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Holiday Walks in the Alpujarra Jeremy Rabjohns |
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Revised in 2006!
The most up-to-date and accurate collection of walks for this wild and beautiful region of Spain, conveniently located between the busy Costa del Sol and the cosmopolitan city of Granada. The intended audience is independent travellers with a sense of adventure. £9.95 For updates please
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Contents | Location | The Alpujarra | Sample Walk
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The Alpujarra is a dramatic part of Andalucia in Southern Spain. Terraced farmland, dramatic mountains and ancient Moorish villages provide the perfect environment for walkers who love to experience Spain at its wildest and most authentic - far away from the populous "costas". The region has come to prominence recently with the best-seller "Driving Over Lemons" (Chris Stewart). Though seemingly remote, it is easy to reach from both Granada in the north and from all of the coastal resorts along the Costa del Sol. So this really is a chance to get away from it all! Jeremy Rabjohns lives in the Alpujarra and has been leading walks there for 15 years. His book contains 27 walks from 5 to 25km based on villages typical of the region. No other guide is as accurate or up-to-date as this - and scarcely any other book provides such an abundance of background information, which can only be appreciated by exploring the Alpujarra on foot. An exploration of Granada is included - demonstrating that there is more to discover than the famous Alhambra. |
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The Walks Capileira Village Stroll - 2½ hours including visits Capileira - Mulhacén - Capileira - Circular route omitting the hostal, 7½ to 10 hours including rests. Capileira to hostal 6 to 8 hours including rests. Hostal to Capileira 4½ to 6 hours including rests. Capileira and the river - 2 hours plus picnic time. Bubión - River Valley - Capileira - Bubión - 3½ hours plus any time spent in Capileira. Bubión - O Sel ing - Bubión - 5 hours plus rests and visiting time. Easily shortened by 2 hours. La Taha de Pitres Linking the main villages of La Taha (de Pitres) Six Villages of La Taha and the Gorge - 4-5 hours including rests and diversions. 8 hours if including a mid-summer siesta. A short stroll above Pitres - 1½-3 hours depending on capacity to dawdle. The best Alpujarran path - 4 hours walking but better treated as an all day walk, with picnic and diversions 6 hours or more. Trevelez The Río Trevelez and the Río Culo de Perro - 6 hours. 8 hours including riverside siesta. Las Siete Lagunas - 3,000m - 7½ to 10 hours for the return
trip. Bérchules A long half day from Bérchules - 4 to 5 hours. A long day in the Río Grande - 7½ - 9 hours PLUS STOPS. Start early and make sure there are enough daylight hours. A Short Stroll above Bérchules - 2 hours. Mecina Bombarón Both Sides of the Valley - 4½ hours walking, 5-7 including rest, picnics, paddling etc. The Acequias - 3 hours walking. 4 or 5 hours for those who take their dawdling seriously. Peñon del Puerto, 2,750m - 5½ to 8 hours Yegen La Salud (fountain of health) - A leisurely 2½ hours Sendero de Gerald Brenan - 1½ to 2½ hours plus 1 hour for the La Puente return. Las Encinas - 3½ - 4½ hours Yegen - Mecina Bombarón, 1½ - 2½ hours Mecina Bombarón - Yegen, 5 - 7 hours total circular route. Miscellaneous Walks Puerto Juviléy - 3 hours walking plus paddling and picnic time. Río Guadalfeo, Cástaras and Notaez - 4 to 5 hours plus a possible 2 hour diversion. Haza de Lino, Sierra de la Contraviesa - 4 to 5 hours plus rests. Juviles, Timar - 3 to 5 hours, more for serious dawdlers and picnickers. Granada City How to visit Granada A bit of city life - From 2 hours upwards. The Albaicín - It depends on your interests but I suggest mid-morning through lunch to evening. Around the Alhambra Hill - There is too much in this walk to enjoy in one day. Appendices Top of Page | Contents | Location | The Alpujarra | Sample Walk |
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The Alpujarra
Flora and fauna With this range of climates it is not surprising
to find a great variety of vegetation zones and habitats. Top of Page | Contents | Location | The Alpujarra | Sample Walk Walk 1. Capileira village stroll Time: 2½ hours including visits Notes: Never leaves the village, use the town plan to help the navigation. Best done between mid-morning and lunchtime (2pm) to make sure everything is open and functioning. On Mondays and Tuesdays some establishments close and so it may be best to plan around that. Start at the kiosk, newsagent/information centre
on the main road. |
| On the downhill section of c. Real is a
little courtyard filled with flowers and greenery. You would think
it to be a little over the top. Apart from the pleasure of having
the plants there is a practical reason for so much greenery. You
can feel the cooling effect that so many leaves have, by virtue
of their transpiration. You notice the same effect when walking
into a tree filled gully, the temperature drops noticeably over
and above the effect of shade. Join c. Escuelas and turn left, then right into c. Mentidero on the edge of the village with the valley at its feet. The museum 'Museo Alpujarreño de Pedro Antonio de Alarcón' is in c. Mentidero and is worth a quick visit. A small charge is made and the door is usually shut even during its open hours. Knock and you will be let in. Pedro Antonio de Alarcón was a 19th-century poet and writer who visited the Alpujarra and wrote what has become one of the classic travel books on the area. The book is for sale in all the gift/book shops and it is interesting to get a 100 year old romantic's view. As far as exhibits go perhaps the most interesting are tools and implements housed in what were stables on the ground floor. |
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| If you are interested in agriculture, woodwork,
fabrics or weaving you will find something interesting to see.
The wooden sledge type things under the wooden pitch forks are what were and are used to thresh on the eras and the wooden boxes are standard measures of grain by volume. The wooden forks I think are particularly appealing; grown in one piece, from the almez tree (celtis australis) which tends to branch with various shoots from the same point and then helped with a bit of training and pruning. You might grow a new fork in three or four years so think ahead and look for a suitable tree if you think you might need one. The joiners bench too, is special but not unique. They occasionally turn up in cortijos still occupied by older people. The hand carving of threads like these must have been a skill much in demand. The grape and olive presses, of which there would have been hundreds, used to have a wooden screw thread of much greater diameter than these, of olive or chestnut timber. (See also the museum house in Bubión church square.) At the crossroads go straight over, down the steps into c. Horno. Keep on the level c. Horno until passing the bakers sign, Horno de Luisa. You must go into the bakers on the pretext of buying something. You will see the huge dome of the brick oven, this is pre-heated with firewood and the dough put in when the fire has done its job and died down. The ash is scraped to the back and the dough put in to cook. The large wooden trough to the left of the counter is an artesa, you will have seen one in the museum. This is standard equipment for hand mixing large quantities of food, in this case bread dough. If you just want a normal long thin loaf ask for, una barra, [oo-na ba-rra]. Another good choice if you want a bread that keeps longer is pan de aceite, [pan day a-thay-i-tay], bread with olive oil in which sometimes comes with a sugar coating. With luck Luisa may be shovelling the bread out of the oven with that great long handled spatula as you arrive. Part way down c. Cerezo when in sight of a flower bedecked balcony on a bend lower down, take the alley to the right. It is a nice cool alley with a shady tinao for each house. It curls round to the left. Keep turning left and rejoin c. Cerezo on the bend just below the flower strewn, triangular, balcony. Turn right and downhill, take the steps down to the right. Pass more flowery corners and follow the road around to the left to enter c. Fuente Cipres. You may have noticed mysterious hanging polythene bags of water and polythene bottles of water around doorsteps and flower pots. These I am assured are to ward off 2 different sorts of pests: flies and urinating dogs. We are left to wonder how they work but the experience is that they do, perhaps in both cases, on taking an initial sniff they are frightened away by a huge reflection! Continue along c. Cipres and take a right turn into c. Moral and follow it to its end at the very bottom of the village. C.Tajo or cliff street for obvious reasons. C. Tajo followed to its extreme, passes out of the bottom of the villlage towards the south. It becomes a path leading down to the river at puente molino and provides a link with walk 4. Leaving the fuente on the left pass out of the plaza up and left. Keep to the right and turn right, up the steps under the low, covered, alley (tinao) that zigzags up to join c. Vicario to the left. Turn left at the end of c. Silenco, to c. Horno. Another chance to visit the bread shop if you missed it on the way down. Turn left to pass the bakers and right at the end of the street, uphill. There is quite a nice dead end alley c. Quinque on the left just before the fuente. Pass the fuente and go left uphill, passing the supermarket. After the supermarket branch right into c. Carmen which leads to the church. After climbing up from the bottom of the village you deserve a sit down in pleasant surroundings. Pass through the tiny shop of the bodego, full of interesting local food produce, and take a seat in the back room. In summer it's cool and in winter a fire burns. The room speaks for itself and so will the wine; you may not like what it says but it's worth a try. Vino costa joven, [beano costa hob-en] is my favourite but in the interests of a full investigation you should try the aged version, vino viejo, [beano vee-eh-hoe], or the sweet version which goes down easily on a cold day, vino dulce, [beano dull-thay]. I like the aged, stained furniture as much as anything else here. The construction of the tables is typical of those seen in every old house that hasn't been improved, with chipboard and formica. The chairs too; often they are apparently ridiculously low or made for children. The reality is that they are not made for sitting at tables but for performing tasks on the floor with a bucket between your feet, or for cooking over the fire in the hearth, for which they are eminently suitable. Enjoy your wine and find your own way back to the start point of the walk, it's uphill. Top of Page | Contents | Location | The Alpujarra | Sample Walk
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