Costa del Sol Towns

Paraje Natural Torcal de Antequera

El Paraje Natural Torcal de Antequera is a natural area located in the municipality of Antequera, in the province of Malaga. It is famous for the capricious ways that various actors have been shaped in its limestone. Its area is about 20 square kilometers. It’s an example of the karstic landscape in Europe.

Origins

Its origins date back to the Jurassic period—more specifically the Secondary Era—i.e., about 150 million years ago. At that time the area was a maritime corridor linking that was stretched from the Gulf of Cadiz to Alicante, the primitive Atlantic and Mediterranean Sea.

Alpine foldings were in the Tertiary, which led to the emergence of limestone sediments that were deposited at the bottom of the ocean arm, giving rise to mountains, whose summits often took the form of a “mushroom.”

Geological Features

Torcal rock is made up of three limestone types: ooliticas, brechoides, and clastic. They all originated in the sea during the Jurassic period, between 150 and 250 million years ago.

Sediment accumulated on the seabed and was added and cemented through by salts and precipitation in the marina. Driven by the forces of folding, the mountain emerged to the surface while retaining much of its horizontal form despite having climbed over 1000 m on the level of surface waters.

This wedge of ice has carved rock features, creating a complete collection of calendar items that are attributable similarities with forms of life (El Tornillo, symbolized in the logo of Paraje, the cap, the front, the coffin, binoculars, the cup, the die, etc.).

In addition, the dissolution of the rocks at the surface gives rise to what is known as Lenar or lapiaz, rocky terrain where it is difficult to travel on foot.

Groundwater Forms

Like all solid limestone, the Torcal presents an enormous wealth of potholes, caves, and other underground, some of them of great historical importance as the Cueva del Toro. Its origin is related also with processes of dissolution and expansion of underground limestone by the action of rainwater.

 

Later a series of fracture-generated cracks (diaclasas) and fault systems that are broken at right angles (oriented NW–SE and NE–SW) led to the erosion and collapse of these cracks, which are what we call today “dead corridors.”

From this moment all is subjected to a process of erosion called characteristic modeling. The fractures of the rock by the action of the wedge, which is the rock that absorbs water and ice due to cold, along with the different dissolutions of limestone by the different effect of acid atmospheric CO₂ in rainwater, have modeled the rocks in many ways.

First, we must stress the frequency of horizontal layers of rock, which is unusual in the limestone mountains of Andalusia. This is accented with horizontal erosion, a rhythmic disposition of the strata generated by differential breakage of alternative limestone with different porosity and water absorption capacity.