DREAMING OF ISTÁN
By Steve Wright
Your friends will not believe you. You will tell them that there is an unspoiled piece of Andalusian charm left in the Malaga province. They will scoff. Costa del Sol has been ruined by gray apartment towers, ex-pat pubs, retailed-to-death roads and faux villas on every terraced hillside, they will tell you. The coast has been corrupted and even the famed whitewashed villages in the hills have traded tradition for tour buses, they will remind you. But there is a place where old people still gather to watch the sun set over the mountains. There is a village that proudly has a population well under 2,000. There is a village where locals still outnumber tourists by a large margin, where the taverns don’t even have signs, where the streets are so narrow that nearly all the cars are parked on the outskirts. Istán is the last holdout of tranquility in an area ridiculed for pompous Puerto Banus and paunchy, over the hill Marbella. Founded in the 1448 by Muslims taking refuge from a defeat at the hands of a Christian Army, Istán still boasts whitewashed houses, Arabic roof tiling and narrow streets of its beginnings more than 500 years ago.
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