Las Alpujarras

Villages of Capileira, Pampaneira, and Bubilon

"If you're at peace with yourself and the world around you, then the flies won't trouble you" --Chris Stewart, Driving Over Lemons

This is a quote that I jotted down in my journal last summer, as I read Driving Over Lemons in preparation for my trip to Spain. The book, a true story, is about a British man who leaves his life in England and buys a farm in the Alpujarras in southern Spain. Last weekend, as I hiked through the Alpujarras, I began to relive his story.

First of all, the Alpujarras are a series of small villages scattered throughout the foothills of the Sierra Nevada; I think the word poetic would be the best way to describe the simple, inspiring tranquility of towns. The buildings are all a pristine white with colorful flowers hanging from the windows, the cobblestone paths narrow and crooked. The white-washed walls are the design of the original inhabitants--the Moors--who knew that the white would reflect the sun and thus keep the houses cooler.

Navigating the trail

Connected by hiking trails, you can walk from one village to another, and up the other side of the gorge to get a panoramic view of all three villages. Our guidebook was very detailed and took us through every step; however, the "slightly overgrown" path that it warned us against was in reality a large thicket of thorn bushes--at one point we even had to get on our knees and crawl! Nevertheless, after making it through the thicket we were rewarded with panoramic views of the little white villages, scattered along the mountainside amidst terraces of orchards, fields of grass and green brush.

Hillside ruins

Continuing on we passed ruins of farms and flour mills--crumbling stone buildings, the wooden roofs long gone. Immediately I thought of Stewart's farm, as described in his book--it lay on the 'wrong side' of the gorge, which meant that in the springtime when the river swelled it would wash out the bridge that connected his farm to the towns across the gorge, and he would be stranded. The ruins we passed were also on the 'wrong side' or the gorge, and I imagine that they were abandoned for this reason. (When we reached the river we even found the foundation of a bridge that had been washed away long ago.) However, Stewart didn't abandon his farm; he still lives there to this day--in the Alpujarras, it's hard not to be "at peace with yourself and the world around you", and Stewart, recognizing this, didn't let the flies--or raging river--trouble him.