Guadix is a windy, dusty town on the slopes of the dry side of the massive ridge that is the Sierra Nevada in Andalusia, Spain. These slopes are the rain-shadow badlands of the province of Granada: a place few foreign tourists visit. The other side of the mountain, the Mediterranean side, is called the Alpujarra and seems a world away: verdant, flowery slopes with orchards, pastures and little whitewashed villages clinging to them: a landscape and people made famous by the English travel writer Gerald Brenan, who lived there.
Our music was not saying anything to these birds, any more than their chirruping said anything to us
But our side could not be more different. I say ‘our’ because my partner and I own two cave houses in Guadix, and often stay. We love the town, partly for its workaday ordinariness; but it’s not without history (going back to Roman times), civic pride, a scatter of fine buildings and a lively cultural life.
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