Snapshots of Andalucía
I first visited Andalucía in September of 2024.
I already knew from hiking the Camino that I love Spain.
Whenever I arrive in Spain, I immediately want to pull up a chair and stay a while.
If I am on a walk in Spain, I can’t pass a vende sign without stopping to look up the property to see how much it would be to buy a small house that I could turn into a pilgrims’ albergue, (my life plan for when my legs stop wanting to carry me so far down the road).
Because I keep returning to the Camino in northern Spain, it took me a while to get to Andalucía in the south, but now that I have been, I cannot seem to get enough of southern Spain.
Just over two years ago I signed up to lead a trip in what is known as the Sherry Triangle, just south of Seville near the coast.
Fast forward two years and I have led four trips in the region and have plans to lead three more in 2026.
So what is it about Andalucía that has swept me right off my hiking boots?
It’s actually hard to say. I feel like I am still at the beginning stages of a love affair with Andalucía that I hope will continue for many years.
What I have to share about Andalucía is not a wealth of knowledge, but more like fragmentary impressions of a place I am still getting to know.
I’m still learning what it means that the cities and villages in southern Spain have “Moorish influence.” Between the 700s and 1400s, the Moors (a word that included Arabs, Berbers, Syrians, Persians and eventually Spaniards) ruled over much of Spain. Seville, Granada and Cordoba were all developed during this time period, which is what makes them and their surrounding smaller towns and villages so architecturally unique from the rest of Europe.
Los Pueblos Blancos (white villages) were built by the Moors and they were what first drew my attention to the area. I kept seeing photographs of these whitewashed hilltop towns. The first tour I led in Andalucia was actually called Los Pueblos Blancos.
There are so many pueblos blancos that it will take me many more trips to visit them all! From their perches on high, these villages invite you from afar to come wander their tiny, winding roads.
It’s difficult to choose a favorite, but I love how in Vejer de la Frontera, the locals decorate their courtyards with plants.
And everyone has outdoor seating with a view.
The ancient practice of whitewashing these towns kept the houses cooler in the summer heat, and it served to keep the walls sterile and clean, repelling both disease and bugs.
But mostly I think the whitewashing creates an inviting feel to these towns.
Different towns add their own local flare to the decor. Locally-crocheted canopies decorate Vélez de Benaudalla and in Trevelez, the highest village in Spain, all the flowerpots have their own handmade covers.
Flowers are definitely a theme. When I come home from Spain, I want to plant pots and pots of flowers everywhere, and in all the colors of the rainbow.
Artisan tile and creative cobblestone patterns are more ways the locals differentiate their white villages.
Around every corner is another tiny surprise.
It’s easy to get lost, but also easy to find your way. You just head uphill until you can see where you are again.
Another delight of being in Andalucia is that you are never too far away from the sea.
There are over 600 miles of coastline to enjoy and everyone you meet has their favorite beach.
Because I usually fly in and out of Malaga to get to Andalucia from Bristol, I like to bookend trips with days along the Costa del Sol. The C-1 train from Malaga Airport makes the beach way too easy to access.
As soon as I arrive, I walk along the seafront and smell the charcoals burning outside every restaurant where cooks are putting fresh fish on the spit.
Patatas bravas and boquerones are the perfect seaside treat. After several visits, I finally convinced Taido to meet me here for a weekend at the end of a trip, and I think I have won him over to the delights of being in the Spanish sun so hopefully more of these views are in our future together.
I also love the province of Cadiz and some of the beaches on the western side of Andalucia, where the surfers hang out for the winds.
It’s quieter than the Costa del Sol, but not as easy to get to with public transportation. I rented a car to explore this stretch of El Palmar de Vejer for a few days after a tour.
On my first trip to Andalucia in province of Cadiz, we spent time in Jerez and El Puerto de Santa Maria, both famous for sherry.
I didn’t think I liked sherry but I had no idea that there were so many kinds. After much sherry tasting with tapas, I found a dry sherry that I enjoy: Oloroso.
We did some coastal walks and wandered through several different nature reserves.
Our walks on this trip weren’t too long. Four or five miles tops. And we almost always followed our walks with a long lunch in some beautiful place.
After lunch, if there was time, we might head to a town square for a quick sherry before a bus ride back to our hotel.
After that first trip to the Cadiz province, I signed up to go right back and lead another Andalucían adventure, but this time I would stay in one of those small hilltop white villages.
I arrived in Tolox in the Sierra de las Nieves Mountains in March of 2023 after weeks and weeks of rain, both in Britain and in Spain.
The landscape that had been brown and dusty in the previous autumn had all turned green.
Instead of sherry tasting and city visits, this time I was there for a week of local walks in the Spanish National Park: Sierra de las Nieves.
I emerged from the winter glum of the UK into the Andalucían sunshine and it was delightful.
I walked new trails and made lists of places I wanted to come back to with friends.
Every afternoon we would return to Tolox from a different direction.
The welcoming sight of the village quickly became my favorite view of the week.
We ate simple, but beautiful meals at our hotel and in local restaurants in and around the village.
One day we took buses to the nearby village of Yunquera and then made our way back to Tolox across a valley and hills in between the two villages.
We had a local guide on this trip and we learned so much about the countryside plants and trees, including what was planted in the terraced hills around the towns: mostly olives, oranges, lemons, almonds and avocados.
I don’t know when I’ve seen so many olive trees!
Our walks were closer to eight miles each day, so we carried picnic lunches and spent the whole day outside.
I had such a hearty group of walkers from the UK. I had one couple from the Isle of Wight in their 70s who walk 20 miles every Saturday.
I am reminded on these trips that a body in motion stays in motion.
If we got back early in the afternoon to Tolox, sometimes we would stop in the main town square for a drink.
But most days we were back in time for a shower, a quick rest and then a walk to dinner.
I do love a week in the hills, and the hills in the Sierra Nieves were just about as lovely as my local hills, but with less rain.
We traveled through several forests, some of which are recently planted. The entire region is a biosphere reserve, where local plants are being protected and preserved.
We enjoyed hunting for wildflowers, especially orchids and tiny little wild daffodils, just about the size of a thumb.
And in the hills, there are still remnants of where farmers packed ice down in the winter to save for when the snow melted. The Sierra de las Nieves don’t see nearly as much snow as they used to, but at one time, the snow from these hills was the main source of ice in a time before refrigeration.
The ice was cut into blocks and loaded onto donkeys to sell, a luxury for those who could afford it.
It’s wild to think about life before refrigeration or electricity, especially since in the history of the world, both are relatively recent. I’m fairly sure I would not thrive without either.
Of all the places to sit and ponder these and many other life mysteries with a sandwich, the hillsides of the Sierra de las Nieves are pretty not too bad.
From Tolox, I took several buses to reach Granada to meet up with my friends for a week of hiking on the GR7, a hike from village to village for seven days. It was so delightful that I am saving it for its own post.
But as a teaser, here is a photo of us at our highest point of the hike with the Mulhacén in the background. (At 11,414 feet, the Mulhacén is the highest mountain in Spain.)
For now, I will skip ahead to my most recent trip to Andalucía and another week spent staying in one of the lovely pueblos blancos, but this time in the Sierra Nevadas.
Lanjarón is the town of water.
The name is derived from the Arabic words that mean “land of springs.”
True to its name, there are water fountains all over the town of Lanjaron, and people fill up their giant jugs to take home because the pure spring water is delicious.
Maybe it’s the water that makes everything else in Lanjaron shine so bright, but even the produce outside the markets caught my attention.
At every meal, I tried to order something that included slices of the gorgeous local tomatoes.
We stayed in the lovely Hotel Alcadima where we could eat breakfast outside and have dinner with a view of the surrounding hillsides.
On one of our first days we visited nearby Niguelas to go to an olive oil museum where the ancient modes of making olive oil with giant stones are preserved for history. Olives were loaded onto baskets and carried by donkeys up to Niguelas to be pressed into oil. The guide at the museum brought the entire process to life for us and I’ll never pour out olive oil without thinking about her careful instructions for buying and tasting the best olive oil.
A couple of days before the guests arrived, I went to Niguelas to make sure I knew where we were going and to do the walk we planned to do.
Then I walked back to Lanjaron on the GR7 which took me a little longer than I planned.
But I got high above both towns and ended up getting a good picture of the region that could only be traversed by donkeys until not so long ago. Lanjaron is the gateway to the Alpujarras, this region of the Sierra Nevadas. It was an important outpost in medieval times and as the Nasrid (the last Moorish) Kingdoms fell in the 15th century, the Alpujarras were the final stronghold.
In fact, we learned that after the Catholic church officially expelled Muslims from Spain, these villages kept at least one family behind to teach the conquistadors how to maintain the complex water system (or acequias) that the Moors built in these towns.
We walked along many of these ancient irrigation canals during our week together in the area.
Even the streets are designed to move water through the hilltop villages so that they don’t flood in the rain.
Of course the flowers and plants are beautiful in the town of water.
It was very dry and hot during our week there in September, but you would never have known it from the lush plants and gardens.
However, the hills were super dry and I had a fine layer of dust all over me at the end of every day’s wanderings.
One day I got high enough to enjoy a mountain spring that was running above ground, but mostly the water comes from deep within the mountains.
There are lots of hiking routes that follow the acequias (irrigation canals) so that you can see how high up they were built.
When my group arrived, we had mostly shorter hiking days followed by lunches in small villages.
But just in case we had a picnic or if we needed a snack, I kept my two favorite treats from the region in my backpack.
Toasted Spanish almonds and a fig log, which is dried fig mixed with chopped almonds and shaped into a loaf. These two items will forever be the treats I bring home from Andalucía. (Along with a bottle of Oloroso.)
Prickly pears, which were growing everywhere, are another local treat. They are so bright and inviting, but you only make the mistake of reaching out to touch the pink fruit with your bare hands one time. (Don’t ask me how I know.)
It would be hard to choose a favorite day out from our week in and around Lanjaron, as every day in the sunshine is a good day to me.
Our itinerary included several walks along local water routes, the favorite of which was probably the one that runs into Niguelas from the mountains above it.
We also visited a cave in Nerja where people lived over 25,000 years ago but was only discovered in the 1950s. Stretching over three miles with cave paintings that are more than 40,000 years old, the preservation of this site is impressive.
Another highlight of the week was a day in Granada. We had a tour of the old town and then spent the afternoon in the Alhambra.
The Alhambra is a palace and massive fortress complex built in the 1200s by the first Nasrid emir, who established Granada as a state in Andalucía, then called Al-Andalus.
As one of the best-preserved palaces of the historic Islamic world, the Alhambra is the most visited monument in Spain, to and it’s not hard to see why.
The detail in the architecture is just stunning. I spent a long time staring at the walls and ceilings of the Nasrid palaces taking in the exquisite ornate carving everywhere.
I can’t fathom how you make everything so symmetrically perfect in a time before modern tools. I would love to have watched some of these walls being created by artisans of the Nasrid Kingdoms. Many of the carvings are actually inscriptions with phrases from the Koran or other ancient writings.
The Alhambra also has beautiful gardens that you could spend days and days exploring. I have so many photos of the Alhambra that I will probably need to do another whole post just about this incredible place. But you can only take in so much in one afternoon before your legs are tired, and my group was wilting a bit in the sun by the end of our visit.
The day after we went to Granada and the Alhambra, we did a short coastal walk by the sea and walked to the top of Salobreña.
From the top of the 10th century Moorish castle we could see for miles across the sea.
After exploring, we wandered down through the village and out to the beach.
We found a seaside cafe where we had a very long lunch, followed by a quick paddle in the sea before we went back to Lanjaron. (A “paddle” is what British people call wading barefoot in the surf of the sea.) In Lanjaron, we had time to sit by the pool before I had to go get ready for dinner. It was the perfect laid-back day to follow the busy visit to Granada.
On our final day of this trip, we drove up into the Alpujarras, the hills above Lanjaron, where the villages are high and remote. We visited a few of them, and walked from one to another along the GR7 before having our last outdoor lunch on a terrace looking out at the mountains.
Between trips to southern Spain, I had started reading Chris Stewart’s books about buying a farm in these mountains, which I found laugh-out-loud funny. (The first book is called Driving Over Lemons.) So it was fun to get walk the hills that he describes in those books.
I have also been reading Washington Irving’s Tales of The Alhambra. Irving wrote the book after his visit to The Alhambra in 1828 and it’s become a classic about Granada. He actually walked from Seville to Granada and after walking some of the GR7, I can better picture his journey. I love these words that he writes about it, and Spain in general:
Such were our minor preparations for the journey, but above all we laid in an ample stock of good humour, and a genuine disposition to be pleased; determining to travel in true contrabandista style; taking things as we found them, rough or smooth, and mingling with all classes and conditions in a kind of vagabond companionship. It is the true way to travel in Spain. With such disposition and determination, what a country it is for a traveller, where the most miserable inn is as full of adventure as an enchanted castle, and every meal is in itself an achievement! Let others repine at the lack of turnpike roads and sumptuous hotels, and all the elaborate comforts of a country cultivated and civilised into tameness and commonplace;
but give me the rude mountain scramble;
the roving, hap-hazard, wayfaring;
the half wild, yet frank and hospitable manners,
which impart a true-game flavour to dear old romantic Spain!
I join with Irving in many of his sentiments, perhaps especially packing “a genuine disposition to be pleased” for a journey and “what a country it is for a traveller!”
I’m excited to be heading back soon to continue my ongoing love affair with “dear old romantic Spain.”
