Madrid-Grazalema was a day of disasters alternating with narrow escapes from further disasters. It was a reminder of the importance of propitiating the travel gods before departure. It's understandable to be squeamish about this, but millions of chickens die every day for less important reasons.
The train was cancelled. After standing around in a ticket office holding a number, I booked another one via Cordoba. We got to Cordoba after the departure time of the connecting train, but that one was also late. When we pulled into Ronda in a rainstorm, half an hour late, I couldn't find the driver who was supposed to take me to Grazalema; but he popped up after some anxious texting.
Finally, I discovered I'd left my plug adapter in Madrid, which would mean no GPS or camera and would leave it up to the outside world to find me should anything happen. Probably, an exhausted runner would appear one day to gasp out the news that someone I've never heard of has posted something I don't care about on LinkedIn. Grazalema is small, but after waiting out the siesta, I found a ferreteria ("ironmonger") who sold chargers. In triumphant relief, I charged all my devices, whether they needed it or not, and thought steep, whitewashed Grazalema, as its town sign says, uno de los pueblos mas bonitos de Espana.
Around Grazalema
The next day was a circular route: to the top of the village, past a construction zone proudly funded by a Programa de Fomento de Empleo Agrario, then down the street and around some road works where more agrarian employment was being fomented, and finally off into the mountains.
The mountains are wrinkled, blinding white, clung to by gnarled conifers, and circled by soaring griffon vultures, and the passes and pastures they enclose are covered in loose white rock. A sign somewhere claims that people once somehow raised crops here, but now the land supports nothing but sheep, and those of the least discerning kind. Some rough stone walls support corrugated metal roofs, and from one of these a dog barks at me, angrily but with a note of puzzlement: clearly a sheep rustler, but where's his black cowboy hat?
There are steep and windswept paths you sweat up in a t-shirt and shiver down in a hoodie and toque and quiet bowls of grass with eroded limestone blocks like abandoned experimental sculptures or the toppled columns of some weird civilization. These are eerie places where it's easy to imagine cowled villagers gathering at standing stones to sacrifice for a good tourist season.
Grazalema to Benaocaz
The next morning, a puzzle. I wanted to label my luggage for transfer. A team effort involving the hotel staff and some extremely questionable Spanish -- I won't say whose -- finally produced a row of tiny sticky labels that immediately fell off. I borrowed clear tape, which also fell off, so I wedged the whole mess into a zipper and left. I don't look for pity; I know others have suffered more than I from Andalusia's adhesives crisis.
On a quiet path I met two old women and three dogs, which ran up and barked. Why are Spanish dogs never happy to see me? The first climb is a little one to an outcropping where a group of ibex graze unconcernedly while their young scamper and their designated watchman eyes me warily. The much longer climb leads to a stony col where there are flat rocks to rest on. A jogger who has just come up this brutal climb trots past, asks if I'm okay, switches to English, praises the view, and says a cheery goodbye, all without stopping or letting his heart rate fall below 400.
Wind rips across the pass and the trail edges along jagged, crumbling peaks before going through a rusty wire gate bearing a variety of unfriendly signs and entering what the route description calls "an open area" where "route finding is difficult". It advises you to look for a blue marker on a rock and then pass between two trees. There are many trees and many million rocks. There are cairns, which is nice, but which trail do they mark, and when were they built? Maybe this whole region was home to a neolithic people known as the "Rock-Stacking Culture".
There's a ruined farmhouse with two surviving walls, one of them cracked up the middle with both halves resting on a chock-stone or two, and then small mountain streams to cross and old stone walls to pass through, and then cow pastures where the track turns muddy, because cows make a mess of everything. The next novelty is an enclosed field with a single pig so enormous I thought at first that it was a bull. I've never had dealings with pigs before, but I seem to have the knack, because it didn't kill me.
Most of the villages start as a bright white gleam in the distance, but you come down into Benaocaz suddenly. It lies up against the base of a cliff, and its very top layer is one of brick ruins and cobbled streets, the "Nazarene quarter" from the Arab period and after. Some buildings have been made habitable again with a few bricks and a lick of paint, of others only part of a wall survives. Andalusia has a lot to offer ruin-lovers: long-abandoned homes, decayed farms, and stone walls that peter out or slump into loose piles of stone. It's sometimes hard to understand the purpose of the stone walls. I think some of them may have been built out of boredom.
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| "Welcome, hikers!" |
Around Benaocaz
The inn is on the far side of the village, above a very busy restaurant staffed by servers in blue uniforms. The room has raftered ceilings and is bare, white, and scrupulously clean, with an iron headboard that clangs like a gong when you lean against it and a heater that begins making loud rattling noises promptly each night at 3AM.
There is one food store in Benaocaz, and that is Juan's: an unmarked door opening onto a counter with room for one person to stand in front of it. It's less like a shopping in a supermarket than opening a kitchen cupboard to find a helpful Spanish man inside. Juan's reopening after siesta is an event people turn out for, and there's a lot of pressure when your turn comes. But what Juan lacks in space he makes up for in genial efficiency.
Benaocaz seems like a happy village. On weekend afternoons, people sit on restaurant patios to talk loudly and wait for Juan's to open, or lean on standing tables outside tiny cafes to chuckle amiably. The doors of many homes stand open, and friendly collarless cats make their rounds, checking that everything is as it should be.
I was two nights in Benaocaz, so there was a day for hikes around the town. The one to the Ojo de Moro goes all the way down the slope, past the bins for old clothes and the snack truck parked for the season, into the unmowed grass by a traffic circle, through one of Andalusia's broken wire gates, which, like all the others, creaks like the door to a vampire's castle, past a sheep pen with angry and mistrustful dogs, along rocky paths, over an ancient stone arch bridge, and up a slope to a sign that says 'Fin de Sendero'. This is the Scenic Spot, a place where griffon vultures breed and, when not breeding, soar overhead in their dozens waiting patiently for something to die. The designated scenic spots are often not much more scenic than all the other spots, but this is because most of the region is scenic.
That took only half a day, so I went down to the restaurant for a traditional Andalusian meal of fried rice served on a roof tile and then picked a dashed line on my GPS app to follow. This ran long more steep dirt tracks and past stretches of tormented wild olive trees. At the end of it, I found the Scenic Spot firmly in the possession of a herd of cows, but I outflanked them by climbing onto the deeply-eroded limestone ridge alongside and caught a glimpse or two of what may have been a scenic river.
Benaocaz to Montejaque
Breakfast was two pieces of toasted bread, fruit, tomatoes, yogurt, roughly a pound of cheese, cake, and a ramekin of something like chocolate icing. I've resisted the hype about the "Mediterranean diet" for too long. It has a lot to recommend it.
There's a long uphill drag into the sun on a quiet concrete road. A flock of sheep have wandered onto it and an ancient shepherd courteously waves it off to the side; so much like a tourism commercial that you have to wonder if he's some sort of plant. Then a forest or plantation of Holm oaks where free-running pigs gorge on acorns and a gate that leads into a surprising flat valley.
Here, a very friendly dog, restoring the average of all Spanish dogs, came over to say hello, putting paws on me and licking my arm devotedly. I wondered if he would follow me, but he didn't. He knew his duty, and it was to stay by the gate, greet visitors, and redeem the reputation of the dogs of Spain. In my view, he is a good boy.
The track turns off gravel and onto dirt, which is a relief, until it turns to mud and you remember how great gravel is. A sharp right takes you up into endless switchbacks up the high wall of the valley. Someone did take a lot of trouble over these trails, if not over the marking of them. Then there's a more level stroll over another field of limestone chunks and then steeply up and then a plunge down into a newly-planted orchard at one end of the green valley. Beyond that is a soggy cow pasture scored by a thousand tiny streams. Staying to the left, where the ground is higher and the cows farther away, there's one of the region's many low, roofless stone shelters, a good place to withstand a siege should the cows attack. These are incongruous places, these blessed little fertile valleys in the dry, wrinkled mountains.
Through the gate that exits the cows' pasture are empty fields with regular piles of stone, as though someone has been very gradually clearing them by mounding up the loose rock. This is a project that might have been going on for millennia. It's not clear that the rate of rock-piling exceeds the rate at which new rocks tumble down from the mountains.
At the end of the valley is a flock of sheep and then a gravel road that leads down into barren country. Here, there's a rare human encounter: an official-looking vehicle pulls up ahead, a woman gets out holding her phone up in front of her as though recording video, walks straight towards me, says hello as she passes, slips on the gravel, falls over, says she's okay, and gets back in her car and drives off. She was the first person I'd seen all day, and it may have been a rare chance for her to record a hiker.
More rocky fields, with rock walls piled up to separate one field of rocks from the next, and wire fences sometimes running alongside to underline the point. Whoever owns these rocks, they don't want there to be any doubt about it. There are more informational plaques, mostly about birds and karst. There are a lot about karst. The authorities have bet heavily on karst tourism, and I'm not saying it won't pay off.
From here there is a very long road of white gravel that leads eventually to Montejaque. Once past the livestock, it's completely still. Close to the village, a car goes by, and then there's a woman sitting by the side of the road frowning at her hands, and then nothing at all for another hour. This is a very, very quiet part of the world.
Montejaque, too, is empty and still, as though the inhabitants have fled some danger you haven't heard about or it was built for an atomic bomb test. This is partly because I arrived during siesta; in fact, at least seven people live here. But it's very different from the merry, crowded restaurants of Benaocaz.
Around Montejaque
The inn is run by a lovely old woman, and staying in it feels like visiting someone's grandmother. I hadn't planned anything particularly depraved, but you still feel constrained by the dainty touches and by walking past the proprietress watching TV and waving cheerily when you come in or go out. Keith Moon would have spent a quiet night here and made the bed when he left. The building is also slightly askew, so that the doors, old paired ones with ancient locks and enormous keys, wedge shut rather than close. It's dark, with only a few dim yellow lights, and the sink is a ceramic bowl with a curtain below to conceal the plumbing and, less successfully, the fact that it leaks.
Breakfast is the customary thousand calories of dairy fat, and then the question, as for all visitors to Montejaque, is which cave to go to. Montejaque has a "speleology centre" and a heavily cave-based economy. It lies within walking distance of several, but most sound silly. The Cueva del Hundidero seems like the pick of them.
The walk sounded bleak, and it is. It runs not on the gravel track I arrived on, but along the main road. There are a few old men shuffling along the roadside, some with sticks and some with their hands behind their backs. It's a route that maintains both fitness and alertness, because the shoulders are narrow. There are no other walkers on the next stretch, which is long, curvy, steep, shoulderless, and full of blind corners. Google and a GPS app estimated 40 minutes for the walk, but I think that may have been a life expectancy. Even though the passage of a car is an event that happens every five minutes or so, it is not a terrific route for pedestrians.
You also do not simply rock up and stroll into the Cueva del Hundidero. You squeeze down a dirt path to a larger gravel one and come eventually to a fork with cryptic signs. One way leads through a creaky gate, over the top of a charming but singularly unsuccessful dam (the karst around it is, it turned out, leaky), along the cliff face, and then turns into a via ferrata. The other goes down via essentially infinite stone steps to the bottom of the gorge, where a sign halfheartedly tries to convince you that you are at the 'fin de sendero'. But the path goes on to the cave entrance, a looming fissure 50m high leading into a cathedral-like space. If it were less clammy, it could be a gateway to the underworld.
The cave offers fluttering bats, dripping water, slick rocks, moaning echoes with no obvious source, and light fading to absolute blackness. I get to use my headlamp, which I brought partly in case I get caught out after dark, but mostly because I think it's neat. The cave goes on to link up with other caves in a vast network, but it seems smart to stop a couple of hundred metres in. Maybe I was still on a dairy high, but it seemed like a fantastic cave. Whether you're a paleolithic kin group or a hiker who makes strange decisions, it has everything you might want. Karst: it truly is amazing.
All the dread of re-ascent I felt on the way down was amply justified.
Up at the top of Montejaque, where I went after a long rest, is a 'karst garden' with a cat colony, many choice pieces of karst, two picnic tables, sweeping views of the town, and a couple of odd fenced-off shanties, from one of which faint hammering sounds come. The slab of rock above is deeply fissured, like a dirty stone glacier poised to crush the village to dust. A bilingual informational plaque says, in a phrase I probably would have used if I'd thought of it, that the karst has a "ruiniform aspect". Quite a few properties up here have 'se vende' signs, usually with German and English translations. On the way down, two middle-aged Englishmen are trying to load a large wall unit into a small car. "Maybe come up at your end. It's a big bastard."
Montejaque to Ronda
The last stage goes to Ronda, and it starts with a cobblestone road that would be charming if it weren't canted up at 30 degrees. You can't help but have occasional thoughts about how the route could be improved. "This would be a good place for a sidewalk." "This would be a good mountain to blast a tunnel through." This section, at least, is part of a well-marked trail, so is easy to follow.
At the top of the ridge is a small "hermitage" built to commemorate the end of a 17th century plague. The vultures have found a juicy thermal here, and are patrolling in large numbers. It's tempting to lie still and try to lure them in, but it was probably cruel enough panting up the switchbacks like a dying animal.
Along the dirt path is another reassuring marker about the plague definitely being over and an almost overwhelmingly impressive collection of overturned bathtubs. A grumpy-looking hiker with a wrist cast, the only one I see today, stumps up towards the pass. The route goes along wide dirt roads that my tracker's eye tells me are much-used by tractors. Along the ridge are more serene flights of vultures. It's hard to understand how they do enough business to survive in such numbers. The cliffs behind are dirty gray streaked with orange, and the November Andalusian sun is at a low angle but blindingly bright.
The route swings along a little river and begins to smell of sheep manure. You don't smell the free-grazing livestock in the mountain valleys swept by sanitizing breezes, but here animals are concentrated in pens. Every property also has guard dogs who start barking while you're still well out and are still yelping triumphantly at your retreating back when you're well past. Next, there's a ruined building full of tires and sheep droppings, with the graffiti that is the clearest sign that a city is near.
Sloping up yet another ridge past another sheep farm, there is a loose dog. Fortunately, it's the size of a kitten and just sits nonchalantly until I'm well up the road, when it starts barking after me as though it had heroically chased me off, possibly so it wouldn't be left out when the other dogs were swapping yarns about how they protected their sheep and tire piles from a sinister biped in dirty trousers.
There's a forest up on the ridge with some stone ruins, and then you're looking down into a rich, orderly valley of orchards and fields. The road plummets down into it and then winds fair-mindedly among all the properties. There's a riding school, an orchard where chainsaws ring out cheerfully and are answered by more chainsaws across the valley, and another orchard with a sign rather overselling a "dangerous dog" that's napping peacefully in the sunshine.
You can see Ronda glimmering whitely at the edge of a distressingly huge cliff up ahead, and there's a roadside shrine labeled "Property of the Gardeners" where I eat a messy lunch while an olive-tree pruner of the old, pre-chainsaw school snip-snips with shears nearby. Further on, a thoughtful homeowner has set out a chair and table by the path, with prayer flags and a sign that says, in English, "have a little rest".
Finally, there's the long climb up to Ronda, past its famous arched bridge and up cobbled footpaths where other tourists appear in ones and twos and then in multitudes. The old town itself buzzes with tour groups. Harpists play Enya when you sit down to rest, and people drift by with ice cream and block sidewalks to take pictures and dance deranged comic jigs next to accordionists.
