted a rubbish collection service."

“El Cuartón, the upper part of the valley, was divided in two by the coastal road. One of the first actions of the development company was to run a narrow track from there down towards the sea. The track continued for barely half a mile and came to an end well short of the rocky outcrop crowned by the cottage that was Jose's home. At the end of the track a delightful and effervescent Irish woman, who'd fallen head over heels in love with Andalucia, built a house for herself and her French husband."

[Robert Luard had a “modest” share in the company, for which he received land and building credits.]

[In the mid 1960s, as the author's house was being built, the El Cuartón development covered 10,000 acres and only two other new buildings had been erected.]

History of the Guadalmesi Valley

The El Cuartón development is in the Guadalmesí Valley, named after the Guadalmesí River that runs through it.

[Luard quotes from “Excursions in Ronda and Granada” (1820)]: “In 1820 a British infantry officer, Captain Rochford Scott, set out from the garrison at Gibraltar to travel by horse round the coast to Cadiz. On the second day of his journey he wrote: 'The road is now very bad, being conducted across the numerous rough ramifications of the mountains on the right and midway between their summits and the sea. At about seven miles from Algeciras it reached the secluded valley of the Gualmesi or Guadalmesí, celebrated for the crystalline clearness of its springs and the high flavour of its oranges, and crossing the stream whence the romantic dell takes its name, directs itself towards the sea-shore, continuing along it the rest of the way to Tarifa.'”

“There were in fact two groups of people living in the [Guadalmesi] valley [in the mid 60s]. One, those of the Guadalmesi proper, lived on or round the fertile little delta at the valley's foot where the river leveled out before draining into the sea. The other group, who called themselves the people of La Ahumada, lived in the uploads behind the Cabrito ridge, the ridge of the 'little goat' which encircled the valley to the north. Neither group inhabited what could be called a village or even a hamlet. The Guadalmesi was a scatter of little houses and smallholdings, La Ahumada a straggle of much more widely dispersed cottages among the hilly woods and pastures."

“[The] Guadalmesi, which numbered some 80 inhabitants, and in La Ahumada, with perhaps twice as many...”

“[Toward the bottom of the Guadalmesi there is an] immensely old watermill... sluice gate... stone channel... the mill had been built by the moors... six or seven hundred years old...”

Referenced Books

[nineteenth century English traveller in Spain, Richard Ford]

[Reference to "South From Granada" by Gerald Brenan]

“Excursions in Ronda and Granada” (1820) by Captain Rochford Scott

Reference to J. W. Carr, British Botanist

Miscellaneous

Author's house was called “El Huerto Perdido” (The Lost Orchard) and was constructed in the mid 60s. "...in 1972, we settled permanently in to the Huerto Perdido [author's house in El Cuartón]."

The [surrounding] area is known as the Campo de Gibraltar, the plain of Gibraltar, was one of Spain's three military zones, the other two being the Balearic and the Canary Islands. ... Apart from a large although not intrusive military presence, the main effect of its status had been to keep the region insulated from urban development.

Other Sources - Philip Jebb

On Philip Jebb's biographical web page, he makes reference to El Cuartón as well:

"Perhaps his finest work – El Cuartón (1966-70), a new village near Tarifa overlooking the Straits of Gibraltar – is one where his personal stamp as an architect is most apparent. It was conceived as a set of holiday apartments on multiple levels running up the side of a cork-tree lined hill, commissioned by Hugh Millais, actor, writer, restaurateur and man of many talents. It was described as Annabel’s-by-the-Sea, as its intended customers were to come from the same tranche of London café society who danced at Annabel’s night club, which Jebb had created for Mark Birley 10 years previously. The brief was for a new 18th-century Spanish village. Jebb’s attention to detail meant the brief was met elegantly and without collapsing into pastiche. At the same time, the positioning of the “blocks” of apartments – in relation to each other and to the steeply sloping site – is a triumph of witty three-dimensional planning. And the main façade of the village, approached from below, has an almost Cubist quality (expressing one plane and many at the same time), quite unlike anything else in Jebb’s work. The villas around the village show Jebb at his most playful and elegant.

El Cuartón was admired by François Spoerry, architect of the celebrated, and exactly contemporaneous canal town of Port Grimaud, St Tropez. More than 30 years after its completion, when Cuartón had developed into a local village, it stood out for architectural historians, including Giles Worsley, as a first-rate example of 1960s Mediterranean resort architecture."

El Cuartón, Tarifa, Spain, a village of holiday flats, circa 1966-70

Louis Jebb (son of Philip Jebb) notes:

• The house "La Muñeca" was designed for the Boyds by Philip Jebb

• The house "La Mariposa" (Nido de Aguila) was designed for Vanessa McConnell by Philip Jebb

• Huerto Perdido was designed by the decorator Jon Bannenberg, who later became the main decorator for El Cuartón in general and in time a celebrated designer of luxury yachts