senderismo

So this weekend we took four days to go hiking in La Alpujarra, a region in the foothills of the southern Sierra Nevada. It was amazing. I feel like making this part more informative because I think people should go and I learned some helpful tidbits about the area.

Granada. If you ever come to Andalucía you will obviously go to Granada for the Alhambra and Arabic blah blah blah. It’s also easy to get from Grandada to the Alpujarras. Most significantly however, every time you order a beer in Granada, you get a free tapa. It’s unreal. You can easily drink five of the tiny beers without getting drunk. They cost about a euro each and you get free relatively delicious food every time. I don’t understand how normal restaurants stay in business there. It is entirely unnecessary to purchase dinner. (In many of the bars it is also acceptable, though not legal, to smoke whatever you may want, if that’s your bag.) We went to a really great place called La Tortuga on C. Elvira right by our hostel where you can choose your own tapa from a list (many places just give you what they have ready, but I mean really, it’s free, who cares). The other reason Granada will remain in my heart always and forever is kebap, specifically the three-euro late night delights of Kabab King (also on C. Elvira), open til 7am Thursday-Sat nights and 4am every other night and more magically delicious every hour into the madrugada. Here we met one of my favorite people so far: a Granadino who had been living in Liverpool, double fisting kebaps, hicupping and telling us about how much he loves/hates the same things in broken Spanish-British accent.
We stayed in Funky Backpacker (Cuesta de Rodrigo del Campo) on Thursday. Cool place, helpful staff, lots of young travellers, bar on the roof, free breakfast (breakfast in Spain is toast, coffee, sometimes juice). Sunday night on the way back through we stayed at Oasis (Placeta Correo Viejo), where I dominated the ping-pong table in the courtyard until I relinquished control. Hilarious bartender, tapas tour every night. I loved Funky and back it entirely, but for the same price (16 euro dorms) Oasis is definitely a little better. They even had a waffle iron and batter with breakfast. No jarabe de arce though.

The Road. Alpujarra is about 2-3 hours and 5 euro from Granada by bus. The ride is insane. The Let’s Go travel guide, which has otherwise been great, suggested renting a car to see the Alpujarras. I would argue to the contrary. Do NOT rent a car and drive to the Alpujarras unless you really, really think you can cheat death. The winding mountain roads are narrow with a rock face on one side and a sheer drop, usually without guardrail, on the other. We were delayed by an accident in which a truck took one of the countless hairpin turns too sharply and became lodged in the ditch between the road and rock face, spilling the contents from the trailer (glass bottles) all over the road. When passing through a tunnel, which is usually the width of a single car, or around a blind curve, the sensible thing to do would be to slow down and approach with caution because of unseen oncoming traffic. Contrary to norms of safety and common sense, however, the custom here is for whoever gets there first to proceed into said corner or tunnel at full speed and courteously blast the horn for the duration to warn/challenge motorists approaching from the other direction. It’s more like Cruisin USA than real driving. I recommend the bus. It’s a lot easier to ignore the threat of injury, when you aren’t in charge.

Capaleira. The first town in the Alpujarras is Lanjarrón, famous for its bottled water. It’s bigger than the towns we visited and the portero at Funky told us to get our map there (which, in retrospect, maybe we should have), but we stayed on the bus up the mountain. A little further up are three lyme-washed towns perched on the edge of the gorge of the Río Poqueiro. The highest town we visited was Capaleira. The bus stops at the bottom of town right next to one of many fountains of agua potable (super awesome) found in the Alpujarras. The toursist office is also right there, but our visits there were only moderately helpful, though pleasant. We ate at PanJulia on the main street where we tried the local specialties: patatas a la pobre, moricllo (both part of the plat Alpujarreño), trigo and sopa Alpujarreña. Some of the highest quality food I’ve had in Spain and one of the best waitresses I’ve ever had (which says a lot in a country where servers don’t give a shit about you) all for 9 euro each including beer. What a steal! We stayed one night at the Hostal Atalaya, which was cheap (26 euro double) and clean and provided lots of blankets.

Time. Spanish people think everything is far away. Basically every time I’m on foot and ask for directions people seem shocked, say dramatically ‘¡Está lejos!’ This is usually accompanied by the shaking of an open right hand back and forth in the air in front of the right shoulder and a grimace in an indication of how much suffering one will experience walking for fifteen minutes to the center of town. Accordingly, our map said the trail would take four hours. If you walked steadily, you could easily do it in two. Along the trail, a local told us it would take us another two hours from where we were to reach the abandoned town of Cepedilla. It took about 45 minutes.

The Camino. In the AM (OK noon), we headed for the Camino de la Sierra, also known as the Camino de Cepedilla, which leads up out of town along the gorge to the abandoned town of Cepedilla. Part of the trail is drivable. We received a map from said tourist office showing a big yellow loop. On separate occasions we had learned from the same tourist office that we were to follow the red, the white and the yellow trail blazes. A lot of the trail blazes had worn off the posts anyway, and at a couple of points we had to take educated guesses. I give the trail marking/tourist office map about a four out of ten. Not useless but not good. I did end up finding a really good map and information in a brochure in a tourist trap shop in Pampaneira the next day. It’s worth asking for. It has the actual distance of the trails, and more detailed maps.
The countryside reminded me at once of Ireland’s west coast and New Hampshire. The trees are changing color, the land is divided up into rectangles, and there are many abandoned, decaying, stone farmhouses. A friendly local on his mulo told us that the land had been used for farming things such as potatoes and trigo fifty years ago, but now only a small portion is still used for grazing. The ghost town of Cepedilla is unspectacular. It’s really all about the views along the gorge. It is possible to continue on from Cepedilla to Trevelez but that will have to be another time.

Pampaneira. Upon returning from the Camino de la Sierra, we grabbed our packs from the hostel and walked another half hour downhill to Pampaneira. We were now following the GR, marked with parallel red and white lines, and a red and white X if you stray. This trail, kind of the main trail from which the other trails are based, is extremely well marked and easy to follow, and continued to be so on the second part we traversed from Pampaneira the following day. The first part of that walk was on the road, and the second part was on trail more difficult than the Camino. We passed through the town of Bubión (say that one out loud) on to Pampaneira. Pampaneira’s 360 residents live on a steep incline. Viewed from a distance the houses look stacked upon steps. It is quaint. The region has become more touristed recently, as evidenced by the tour buses which pulled up to dump (mostly Spanish) people into the town for the day on Saturday and Sunday.

Names. The Alpujarras were inhabited by the Celts, The Romans, the Goths, and the Moors before being settled by Galician and Asturian farmers after the Catholic reconquista. No one I talked to seems to be in agreement on where the Portuguese-looking spellings of the place names (Capaleira, Pampaneira, Poqueiro) comes from. The Roman names seem to be the base, and then maybe some Gallego thrown in, but different people say the names come from all the afore-mentioned groups. Ya I’m empollón for that s***.