Cortijo el Castano, Nr Orgiva, Andalucia, Spain
As forecast, today is slightly cooler and with a bit of cloud about. Snow may fall today on the highest peaks nearby (11,000 ft). We are trying to think about how our guests might approach their first complete day and so have decided that our first trip would be somewhere local - a trip into the foothills of the Sierra Neveda mountains to see some of the local "white villages".
So we drive through the local town, Orgiva, and out on the winding roads to our first stop - Pampaneira. This is a typical example of a small "white village" and has loads of local craft shops, which we are soon having a good look round. Linda is keen on rugs and pottery, I am buying loads of guidebooks to the whole Alpujarras region and to places like Granada. Every shop seems to have Chris Stewart's three books - Driving over Lemons, A Parrot in the Pepper Tree and The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society - which are set in this area of Spain. His books are even available in Spanish. He lives very close to Orgiva and has really put the area on the map. Linda has been reading his books over the last week or so to put her in the mood for the trip. Nigel and Zoe also seem to have quite a lot of dealings with Manola who features in the books.
Linda outside one of the many craft shops selling rugs and other local products
We have lunch in the main square. Linda has potatoes with peppers - which is a dish mentioned in Chris Stewart's books as a major part of the local diet - while I have a plate of various local hams and sausages, which also comes with potatoes and peppers. We are joined by a scraggy dog who obviously knows how to get titbits from people. A scraggy haired guitarist who looks quite a lot like the dog plays in the square while we eat and is pretty good.
The scraggy dog in Pampaneira
Scraggy guitarist in the main square of Pampaniera surrounded by local rugs
Capileira and Bubion - more white villages - from the road above Pampaneira
From Pampaneira, we drive on towards Trevelez. This is one of the places I most wanted to visit locally as it is the obvious starting point for a walking attempt on Mount Mulhacen, the highest mountain in the Sierra Nevada mountains at about 11,400ft. Some of the walking guides I have for the area feature this walk, but it is a tough one. Maybe five or six hours to the summit. Also next May it will still have snow on it, so a far tougher proposition. Trevelez is a famous producer of hams and there are loads of stores selling complete hams, yet we haven't seen any pigs. Do they import the hams and bring them all the way into the mountains to process them? We continue round the valley to Torvizcon and then back down to Orgiva.
For dinner tonight we decide to try Orgiva, just a couple of kms down the road, so armed with Nigel's hand written map showing tapas bars and all the restaurants they know, we set off for a look round. We settled in a place that looked quite promising, for fish soup (which was excellent), tuna steaks, more ham selctions and more potatoes, washed down with a bottle of local red wine which we'd never heard of. Not bad at all we thought.
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