Paraje Natural Torcal de Antequera

El Paraje Natural Torcal de Antequera is a natural arealocated in the municipality of Antequera, in the province of Malaga. It isfamous for the capricious ways that various actors have been shaped in itslimestone. Its area is about 20 square kilometers. It’s an example of the karsticlandscape in Europe.

Origins

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

Alpine foldings were in the Tertiary, which led to theemergence of limestone sediments that were deposited at the bottom of the oceanarm, 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 Jurassicperiod, between 150 and 250 million years ago.

Sediment accumulated on the seabed and was added and cementedthrough by salts and precipitation in the marina. Driven by the forces offolding, the mountain emerged to the surface while retaining much of itshorizontal form despite having climbed over 1000 m on the level of surfacewaters.

This wedge of ice has carved rock features, creating acomplete collection of calendar items that are attributable similarities withforms 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 surfacegives rise to what is known as Lenar or lapiaz, rocky terrain where it isdifficult to travel on foot.

Groundwater Forms

Like all solid limestone, the Torcal presents an enormouswealth of potholes, caves, and other underground, some of them of greathistorical importance as the Cueva del Toro. Its origin is related also withprocesses of dissolution and expansion of underground limestone by the actionof rainwater.

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

From this moment all is subjected to a process of erosion calledcharacteristic 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 thedifferent dissolutions of limestone by the different effect of acid atmosphericCO2 in rainwater, have modeled the rocks in many ways.

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