Montes de Malaga Natural Park

This guide to Montes de Málaga Natural Park follows the vineyards that once covered these slopes after 1487, feeding Málaga's sweet wine trade for four centuries until a root louse called phylloxera wiped them out in 1878. It traces how the abandoned hillsides washed into the Guadalmedina river and worsened the city's flooding, and the 1930s engineering gamble that replaced the vines with pine forest and a reservoir instead. Along the Sendero de Torrijos you'll pass the old Lagar de Torrijos wine press, now a small museum of the industry the forest replaced.