Playa de la Misericordia

This guide to Playa de la Misericordia in Málaga opens with a question: would you have pressed the button on a stick of dynamite strapped to the base of a sixty-five-meter concrete chimney? It follows the Central Térmica de la Misericordia, built beside the beach in nineteen sixty to draw seawater for its turbines, through two decades of operation, its closure in nineteen eighty, and the neighbors who fought city planners' decision to blow it up. Listen, too, for what locals call the wave of the Melilla ferry, a sudden little surge that rolls onto the sand when the incoming boat brakes on its approach to port.