SpanishCountryHome.net
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Spanish Country Homes
Description
Coín is situated in the fertile valley of the Rio Grande approx. 21 Km inland from Marbella and there is little doubt that a community of some kind existed on the spot long before the Roman conquest. Nevertheless, it was the Romans who gave it the first name which has survived: Lacibis.
It became a market town: a transition point for the minerals being quarried 5 Km or so to the south in the Sierra Blanca. Marble from these quarries was certainly used in the construction of the Roman town of Italica, which once stood close to Seville, and was the birthplace in 76AD of the future emperor, Hadrian. The quarrying of marble and the mining of iron ore went on well into the 19th Century. During the time of the Visigoths, who supplanted the Romans as rulers of the peninsula, the town lost its lustre and appears to have been deserted and left to fall into ruin. By the time that the Moors resettled and rebuilt it around 929AD virtually all of its Roman heritage had been lost, and what little was left disappeared in the rebuilding.
1485 was a momentous year in the region. The Christian reconquest was in its final triumphant space, and villages and towns fell to them like grass beneath the scythe. Coín was taken after a siege in which, legend will tell you, no less a person than Christopher Columbus took part. A certain Captain S. E. Cook of the Royal Navy visited Coín, along with Cártama and Alhaurín in 1829, and was mightily impressed.
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