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Spanish
Steps On a walking safari in Andalusia, BRIAN JACKMAN follows an old smugglers' trail across wild and wooded hilltops to the whitewashed town of Ronda The path emerged from the woods beside a dried-up stream-bed choked with oleanders; we stopped for elevenses, resting in the shade of a cork oak, while Hugh unpacked one of the panniers slung over the grey flanks of Pedro's mule, Paloma. Out came home-made lemonade, a rich Dundee fruit cake and a bottle of Domecq's La Ina, chilled fino, poured into stainless steel goblets. "I don't think it's worth compromising, not to have the best sherry for the sake of a pound or two, do you?" Hugh said. For the past year, Hugh Arbuthnott, former Black Watch officer and City gent, and Jane, his wife, have been leading walking safaris into the wilds of southern Spain from their home near the Andalusian mountain village of Gaucin. In July and August it is too hot for walking, but our trip took place in late September, and although the landscape was still painted in parched colours, the hillsides bare and tawny as the skin of an old lion, the mountain air. was sharp and clear, and the light, falling yellow across the valleys in the late afternoons, held the hint of autumn not far off. An ideal time, an ideal place to enjoy the last of the summer wine. The first leg of the journey had taken us over stony hillsides, past whitewashed farmsteads, and then up through steep pine woods to pick up the old tobacco smugglers' trail that runs from Algeciras to Ronda. at the top of first high ridge we paused to drink, squirting water into our mouths from leather botas carried by the uncomplaining Paloma. Far to the south, barely discernible in the afternoon haze, rose the pale blue sugar-loaf of Gibraltar, where our flight had landed only the day before. Now the Rock and the crowded coasts were behind us as we headed north into the mountains. Not until you leave the busy coastal highways and venture on foot into the interior do you begin to realise what a huge, hard, wild country Spain is. We tunnelled upwards through another pine wood, sweating in the resinous air and glad of the breeze that sighed like surf in the branches above our heads. And then, quite suddenly, we were out of the woods on a rocky ridge, a great void at our feet; and beyond it, lit by the late afternoon sun, the white houses and Moorish castle of Gaucin, with the mountain called El Hacho (the Axe) at their back. Gaucin is one of the famous pueblos blancos, the dazzling, lime-washed hill towns of Andalusia that have clung like swallows' nests among the barren crags. The Hotel Nacional where we stayed, a modest building with just half-a-dozen clean and simple rooms, was previously called the Hotel Ingles, and its registers were filled with the signatures of generations of British naval officers, from Gibraltar who had stayed here on their way to Ronda. "I spent a top-hole time here," someone had written in 1920. On another, more recent page, Clementine, the elfin lady owner, proudly pointed out the signature of the Empress Pahlavi, the last Queen of Persia. Beneath it, some wag called Robert had signed his name, adding thoughtfully: "One simply can't have too many queens on one page." After Gaucin the landscape changed, and we walked all morning through an Arcadian countryside of deep valleys filled with cork oak forests. Deer lived here, although we did not see them. In spring and summer there were cookoos, nightingales, golden orioles, Hugh said, and eagle owls - fierce birds with orange eyes and a voice as deep as a hound's - which the Spanish call el gran duque. But now, apart from a distant carillon of goat bells, the woods were silent. Wandering among the endless aisles of gnarled cork oaks, I thought how easy it would be to become a tree-worshipper. Some of these forest giants with their hollow trunks and misshapen limbs looked as if they had stood there forever, relics from the old Spanish wildwood, from the days when, as a French nobleman wrote in the 18th century, a squirrel might run from the Pyrenees to the Mediterranean without once putting a paw on the ground. Pedro, our muleteer, worked in these woods every year, harvesting the cork and packing it out by mule to Gaucin, and we passed many oaks that had only just been stripped of their bark, leaving their smooth, bent terracotta trunks looking uncomfortably naked, like old men caught with their trousers down. Towards noon, having disposed of the Dundee cake and chilled fino, we continued across dry meadows of yellow grass where dead thistles stood like splintered spears, and came to a farmhouse, cool as a cave, with flagstone floors and melons ripening in nets hung from low beams. Cold beers from a gas fridge were set before us, with tapas of air-dried ham and cheese. Then it was on again, down an old drove road to the Guadiaro river with its oleander jungles and slow, ghosting barbel, its orchards of apples and yellow quinces. Across the river the path rose once more into the hills, winding among scattered groves of evergreen oaks among which stood a Moorish watchtower, deserted now except for bats and owls. The tower and the name of the nearby village, Cortes de la Frontera, were markers in the landscape, identifying this as part of the frontier of the last Moorish kingdom in Spain, which held out until 1492. It took the Romans two centuries to conquer the Iberian peninsula. The Moors did it in two years and stayed for 700 more. No wonder that, all over Andalusia, towns and place-names still resonate with their dark presence. Even Gibraltar, that staunches! of British citadels, owes its name to the Moors, who called it Gebel Tariq, and today, exactly 500 years since the fall of Granada, these lonely mountains still have the watchful air of frontier country. Ahead, on a rocky hill, shaded by a canopy of oaks, stood the campsite, a cluster of green tents, a vision straight out of Africa, complete with the smell of woodsmoke and a cloudless sky in which a pair of griffon vultures was sailing on enormous, outstretched wings. There was roast lamb for supper, velvet-smooth Rioja wine, a campfire to hold the September evening chill at bay, and a sky full of stars. As in Africa, much of the joy of these Andalusian safaris comes from the provision of luxurious comforts in the midst of wilderness. Boy Scout camping this was not; and when I turned in that night it was to find a hot water-bottle in my bed and a duvet as deep as a snowdrift. Next morning we set off early to eat a typical Spanish breakfast in a local bar in Cortes: toast rubbed with a raw clove of garlic, then soaked in olive oil to produce a kick like horse liniment, which only the strongest black coffee could exorcise. It was here that we exchanged our mules for a string of Andalusian donkeys and met Candido. the guide who would take us over the high pass in the Sierra de Libar. To the clatter of the donkeys' hooves on the cobbled streets of Cortes, we set off into the mountains, plodding steadily upwards towards the gaunt battlements of shattered limestone that seemed to bar our way. The red tassels on the donkeys' harnesses swung gaily, as if we were on our way to a country fair, but the sun was hot now, and the steep stone track lay ahead of us like a life sentence. The Romans had built it, Candido told us; a road to nowhere, toiling up into the sky where the air was so pure that it no longer carried even the familiar incense of the pines; but eventually we reached the high pass at 3,000ft and dropped down over the other side through a desolation of boulders to visit the Cima de Libar, a yawning pothole, which is one of the natural wonders of these wild Andalusian karst-lands. A young oak had taken root in the pothole's rim. I grasped it firmly, leaned out and stared down into the darkness while Candido tossed pebbles down its rocky throat and their clatter echoed on and on. Our route lay now across sun-dried pastures where ancient pollard oaks stood, each in its pool of shadow, with the mountains rising on either side and kestrels wheeling among their crags. "This is the Llano de Libar," Hugh said. "It's what I call our secret valley." It was a magical place, timeless and beautiful and so remote that you .could only reach it on foot. In springtime, he said, the pastures were green and so filled with wildflowers that you could hardly move for fear of trampling the wild orchids and hellebores that grew there. Eventually, after walking for nearly five hours, we were greeted by Jane with a picnic lunch spread under the trees; ham and hard-boiled eggs, cold roast quails, white Rioja, followed by cheese and fresh walnuts eaten with golden chunks of quince jelly and - since this was Andalusia - a siesta in the grass. Then on by car in the late afternoon through a wonderful park-like country of scattered trees and rolling stubble lit by the deepening light, driving westward straight into a September sunset, the sky the colour of a Spanish blood-orange, the sierras sharp-etched in deepest indigo and the lights of Grazalema shining like fallen stars under the high peaks. On our last day, having seen Ronda perched in the distance on its 400ft cliffs, we entered the city like pilgrims at the end of a journey, to wash off the dust in the gracious old Reina Victoria hotel. Yet not even the romantic streets and courtyards, the famous bullring or the dramatic gorge that splits the town in two, could dispel the sense of anti-climax. My head told me I should be glad to be staying in one of Spain's finest tourist cities. But my heart was still in the high country, among the deep patrimonial forests and remote valleys where the old Spain lived on: proud, austere, unvanquished.
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Safari Andalucía SL, Finca Almuña, Apartado Postal No 20, 29480 Gaucín, (Málaga), Spain Telephone: (34) 952151148 | Fax: (34) 952151376 | E-mail: info@arbuthnottholidays.com |
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