The place is not important, neither the time but these photographs are the only witnesses to a rustic shack somewhere in the Andalusian countryside.

Once, not so long ago, this shack stood in all its rustic glory on a hill just outside Marbella where it was slowly succumbing to the ravages of time. Nearby farmers told me that it was “muy viejo, de antes de la guerra(very old from before the war) and in these cases guerra always refers to the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).

It had been used as a shelter for goats but in the sixties the animals were moved to a slightly more modern abode as a road was carved around their home, leading to a substation of the provincial electricity company. The shack was thus left in a somewhat isolated position and soon became an anachronism amidst the rapidly constructed houses required for the ever growing population of Marbella.
The walls of this shack were put together following the age old tradition of putting stones together with mud, a rather unstable construction at first sight but through the ages a well tested system in southern latitudes where the sun turns the mud into a rock hard substance. A roof, made of twigs and branches covered with turf was sticking out on four sides, preventing the rain from making the walls too wet. There were no windows and three thick branches between which a curtain hung, woven from esparto grass, served as a doorway.

Once the goats moved elsewhere there also came a stop to the minimum amount of maintenance such a building requires and by surviving still another thirty years it was obvious that the original builders had known their craft.

Old age however had crept upon the shack in such a way that rain and wind had free access to the inside and once some heavy storms caused the roof to collapse the end was imminent.

As often happens in the country side, where illegal building is rampant, everybody can always use some old wood, be it to make a fire or to mend a fence and even the crumbling walls soon disappeared. Within a few weeks nothing was left but a heap of rubble from which a lonely reed pointed an accusing finger to the sky.

Sic transit Gloria mundi and will everything finally bow down to the inevitable law of gravity.