Hiking through Spain's little-known Alpujarras, with only goatherds for company

“The locals wouldn’t do this,” David Illsley told me, “walking between villages with the sun beating on your head. You do that round here only if you’re trying to find grazing for your sheep and goats. The equivalent would be people from the Alpujarras going to London and spending all their time on the Tube.”

He was half joking, and he certainly wasn’t suggesting that the villagers he’s settled among don’t appreciate their surroundings. But he was making a serious point, too. In these great valleys of eastern Andalucia, between the Sierra Nevada and the Mediterranean Sea, life can be hard enough without making work for yourself. Hiking is a sport left to mad holidaymakers.

That was part of the draw for us. Over a week, we went uphill and down scree and, the odd goatherd aside, rarely met a soul. Not that we were hiking, exactly. None of our walks was longer than seven miles (11km). Though we were travelling with Chapters Experience Holidays – since incorporated into Ramblers Walking Holidays – we were aiming not to bash peaks but to gain an insight to the High Alpujarras on a ramble. So we learnt, among other things, how the locals make cheese, wine and olive oil and cured ham, we watched a demonstration of paella-making – and we ate extremely well.

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Our base was Mairena (population: under 200), a village nearly three hours’ drive from Malaga and, at 3,300ft, as high above sea level as the summit of Snowdon. From two circular stone platforms above its leaning 18th-century church, where villagers used to thresh wheat, you can enjoy a panoramic view of a basin scored with valleys, of the Cerrajón de Murtas, the highest point (4,970ft) in the Contraviesa range, and of the snowcaps of the Sierra de Gádor, in the neighbouring province of Almería. That’s why, at the turning off the main road, Mairena bills itself as “El Balcón [The Balcony] de la Alpujarras.” At that same turning are two more signs. One says, helpfully, “Aquí hay un bar” (Bar here), the other says “Las Chimeneas” (The Chimneys).

The latter was our gathering point. It’s a combination of restaurant and guesthouse, run by David and Emma Illsley, who fetched up here after three years teaching English in the Canary Islands with the British Council. The idea was to stay for a year before going home to “real jobs”. That was in 1998. Like the great Hispanist Gerald Brenan, who chronicled village life in nearby Yegen in the 19th century, and Chris (Driving Over Lemons) Stewart, who has been doing so in the western Alpujarras since 1999, they were seduced. Their two sons were born here, and speak Spanish with un acento Andaluz.

When Las Chimeneas is busy, the Illsleys use a few properties elsewhere in the village, so my wife and I were put up in a cosy house a few doors from the church – a house that happens to be owned by friends of ours in Lancashire. Staying there, too, was Kate Harre, our leader, who works mainly as a translator and was not only on her first trip to the Alpujarras but on her first outing as a guide.

Her charges numbered 10, ranging in age from late 50s to just shy of 80, among us three couples and four solo women travellers. Several had lived abroad but all but one were now based in Britain, the exception being Toni, an art historian and teacher who had come all the way from Trenton, Georgia (“You’ve heard of Chattanooga? It’s near there.”). Hers was the smallest suitcase.

Wherever we went, up paths shaded by olive and almond trees, down streets with houses half-hidden by pots of geraniums and petunias, we were reminded of those who had been here before us. As David told us outside the 1,000-year-old church in the village of Júbar – a building bearing a cross, a star of David and a crescent moon – it was to the Alpujarras that the last of the Moors fled after the fall of Granada in the Christian Reconquista (Reconquest) in 1492. They built houses much like those of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco: of grey stone, low, flat-roofed. Above their stout beams of poplar or chestnut is a mat of canes on which flat stones are piled, topped with a layer of launa, the grey mica found on the peaks.

Those peaks keep out extreme cold from the north and extreme heat from the south, but they don’t stop the fertile valleys baking in summer. The Moors had an answer to that, conserving every drop they could of the rain or snow that fell in winter or spring and then, through their acequias, or water channels, bringing it down when needed.

The channels are maintained and renewed by the farmers of today, a community of waterers led by a man whose title translates roughly as “The Illustrious Mayor of Hydraulics”. Thus fields are irrigated, fountains gush, and tubs fill at the lavaderos, or communal wash-houses, where, even today, with washing machines in most kitchens, women sometimes take a half-load and chat to their neighbours.

In Mairena, most people over 50 have never learnt to drive. There’s a tucked-away mini-market. A bread van delivers every morning and three times a week there’s fish. If you need anything else, you grow it or make it yourself.

The locals were probably horrified that we went all the way to Almería (90 minutes each way) on David’s promise of “the best lemonade in the world”, served at the Moorish teahouse of Almedina. He was right. We did wander around the museum and the fort, too. And we had lunch at Casa Puga, which since 1870 has been “the place where it all happens”.

On the way out and back, we goggled and grimaced at the Costa del Polythene, a forcing ground for salad vegetables that covers 40,000 hectares in the coastal plain of Campo de Dalías. Thanks to chemical fertilisers that are drip-fed to each plant from computer-controlled vats, crops can be grown in these greenhouses continuously from October to July.  

They don’t do that kind of thing in the Alpujarras. This is a place where life is governed by season, weather and custom; where everything is done en su tiempo – at the proper time. We stuck to the rules. Whatever was on the itinerary, from an introductory yoga session at the Illsleys’ finca (farm) to a wander around the museum in Ugíjar (the municipal power with a population of more than 2,500), we ended the day with dinner.

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Our base has acquired quite a reputation for its food. Indeed, it has its own cookbook, Las Chimeneas: Recipes and Stories from an Alpujarran Village, which was shortlisted for an award last June by the British-based Guild of Food Writers. My wife and I had read it before our trip, and tried a few dishes from it. They tasted even better at their source.

When the Illsleys’ first cook, a Frenchman, was ordered by his girlfriend to come home or get lost, two of the villagers, who had been cleaning rooms and helping out with breakfast, stepped in. Soledad Sanchez Galafat (known to all as Sole) and her sister-in-law, Conchi Garzon Roman, weren’t at all fazed. They’re used to joining in communal cooking for events such as the Fiesta de San Marcos, patron saint of the countryside, when – with a stew of chickpeas, fennel and pork – the women of Mairena cater not just for all the villagers but for their extended families, too.

And so Bruno’s Mediterranean cuisine gave way to Sole’s and Conchi’s cocina alpujarreña, combined with the flavours of North Africa. Highlights during our stay were a starter of garbanzos y espinacas (chickpeas, chorizo and spinach braised with garlic) and a main course of tarta de puerros (creamed leek tart), served with broccoli and garlic potatoes.

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Working with Sole and Conchi are Alistair Lawton, from York, an award-winning baker whose sourdough forms the basis of breakfasts, and Andrew Lowrey, from Pickering (North Yorkshire), who, when he’s not taking orders or delivering waspish one-liners, turns his hand to cakes and puddings. In the Alpujarras, most people can turn their hand to most things.

At the finca outside the village – where we had a yoga session, picked cherries and then watched Sole and her daughter-in-law, María Eugenia, cook rabbit and seafood paella, we wandered about among olive trees that, come winter, the Illsleys will be thrashing with birch staffs for their fruit. In common with all the villagers, they take the olives to the mill, help turn them into oil and, later in the year, come back to collect their share. The average family gets through a litre (1¾ pint) of oil a week, and you have to pick 100 kilos (15st 10lb) of olives to get 20 litres (35 pints). The Illsleys, Emma admitted, aren’t the most efficient harvesters. “We turn up with 70 kilos [11st], and everyone else says, ‘What on earth have they been doing all day?’”

She and David combine a deep affection for, and knowledge of, local life with a nice line in self-deprecation. Nicknames come into it. In Yegen, where Gerald Brenan lived, the former inn where he stayed on arrival has been turned into a museum, decorated with pictures of villagers taken between 1959 and 1989 by a Dane who lived there then, Vang Hanssen. They are captioned not only with names but with nicknames: El Posadero (The Innkeeper), El Bicho (The Bug), El Diablo (The Devil). In her early days, Emma told us, after she ran out of spuds and had to borrow some, she became known as La Mujer Sin Patatas (“The Woman With No Potatoes”). Later, having been spotted on a building site doing a spot of hod-carrying, she acquired a more admiring moniker: La Leona – the Lioness.

Ramblers Walking Holidays (01707 331133; ramblersholidays.co.uk/home) offers a seven-night “Ambles in the Alpujarras” trip costing from £1,345 per person sharing, including flights, transfers and half-board, picnic or tapas lunches and local transport. Departures on May 6, June 3 and Oct 14 in 2018.