Sunny Walkers 220522: Playa de Gatares y Ermita de la Dehesa de La Punta y Torre del Lobo

A perfect pairing for this time of the year a short hike followed by a visit to Playa de Gatares for a nice swim in the fresh water.

During this hike we visit the ruins of the Chapel of the Dehesa de la Punta or of the Santísima Trinidad located on the top of the mountain that closes the Getares cove to the south in the area known as “Viña Grande”. The chapel was originally a local watch tower subsequently extended for the local peasants.

During our hike will come across across several ruins one of which is the Torre del Arroyo del Lobo a ruined medieval defensive tower located in the cove of Getares, which was used to monitor the stretch of coast from Punta Carnero to Punta de San García between the cities of Algeciras and Tarifa as part of the defensive system of the Strait of Gibraltar in the Middle Ages.

A Little History
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The Chapel of the Dehesa de la Punta
at the request of the priest Antonio Pérez Cruzado, around 1778 a church was built in what is known as Viña Grande for the peasants of Getares and Punta Carnero.

Since the incorporation of the terms of Algeciras in 1462 to the recently conquered city of Gibraltar, the lands that today constitute the municipal term of Algeciras were occupied by residents of La Roca who had their fields of cultivation, meadows for the stay and sustenance of cattle and farmhouses whose names have come down to us, such as Cortijo de las Monjas and Cortijo de Algeciras and the meadows of La Punta and Novillero. The steep terrain located between Getares and Punta Carnero, terraced as can still be seen in part today despite the erosion suffered, were dedicated to planting vines which, according to the Gibraltarian historian Alonso Hernández del Portillo at the beginning of the 17th century , together with the vineyards located around San Roque, produced excellent quality wines that were exported by sea to Flanders, England, France and many parts of Spain.
Although the loss of Gibraltar in 1704 and the disappearance of the only export port for wines in the region had caused a first bankruptcy of this crop, as the historian Ignacio López de Ayala attests in 1782, the truth is that with the birth of the new towns of San Roque, Los Barrios and Algeciras, the land located on the slopes of the mountains near Getares continued to be cultivated and planted with vineyards, as can be seen in the documentation preserved in the Archive of Notarial Protocols, and producing wines until the decline and disappearance of this crop in the area due to the phylloxera plague in the 1970s.
The mentions of the vineyards "de la Punta" and the place names related to the cultivation of the vine that are preserved in the area, such as "Viña Luna" or "Viñalona", "Viña Grande" (where the chapel that is the object of of this article) or the "Cala de la Parra" are evidence of the thriving wine activity that developed in the southern area of ​​Algeciras in the 18th century.

In the middle of the aforementioned century, the numerous peasants, fervent Catholics, established in the fields that surrounded the Getares cove and the slopes of Punta Carnero had enormous difficulties in attending Sunday mass or going to any of the acts and ceremonies that the churches of the city organized and offered to the faithful, as well as to receive, them and their children, Catholic education. Not only did the remoteness of those farmlands from the city of Algeciras prevent them from hearing Holy Mass on holidays, but during the winter the rough roads became impassable and the overflowing streams made it impossible to travel to the Algeciras churches to attend the religious offices or receive the holy sacraments in case of serious illness or Christian care for the deceased.

For these reasons, in 1775 the priest Antonio Pérez Cruzado submitted a petition to the City Council in order to be granted authorization to build a chapel dedicated to the Holy Trinity, Our Lady of the Rosary and Saint Nicholas of Bari in the Dehesa de la Punta (located near the so-called Cerro del Campanario) and to be able to attend, in it, to the religious needs of the farmers and settlers who lived in that remote place.
On April 15 of that year, the Consistory of Algeciras granted him the requested permission, naming him chaplain of the church that was going to be built. The bishop of Cádiz, Fray Tomás del Valle, also granted the corresponding ecclesiastical license for the erection of the church. There is documentary evidence that the chapel was under construction in October 1775. According to Manuel Pérez-Petinto, when the building work had not yet been completed, the chaplain complained to the City Council about “the slights and dislikes that Sebastián de Sanjuán caused them daily, the builder who was in charge of the works and who, for this reason, threatened to resign from his position, giving up the money he had spent up to that day on the chapel.” However, the Consistory did not agree to his resignation and taking into account "the virtue, zeal and charity as he has accredited in the service of the poor of charity..., agrees not to accept the resignation because he knows how useful it is for said chapel and more so, since this job cannot give him any other satisfaction than that of serving God in which he will occupy himself, as he has occupied himself, teaching the doctrine to the poor settlers of La Punta who cannot come to town and help them in the calamities…”

Thanks to a memorial delivered to the Algeciras City Council on August 21, 1778 by the chaplain of the Dehesa de la Punta Chapel, Antonio Pérez Cruzado, we know that he reported that, on that date, the church was already finished. . Also attached was a decree from Fray Juan Bautista Cervera, bishop of Cádiz since 1777, empowering Bernardo Narciso Pérez, vicar of the city, to visit the new church and bless it when it was well endowed with the necessary ornaments and other liturgical objects. From that date it is known that the church's own cults were being celebrated in the Chapel, with the chaplain attending to the faithful who lived in the surrounding farmhouses, until it was disentailed and the lands on which it settled in the chapel were sold. decade of the thirties of the nineteenth century. Abandoned from those dates, in the following decades the sacristy and the small nave that constituted the space dedicated to worship were used as a refuge for shepherds and goatherds, being very ruined when the chronicler Manuel Pérez-Petinto wrote his "History of Algeciras" in 1944.
The Chapel of the Dehesa de la Punta or of the Santísima Trinidad was located on the top of the mountain that closes the Getares cove to the south in the area known as “Viña Grande”. Until the beginning of the 21st century, despite its state of ruin, its most outstanding elements could still be identified. For its construction, an old beacon tower was used, which crowned that hill, to which was added a front body with a square floor plan, similar in size to the base of the tower, and two outbuildings, one on each side, also with a square floor plan, which They served as the sacristy and the chaplain's living quarters, all with ashlar masonry joined with poor quality mortar. The dependency on the Epistle side would be the one dedicated to the residence of the chaplain and the one on the Gospel side would be the sacristy. The resulting plant of the church resembled those of the churches of the Visigothic period, which, in the past, led some researchers to think that it was a Visigothic hermitage.