Granada and Mulhacén

Text and Photos by Morgan Smith

March, 2000. Boulderite Ken Wright, president of Wright Water Engineers, and I are on the windswept summit of Mulhacén (11,425´), the highest mountain in continental Spain.

Ken points to the northwest and says, “ Look, there’s Granada!”

Turning to the south, we can see the Mediterranean about twenty-five miles away. This area has everything: the historical city of Granada; the surrounding towns; an attractive coastline; and the highest, most accessible mountains in Spain.

Granada and environs

The Alhambra, high on a hill overlooking Granada, is one of the most significant architectural sites in Europe. Its three sets of buildings—the gardens of the Generalife, the Alcazaba, and the Royal Palace, built by Moorish rulers between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries,—make Granada an essential stop.

It’s also particularly “American” because Washington Irving, who lived there in 1829 and wrote Tales of the Alhambra while in residence, propelled the restoration of the Alhambra.

Flamenco

Granada is famous for flamenco music. There are “espectáculos” or shows that cater mostly to tourists and feature dancing. Private clubs or “ peñas flamencas,” on the other hand, offer a much purer form of singing and guitar playing. It is all, however, enjoyable as well as inexpensive.

At the recommendation of our hotel, we went to Los Tarantos and Venta de Gallo, both located in caves in the Sacromonte gypsy area on the edge of Granada.

The whitewashed caves decorated with copper pans and utensils, the enthusiasm and generally high quality of the musicians, and the low cost (about $20 including transportation to and from the hotel) made this a very enjoyable evening.

My favorite, however, was La Peña de Platería, one of the oldest private flamenco clubs in Spain. Our expectations fell as the singer, Jose Maldonado from the small town of Motril, fiddled endlessly with the microphone, apologized for being exhausted from an all night family wedding the previous night.Then he closed his eyes, thrust his head back, began tapping his thigh with one hand and squeezing the shoulder of his nephew, the guitar player with the other hand.

Suddenly out came a deep, raspy but extraordinary voice.

Around Granada

Forty miles east of Granada is Guadix where many of the residents still live in caves. In fact, we stayed in a cave—the Aparta-Hotel Cuevas Antonio de Alarcón. Our accommodations consisted of three bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom and a living room for about $55 a night.

The hotel’s modest looking restaurant serves a superb “choto” or baby goat stew. With a day’s notice, they can also prepare all sorts of traditional local dishes with unusual names like andrajos, gurullos, or talbinas.

Just beyond Guadix are the roadside pottery shops of Purullena. Then another ten miles to the east is La Calahorra, a combination castle/fortress built on a bleak reef of rock by Don Rodrigo Mendoza after he had become estranged from the court of Ferdinand and Isabella in the early 1500s. The walls are ten feet thick and the second floor interior is Italian marble.

Unfortunately it is only open for tours on Wednesdays.

The home of the famous Spanish poet, Federico García Lorca in Fuentevaqueros has been turned into a fascinating small museum, and a monument to him has just been completed near Viznar where Franco’s supporters murdered him at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.

Montefrío, northwest of Granada, has a spectacular hilltop castle. About two miles east is La Peña de los Gitanos, a long cliff at the base of which are a number of dolmens built by early Iberian tribes.

For a Westerner, however, much of the charm of this area is simply driving through a countryside of green olive trees with silver tinted leaves; whitewashed farm buildings with alert, little spotted dogs standing guard; earth that suddenly changes from reddish browns to gray; smoke rising from small fires of olive branches; hills that surge up to jagged limestone summits; and a scattering of bright orange trees in the stream bottoms.

The mountains

If you want a short outing that will allow you to say you’ve climbed the second highest mountain in continental Spain, you can drive about an hour from Granada to the end of the Sierra Nevada road, then walk perhaps two to three hours to the summit of Veleta ( 11,389 feet).

Our Mulhacén climb, however, was much more interesting. We started in Capileira, a tiny, white washed town that seems to flow down the slopes on the southern side of the Alpujarra mountains, less than two hours by car from Granada. A young guide from Granada, Germán Guerrero led us up a long, brownish valley of the Rio Poqueira which is actually just a small stream. Up and up for hours, it seemed, past tiny farms clinging to the steep slopes, fields of corn and grain, round stone platforms where farmers used to crush and separate their wheat, summer corrals for sheep, irrigation ditches perhaps centuries old.

Once stopping for water, Germán dipped his cup in the crystal clear stream and offered it to me.

“No,” warned Ken, holding out his iodine-reeking water bottle.

Five minutes after gulping down Germán’s cupful, we rounded a bend and there were three hundred sheep grazing along the streambed.

Finally we crossed a windswept hummock of ground and there directly ahead was the newly constructed Refugio Poqueira. It was evening, the sun setting and the wind howling, and the refugio was almost empty. Lucas and Manuel, the hut managers, fixed us a huge meal of soup, pasta, ham fried in cheese with scrambled eggs and fried potatoes, lots of water and a local red wine.

By 7:45 a.m., it was getting light and we were on the trail, winding upwards through rock outcroppings, great hummocks of grass, across little frozen rivlets. Ahead was a long rock wall called the Puntal de la Caldera, at the base of which there is a small hut where we could snack out of the wind.

From there it was a steep, winding slog up a windswept ridge, in and out of the sunlight to the frigid summit which we reached at 10:45 a.m.

I had been to Granada a number of times but never fully appreciated it until that bitter cold March morning when Ken and I looked down from Mulhacén. Don’t just see the Alhambra and rush on. Take four or five days for the mountains, the music, and the surrounding towns.