MUCH AS I appreciated the weather on our first weekend back in Ireland — the biting wind, the driving rain, the boggy fields — I would have to recommend to my compatriots and contemporaries a few winter months in Spain’s Sierra Nevada mountains, if only for the increased lung capacity that walking the local high altitude paths endows.

THE other afternoon, we drove to Trevélez, the highest village in Spain, and then walked higher still.

IT seems to be the search for communion with nature that brings foreigners to remote Ireland, similarly to remote areas of Spain.

TODAY, the hills and mountains are white and the tall, leafless poplar trees are beautiful, all dressed in snow.

IN THE MORNING sunshine, carpenter bees buzz around the facade of our rented house in the Sierra Nevada and find their way into niches between stones.

PRECIOUS water is exported from the dry lands of Spain in millions of cubic kilometres each year. We receive it in Ireland in, for example, tomatoes, which are probably 70% water.

WHEN the first flakes scudded past the window at lunch time, I thought they were almond blossom petals drifting on the wind.

IT ISN’T all sunshine here, although there’s a lot of it; happily, it can also rain. We’ve seen no downpours or deluges, in spite of the locals’ ardent prayers but, yesterday, we woke to find the day darker than any in the five weeks we’ve been here and outside it was very cold.

WHILE waiting to move into our long-term rented house in the Alpujarras mountains, south of Granada, we left Spain and went to Africa, arriving at midnight in Tangiers with no arrangements made.

WE DROVE across the bare Meseta, the tableland at the centre of Spain, on a Sunday morning, the sky big and blue overhead and snow-capped mountains on the horizon, rising above a band of blue mist.