Back to nature — the Alpujarra way

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

We are surprised at the number of English who have moved in to the Alpujarra and settled here. In La Gomera, in the Canary Islands, it is Germans; here, it is Brits.

Amongst the stalls at the Thursday open-air market at Órgiva, gateway to the Sierra Nevada, English voices are heard everywhere. The owners are not the Limey Flash Harrys of the Costas, with gold chains, oily suntans and brash tattoos, but earnest people buying organic vegetables or wholesome bread, or sitting around the cafes discussing literature and house prices.

Many are here for the long haul. Early settlers blame Chris Stewart’s 1999 book, Driving Over Lemons, about his amusing adventures when setting up home here, for the influx. Similarly, Peter Mayle’s book, A Year in Provence, is blamed for bringing hordes of English to that region of France.

Certainly, Stewart’s book put the Alpujarras on the map. English romantics came on holidays. They fell in love with the mountains and the quaint villages and bought houses which they are still, years later, repairing. Old Alpujarra houses come cheap — about the price of a No-Road-Access ruin in a Leitrim bog — but rendering the flat roofs of logs, stone slabs and mica silt impermeable can turn out to be a lifetime occupation.

The folk who sell organic produce to these house-holders are often, themselves, British, but generally younger. They can be distinguished by their dreadlocks, dogs and children. Many are part of a community living a back-to-the-earth life on the ’Beneficio’, a swathe of land generously provided by a Spanish philanthropist where anyone who wants to strive for self-sustainability is given a piece of ground to have a go. We often give Beneficio people a lift if they’re hitchhiking when we’re passing. They smell of wood smoke and, sometimes, of goats.

The third kind of English immigrant lives in a tepee, bender or battered van in a river bed at Tablones, below Órgiva. Here, there is a large community of New Age Travellers, 75% of them from Britain. The corpses of many ancient mobile libraries, ambulances, pantechnicons, horse-boxes and post office vans with English legends and licence plates stand rotting on perished tyres amongst the bamboos.

A festival of New Age music takes place at the encampment each March, this year beginning on St Patrick’s Day. It is more random than organised. As many as two thousand celebrants, folk musicians and performers converge from all over Europe and North Africa to spend a week shattering the nights with sounds, melodic or mangled, sleeping around bonfires and, presumably, washing in the cold river nearby.

Unfortunately, the Travellers’ freedom of movement without responsibility has resulted in the once-attractive river bed taking on the appearance of a vast scrapyard while almost every one of the Alpujarra’s beautiful villages suffers the insult of one or more English panel wagons rusting in the church square. The labyrinthine laneways of the villages are too steep and narrow for cars. Tunnels and bridges join the low, whitewashed houses with their flat, earthen roofs and quaint chimneys. The only sound in the midday silence is one’s own footfalls on the cobbles, a scratching dog or a cat purring in the sun.

In the countryside, the silence is total but for the soft clang of the bell-wether’s bell as it leads the flock up or down the hillsides, the song of birds and the almost ubiquitous gurgle of streams carrying meltwater from the snow fields above.

The locals express no grudge against the foreign influx, unlike the Provencals who got uptight indeed when Mayle’s book brought the Brits.

Not having much liked his funny-ha-ha descriptions of French habits, they may have assumed that they were only coming for laughs. However, communities in the Alpujarra seem to welcome the new life, colour and money the settlers have brought.

In the early 1920s, Gerald Brenan, the English writer, took up residence at the village of Yegen and his book, South from Granada, is still the seminal theme on the Alpujarra, full of fascinating descriptions of daily life, now changed but not entirely; in remote agricultural communities, change takes time.

Brenan relates how various members of the Bloomsbury set of London writers, artists and intellectuals came to visit him. Amongst them were the unfortunate Lytton Strachey who travelled the last 20 miles by mule (there were no motor roads) — and suffered terribly from his piles. Virginia Woolf, the novelist, Bertrand Russell, the philosopher, and Augustus John, the painter, also came.

Indeed, some of those who knew Brenan in later years are still around.