A Hemingway feel for scapes of Spain

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

In the sun, they sparkle like some mad admirer has hung diamond necklaces on the branches. Locals say another week of snow or rain will do us. That’s good to hear!

Three days ago, it was 26 degrees here in the Sierra Nevada, with no wind. The crickets leapt for joy. A few fell in the swimming pool and we pulled them out before they could be eaten by the Great Diving Beetles. I was once bitten by one and its jaws pierced my skin. Swimming with sharks might be safer.

The pool will be cleaned and refilled in May.

In a field about a 100 yards from our rented house (called Wild Boar Lodge), we saw sods freshly turned, and holes rooted out around the periphery of a briar patch. They weren’t there yesterday, my wife said.

There was no rhyme or reason for the ploughing, and it could only have been done by wild boar. As we passed, I held my pointed stick in front of me and walked on the outside of the path, as my mother always told me I must do when walking with a lady, so as to protect her if there was a runaway horse. Happily, no boar, cat, or dog was sheltering in the bushes.

Things jumping out thickets aren’t good for the nerves.

Boars, I’m told, are becoming a bore for rural gardeners and they can legally be shot. They were protected for a while and the result was over- supply.

On the road, my wife saw a very brown fox but a fox nonetheless, with a big brush of a tail. It was pursued by two energetic fox terriers, who seemed to be out hunting alone. One yapped excitedly but there was no hallooing like we hear in West Cork when the ‘bagels’ are abroad.

Once, in Timoleague, in company with a friend from New York, I met a man who told us that he was a member of the Caherciveen Over the Water Foot Bagels (I think I’ve got that right; it was years ago). My friend, who was Jewish, was intrigued with the information that there were four-footed bagels. She recalled how we had enjoyed warm, doughy bagels at a street stall one snowy morning in New York.

We regularly see oranges for sale by the roadside, stacked in wheelbarrows. A bag of 20 costs €2, the sweet variety for eating or the seedy variety for juice.

Here in the Alpujarras, one is constantly near the sky. I’ve never lived at such altitudes before or in this part of Spain. Each region, of course, has its specific ecology. When we were really high up, at 6,000 feet, I hoped to catch sight of a ring ouzel, birds for all the world like blackbirds but for a pure white crescent on the breast. I used to commonly see them when I lived in Mayo as a child and, I think, in Donegal too. I saw none here.

However, last Sunday, I saw a Booted Eagle roosting on a distant rock at sunset, a magnificent sight albeit they are small eagles indeed.

Of other birds I wouldn’t see at home, I can report, so far, only Sardinian warblers and spectacled warblers, and neither were warbling at the time.

Also, red legged partridge, their wings whirring as they plane away, out over the ravines. Before spring migration, I hope to find time to go to the marshes of the Coto Doñana, at the mouth of the Guadalquivir river, where the list of winter exotics will be huge. Also, of a weekend I might make the 300km drive to east of Huelva and the Portuguese border where the migrants coming north from Africa pass along an aerial corridor and the sky is, I’m told, full of eagles, vultures, cranes and swallows, all the birds that arrive in Europe in summer.

These days, pink and white almond trees, cultivated and wild, paint and scent the hills. After a strong wind, we see drifts of almond-blossom snow beneath some trees but the blossom is resilient, well able to withstand the extremes of weather in the Sierra Nevada at this time of the year.

Broom is in flower on the hills, like gorse at home.

However, if I must wade through gorse, I’d prefer dwarf Irish gorse than the variety they have here, which has long, vicious spines, as strong and sharp as needles. Happily, the mountain paths are well worn by goats, humans, mules and boar. Higher up, there are Ibex, large mountain goats, which I have yet to see.