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In
amiable amble in Andalucia If you don't mind a gentle stroll, there is a corner of southwest Spain which is forever England, as Stephen McClarence discovered. Forty miles over the hills is Torremolinos, with its bars, its amusement arcades, its crooks, its steak and chips, its lager louts and its stack-'em-high-sell-'em cheap holidays. You wouldn't necessarily guess. On a vine-shaded terrace, Jane Arbuthnott pours Spanish chardonnay. "Do try the cheese," she urges, "it's not the goat's cheese. That's tomorrow. This one could be a bit sheepy." She passes around the water biscuits. Jane and her husband Hugh have lived high in the Andalucian hills for eight years. She once cooked directors' lunches for firms in the City. He ran a freight business in East Africa after an Army career. The regimental photos - of the young Hugh, eyeball-ing the camera on a foggy British day - are hung in the lavatory. At a London dinner party in the mid-Eighties, someone mentioned a holiday-home venture starting up in the pueblos blanco (white towns) area of Andalucia. It was a good evening; the wine flowed; Hugh and Jane signed up. They sailed from Plymouth and arrived just in time for nine solid weeks of rain. But they decided to live here, and in 1990 launched Andalucian Safari, a company specialising in walking tours. They do ambles rather than rambles, with donkeys for the easily fatigued, timetabled siestas for the terminally tired and back-up from a small army of Andalucians ready to strap saddle bags and slice lemons for the G&Ts. "You build up a network of people to help," Jane says. "You get one good egg and they bring in more good eggs." The walks, attracting many older people and the odd duke, cover eight to 12 miles a day. They explore traditional muleteers' routes through glades of mossy oaks, across miles of hidden meadows, past olive groves and orange orchards, fields of poppies and hilltop pines. On one side, a crumbling Moorish castle. On the other, a hillside village, a jigsaw of white walls and orange roofs. It is as Spanish and, crucially, as unknown Spanish, as it comes. But the atmosphere is like an English country house party, especially as the Arbuthnotts are blessed with the good host's gift of making total strangers feel like fairly old friends. Their farmhouse, all honeysuckle and wisteria, is four miles from the nearest village. It's a little outpost of Englishness: family photos, small stacks of Country Life and battered leather armchairs that more suburban owners would long ago have repaired and ruined. English? The daily time-table features a 6pm cup of tea, while the list of Useful Spanish Phrases includes, "Any more brandy?" and the shoulder bags for walks come from the Army and Navy Stores in Market Harborough. Everything is planned. Guests and their luggage are colour-coded on arrival. The 22 wines served over the week are painstakingly listed. The Arbuthnotts' CV includes not only their children (Arabella and Hughie) but their dogs (Annie and Mole) and cats (Pimmie and Memelada). More wine? A liqueur? The Rock of Gibraltar, high over the horizon, glows a dusky orange in the setting sun. The village lights glitter down the valley. A crescent moon hangs like a lantern in the trees. There's a misty hint of the distant Atlas mountains of Morocco. Jane leans confidentially across the table. "That's Africa over there," she whispers. We forget we were at Gatwick four hours ago. And the cheese is indeed a bit sheepy. Next morning we set off walking. Pedro and his mules bring up the rear. A stocky man in his sixties, he picks oregano for us to smell, cuts open almonds for us to eat and shouts "Ole!" whenever we pass a fightable bull. We pause at a farmer's cottage for beers. The sitting room is dominated by stark black-and-white photographs of his in-laws as a young married couple. They gaze out with dark-eyed intensity. To their left is a fridge-freezer; to their right, a 2ft-high plastic Donald Duck money box. I greet passers-by with a hearty Spanish "hola!" They reply with "hello" or "hi." After a steep climb, we reach the campsite where we spend two nights. A table of drinks is waiting by a cluster of tents as big as garages on the gently sloping sides of a wooded valley. It's clear we aren't going to rough it. These are tents for people who don't like camping. They have proper beds with proper headboards, duvets, hot water bottles, bedside lamps, running water, showers and private lavatories. "Porta-Potty Mark Four," Hugh says. "Great improvement on Mark Three." The only sounds are the hissing cicadas, the birds, a gamelan of clanging goats' bells, the rustle of wind in the trees and the hooting of occasional trains down the valley. The railway line, with its red tip-up signals and its Hornby 00 stations, was built last century by a Scot, Lord Farringdon. "Quite by chance, we had two of his great-grandsons on a safari last year," Hugh says over dinner. "They'd never met before.More wine? Another liqueur?" We breakfast in a bar at Cortes, a nearby village down a winding road lined by fig trees and wild pink snapdragons. The village is as neat and pretty as any in the white towns area (all its buildings are painted white). Old men sit outside their houses, watching the day pass and shading their eyes from the dazzling sunlight. Doorways offer glimpses of dark, heavily furnished rooms behind bead curtains. At 7.30am, the bar is full of swarthy men in swarthy caps. They drink cognac and eat pork fat on garlic toast. We try to do the same. This is a regular Arbufhnott stop. The locals are forbidden to use the specially cleaned lavatories until the visitors have gone. On the walk up the valley, we meet two men carrying a bag of goat manure. One of them points to his mouth and repeats, "Dracula, vampiro, Dracula." Hugh translates: "He thinks bat guano is the best. Then sheep, goat, horse and cow in that order." A picnic lunch is waiting across a meadow of celandines - quails and quinces, raisins marinaded in brandy, blankets and cushions under the trees, mares' tail clouds in a pure blue sky, three o'clock and time for a siesta. A short siesta. We carry on down a steep limestone valley - more scramble than amble - and catch our first glimpse of Ronda, a pretty, if commercialised, town perched on sheer inland cliffs with a towering bridge slotted into the 300ft gorge that divides it. Time for a few Spanish essentials. Ronda's elegant bullring is variously described as the oldest and biggest in Spain. Certainly it is the most venerated. Pedro Romero, father of modern bullfighting, was based here, killing 200 bulls a year for 28 years. Hemingway and Orson Welles were regular visitors and their photographs hang in the bullfighting museum under the mounted heads of bulls which died with particular dignity. The bloody swords and darts have been tactfully removed from their necks. As we finish a late restaurant dinner, flamenco bursts in. The singer, a plump woman in a tight scarlet dress, clenches her fists and screws up her eyes as she hollers songs of tragic love. Her brother struts his fingers over his guitar. A pair of dancers whirl out of the kitchens and stalk each other round the tables, eyes locked intensely, like predators. It's raw and fierce and has nothing to do with the tourist cliches of castanets and frilly shawls. And nothing at all to do with Torremolinos. More wine?
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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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