Then and now

1. What you are looking at

A photograph from 1894 says little on its own. You see a lane of loose stone, white walls, women in black — and you have no idea where it is. Put the same spot today beside it and everything shifts: it is the stairway you walked past yesterday. That shift is the reason for this page.

The montages are the work of Jaime Guardiola. He tracked down the old pictures, found the vantage point again, took the present-day shot and put them together — in some cases across five or six periods. They are collected at Altea Mi Pueblo, Antonio Pérez’s local chronicle, which has been running for more than fifteen years.

The old photographs themselves are not his. They were made available by Oscar Lloret, and a good part of that collection could be assembled only thanks to the unstinting help of Ramón Llorens Barber, Luis Fuster Orts and Pedro J. Orozco Juan.

What you see here is a selection from some five hundred montages, chosen by age — the older the original view, the better — by the number of periods shown, and with an eye to not repeating the same white lane thirty times. The full collection is at Altea Mi Pueblo, and anyone fond of Altea will lose an evening there.

Tap an image to see it large; arrow keys or a swipe move on.

2. The pictures

The town as a whole

Lanes, steps and archways

Squares and streets

Harbour, beach, fishing

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Montages: Jaime Guardiola. Fotografías cedidas por Oscar Lloret (gracias a la colaboración desinteresada de Ramón Llorens Barber, Luis Fuster Orts y Pedro J. Orozco Juan, que hicieron posible que se pudiera recopilar una buena parte de la colección de fotos). From the collection of Altea Mi Pueblo, reproduced here by kind permission of Antonio Pérez. The full collection is on their site.

3. What they tell you

Four things recur across the forty-eight pictures, and together they tell the town’s story better than any date.

• The fields disappear. In views up to the 1960s, cultivation runs right down to the beach: terraces, almond trees, rows of vegetables. Today the town stands there. Clearest in the aerial views and on the hill above the fields.
• Decay came before rescue. Several montages show the old town in the 1930s and 1960s as a field of ruins — collapsed roofs, bricked-up doors. Today’s white Altea is not a preserved town but a rebuilt one.
• The animals are gone. Donkeys, goats, pigs, mules with carts: part of the street scene into the 1970s. After that, they disappear.
• The mole grows. In 1894 the bay lies open, in 1935 a stone wall begins, by 1958 it is longer, today the harbour stands there. Seeing the four steps in sequence explains why the beach now lies where it does.

What the pictures do not show is telling too: no wall of towers against the old-town hill. The core of 1617 is still there; what grew was everything around it. Why the town sits where it does is on the history page.