This area is poor, the land is barren and the weather fickle, no wonder there are so many FOR SALE signs on the roadsides. We’ve read all the Chris Stewart books: Driving over Lemons, Parrot in a Pepper Tree, Almond Blossom Appreciation Society and The Last School Bus, which are set in the Alpujarras, in particular the villages around Orgiva, and we wanted to see if the scenery matched our imaginations …
The flat-roofed, square houses in the Alpujarras villages are predominantly white, but due to the recent Saharan sand-filled rain storm the buildings are now pale terracotta in colour. The trees and shrubs are also covered in an orange dusting, leaving little to distinguish between rocks, dry riverbeds and vegetation. This is a shame as the lower hills are draped in a velvet cloak of what would usually be a bottle green of pine trees, figs and esparto grass. The air carries a dust that you can’t see, but you can feel it on your lips and taste it at the back of your throat.
We are staying at a basic campsite just outside Orgiva with the sound of birds everywhere, accompanied by the jangling of bells worn by the sheep and goats and the whistling of the wind that rips through the valley. The other campers are mostly bohemian in style, some appearing to live here permanently, Dutch, Belgian, Italian, Spanish, German and English, carrying their yoga mats under their arms, knapsacks on their backs, hair in dreadlocks or very short styles and some with facial piercings. There’s a hippie commune nearby, and a naturist campsite; maybe next time…
As the mountain roads are steep, narrow and at times just tracks, we hired a car and left the camper at the campsite. The roads were VERY scary, often with vertical drops of hundreds of metres; on the minor roads there are no roadside barriers either, not for the faint-hearted. We were going to take our bikes up into the mountains but are happy to be in the faint-hearted club for the time being.
ORGIVA – 450 metres
TIJOLES
TORVIZCON – 685 metres
CASTARAS – 1,016 metres
NIELES – 994 metres
CADIAR – 919 metres
PAMPANEIRA – 1,060 metres
BUBION – 1,350 metres
CAPILEIRA – 1,436 metres
LANJARON
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