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IN the Fifties, an anthropologist called Julian Pitt-Rivers went to live in the remote mountain village of Grazalema, one of the celebrated pueblos blancos of Andalucia in southernmost Spain. The scholarly Ingles was made very welcome in the whitewashed houses and was stood many a drink in the ramshackle cafes off the sunlit square. But the canny locals ran rings around his efforts to study their lives and customs. "The Andalucians,' he wrote despairingly, 'are the most accomplished liars I have ever encountered.' Fiercely independent and contemptuous of officialdom, the people of the high sierra lived above the law for generations, practising the noble arts of tobacco smuggling, cattle rustling and highway robbery. The police in the valleys tolerated this as a fact of life. 'It's a matter of pride. In some areas, the pueblos strive to produce great bullfighters - here they want to have famous bandits.' A lot has changed in 40 years. New roads have replaced the mule-tracks and the bigger villages have electric light. TV aerials sprout from their pantiled roofs. The bandits are no more, but many farmers have left as well. Thousands have abandoned the dry soil of the hills for work on the nearby Costa del Sol, lured to the rich pickings of the tourist trade and the construction booms in Marbella and Malaga. The upland crofts are deserted and the scrubby maquis of juniper and wild thyme, once grazed by goats, is prey to forest fires started every summer by careless picnickers and amateur arsonists. The wild landscape, however, still has power and beauty enough to capture the hearts of foreigners. Word spread recently in Grazalema and other neighbouring villages that the Ingles had returned. A man and his wife were tramping the hills, studying maps, breaking old trails across the passes and stopping at isolated farms to inquire about donkeys and beehives, wines and cheeses. The inquisitive couple were Hugh and Jane Arbuthnott. Two years ago, they came to live in Andalucia, building a house on a hillside estate called La Almuña, which looks out over miles of open country to the distant sea. On a clear day, the view from their terrace reaches to the African coast, beyond the Rock and the Straits of Gibraltar. In the working farm below the house, pigs crunch almonds in the yard and horses graze in an orchard of pomegranates and apricots. But the Arbuthnotts' curiosity was directed inland, to the white villages and the bone-grey mountains. From their farm and the nearby pueblo of Gaucin, where their children had enrolled at the local school, they found they could follow an old smugglers' trail right over the rocky Sierra del Ubar to the cliff city of Ronda. The journey - on foot, donkey and muleback - enchanted them and they decided that it ought to be enjoyed by others. The smugglers' trail now forms the basis of a week-long walking tour that the Arbuthnotts call their Andalucian Safari. Hugh and Jane welcome their clients, in groups of up to a dozen, to their own home at La Almuña. After a good supper and a restful night, guests are dunked in the swimming pool and laid out on the sunbaked terrace, where Hugh briefs them on the rigours of the week ahead: quiet rambles in glorious scenery, with frequent stops and long picnics; donkeys and mules on hand to carry the loads and the lazy; huge evening meals in comfortable hotels or at Hugh's luxurious tented camp in the hills and liberal quantities of tino (sherry), tinto (red wine), and agua ardente (brandy) to refresh the thirsty traveller. The Arbuthnotts treat their 'volunteers' to a gentle, unpressurised immersion in the way of life of the up-country muleteers - one that is fast disappearing. We walked with one such, 69-year-old Antonio, who used to make his living transporting cal, quarried limestone tor the white-wash kilns. Below Cortes de la Frontera the forester Pedro led us through groves of cork-oak, where the tree trunks, stripped of their bark, glow like red velvet in the dappled sun. On the hills above, we visited farmyards to inspect beehives fashioned out of bark, hooped into hollow tubes and sealed with clay. We tasted fresh cheese in a cool, pungent dairy, while a hundred goats bleated to be milked. In the town below, we breakfasted in the Bar La Raspa - on rough coffee, toast, mantecca pate and raw garlic - while the old boys lined the counter to knock back their first glass of the day. The walking is led, with unfailing good humour and informality, by Hugh, at the head of a line of colourful donkeys and straw-hatted hikers. Whenever his fund of local anecdotes threatens to dry up, his wife appears in support, waiting at a crossroads with a vehicle full of cool drinks, fruit cake and candied quince, or a picnic of smoked pork and cold roast quail. The studied ease of the programme conceals the couple's formidable gift for organisation and detail. hen they decided a local hotel was not up to standard, they got the owner's permission to install cotton sheets, feather pillows and even a bathroom, all at their own expense. A visitors' book on display at the same little hostelry, the Hotel Nacional in Gaucin, reveals that Hugh's volunteers are not the first English travellers to chance the rocky trail across the mountains. From the mid-19th Century, the adventurous journey to Ronda was a favourite excursion for Naval officers stationed in Gibraltar. Their peremptory comments make instructive reading: 'Arrived very dusty after an all-night walk. Dom Pedro, our host, is a delightful sort of chap. Quite satisfied; no bed-bugs. The stabling, however, is a disgrace.' I am happy to report that the welcome afforded to two-legged tourists is as warm as ever, and that conditions have greatly imroved for the livestock. My donkey, at least, made no complaints.
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