Arcos de la Frontera: An Art Nouveau Vintage Travel Poster from Our Own Photograph
Stand on the far bank of the Guadalete at dusk and Arcos de la Frontera arranges itself in layers: the river and its green iron bridge at the bottom, a band of trees, then the white town climbing the ridge, and at the very top the tower of the Basilica of Santa María and the sheer sandstone face of the Peña Nueva catching the last light. This poster keeps that view and finishes it the way a Belle Époque sheet would: ivory, teal and gold, white lilies, and a name in large letters across the top.
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A photograph, held as a poster. The vintage travel series takes a real view and gives it the manners of an early European railway sheet. Here the source is our own photograph of Arcos de la Frontera at dusk, taken from across the Guadalete. The poster is the interpretation. It is not the photograph, and it does not pretend to be.
Location: Arcos de la Frontera, Sierra de Cádiz, province of Cádiz, Andalusia
Old town: Historic-Artistic Ensemble since 1962
Subject: The white town, the Peña Nueva cliff and the Guadalete river at sunset
Photograph: Panorama of the hilltop town of Arcos de la Frontera at dusk
Poster: Sapiens Verbum
Work: Art Nouveau travel poster
A white town on the frontier
Arcos stands on a long sandstone ridge on the right bank of the Guadalete, which loops around the foot of the rock and flows on toward Jerez and the Bay of Cádiz. The Romans called the place Arx-Arcis, the fortress on high ground, and under Moorish rule it became Medina Arkos, for a time the seat of its own taifa kingdom. Ferdinand III took it in 1250, and Alfonso X brought it under Castilian control in 1264. The words de la Frontera recall the centuries when this was the edge between Christian and Moorish Spain.
At the top of the ridge are the Castle of the Dukes of Arcos and the Basilica of Santa María de la Asunción, raised over the remains of a mosque, with a Plateresque-Gothic main front and an unfinished tower repaired after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Nearby the Mirador de la Peña Nueva looks straight down the cliff to the river. Arcos is usually counted as the western gateway to the Route of the White Towns, the Pueblos Blancos of the Sierra de Cádiz.
The Art Nouveau travel poster
The photograph stays as the bones. The cypresses stand on the left, the arched iron bridge crosses the river in the middle, the golden face of the cliff holds the centre, and the church tower still marks the top of the ridge, exactly where the lens put them. What the poster adds is what a sheet for a station wall needed and a landscape photograph did not: a frame, period lettering, and a palette of antique ivory, deep teal, sage green and golden ochre.
The lettering is ARCOS in large deep-teal capitals on an ivory cartouche, with DE LA FRONTERA beneath it, ANDALUCÍA in red and ESPAÑA below. White lilies climb from the corners, a small vignette of the town crowns the arch, and a ribbon at the foot reads HISTORIA, PAISAJE, LUZ. The photograph’s pink and violet sky turns to a warmer watercolour of orange, rose and blue, and the river takes the colour of the sunset. Arcos is still Arcos. The border is the only fiction.
The photograph behind the poster
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The source is a wide panorama made at the blue hour, from the riverbank below the town. The green of the trees and reeds fills the foreground, the Guadalete runs in a dark curve toward the bridge, and above it the houses climb from the river to the crest, their windows just starting to light. Over everything, streaks of pink and violet cloud cross a turquoise sky. It is not a survey plate and not a library record. It is our own photograph, and Sapiens Verbum also made the design and the interpretation. A buyer of the poster is not getting the photograph. They are getting the travel sheet made from it.
Seeing it for yourself
Walk up through the narrow streets of the old town to the Plaza del Cabildo, between the castle and the basilica, and lean over the rail of the Mirador de la Peña Nueva for the drop to the river. Then come back down to the Guadalete at sunset to see the view in this poster. The same town is the subject of other photographs on this blog: Arcos de la Frontera at dusk above the Guadalete and a dramatic view of Arcos de la Frontera.
The series continues with other posters made from photographs: Inside Cádiz Cathedral, Redes, Ares, a Galician fishing port and Ferrol and the Juan Sebastián Elcano, and with the European cities, Prague, Old Town Square and the Týn Church, Amsterdam, Dam Square and the Nieuwe Kerk and Vienna, The Staatsoper and the Ringstrasse.
Bring the white town of Arcos de la Frontera to your wall as a vintage travel poster from the Sapiens Verbum print shop.
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💬 Over to you: The photograph records the evening. The poster sends you there. Which one would you hang? Tell us in the comments.
More from the town in the Arcos de la Frontera series, and more posters in the Vintage Travel Poster series.
Sources
Wikipedia — Arcos de la Frontera
Turismo de Arcos — Discover Arcos
Panorama of the hilltop town of Arcos de la Frontera at dusk
Sapiens Verbum — Arcos de la Frontera Art Nouveau travel poster
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