The Old Town is built from one thing. Walk up any street, look at any doorway, run your hand along any wall and you’re touching the same material – Tosca, a soft golden sandstone that comes from about a mile away.
The quarries – the Muntanyar de Dalt and the Muntanyar de Baix, (upper and lower) run along the rocky shore at Muntanya beach at the Parador end of the coast. They’re still there. Nobody has fenced them off or tidied them up. You can walk down and see exactly what was taken and how. The extraction marks are cut into the rock face as cleanly as the day they were made. The layering – ‘the llavades’, the strata of the original beach dunes, is clearly visible in section. So are ‘the pels’, the natural fissures ‘the picapedreros arrancadors’ (miners) used as guides, working the stone apart along the lines the rock itself suggested.
The Tosca is a calcareous sandstone formed from coastal dunes around a hundred thousand years ago. It cuts easily when it comes out of the ground and hardens on exposure to air which made it ideal. You could shape it into arches, lintels, decorative surrounds, inscription panels. Once placed it set hard. The colour shifts with the light, almost white in the morning, deep gold by late afternoon. That’s the colour of the Old Town and it comes entirely from this shore.
These ‘pedreres’ have been worked since Roman times. A third site, the Cova Tallada at the foot of the cliffs at Cap de Sant Antoni, shows evidence of use from the 12th century, during the Andalusian period. The ‘toscars’ were finally protected in 1972 when extraction was banned not because the stone ran out but because what remained was recognised as something worth keeping. They are a magnificent sight.
Everything in the photographs on this site came from here. The doors, the arches, the inscription panels, the street corners worn smooth – all of it quarried from these two beaches, carried up the hill, and shaped by the same hands that left their tool marks in the rock face you can still see today.
The stone as it appears in the Old Town itself is documented in Stone. The arches and doorways it was used to build are in Doors.
Source: Ajuntament de Xàbia
For the full history of how it was extracted and the craftsmen who worked it, read The Stone the Old Town is Made Of
