The only sound was goats and streams

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

I’m not sure I have ever been higher.

Once, years ago, on a whim (we are not climbers) my very pregnant wife and I set off on the Jomsom Trail out of Pokhara in Nepal, heading for Everest Base Camp.

We passed Tatopani and reached about 9,000 feet where, being ill-equipped (desert boots, everyday anoraks and middleweight sleeping bags), we were so cold we couldn’t sleep at night in the windowless barns which were the only accommodation available in the villages half a week’s walk from the nearest road, shop or electrical installation. We had to come down.

More recently, in Mexico, I crawled to 3000m to witness the spectacle of hundreds of millions of Monarch butterflies arriving on their annual migration from the United States. That was then, some seven years ago: laterally, I’ve not been much given to climbing steep slopes. However, the Alpujarra villages around us are all perched on steep terraces, so leg muscles and lungs get regular, unavoidable, exercise.

Last week, we casually took on the challenge of a walk from the picturesque and touristic village of Bubión (Bubby-on) to the picturesque village of Capileira (all Alpujarra villages are picturesque to a greater or lesser degree). The first section was a descent to a river bed, with gushing falls and tall white poplars still in red, dead leaf.

It was wonderful going down, down, down, passing abandoned farmhouses, each with its semicircular stone paved “era” or threshing floor built on a salient nearby, there to catch the best wind for winnowing.

Not a soul did we meet and the only sound was goat or cow bells and streams rushing down from the snow caps above.

Coming up the other side, however, was less wonderful. The stony path was steeper than St Patrick’s Hill in Cork, and it climbed ever upward for a mile.

Between the many stops (to admire the view ...) I took my mind off my pounding heart by counting the number of cigarettes I had smoked in my life until I gave up six years ago.

A quarter of a million, I reckoned. The effect hasn’t been good; the truth speaks, or rather, wheezes, for itself. I seem to be in fair nick (of course there’s such a thing as famous last words ...) but it’s the smoking that’s got to me. My dear, dead father used to say the same when he could no longer jump a six-bar gate at age 91.

That, then, was the Capilera trek, a thigh-breaker. But now, back to Trevélez, claimed to be the highest village in Spain. It is 1746 metres above sea level and, not in the Pyrenees, as one would expect, but far south, in Andalucia. Up there, the air is thin. Above it is Mulhacen, indisputably Spain’s highest peak.

It is not unusual, in the Alpujarra mountain, to come upon occupied houses whose inhabitants have no option but to walk if they are to reach shops and services. Thus, on a steep track a thousand feet above Trevélez, as I plugged along with a staff and serious boots, I was overtaken by an old fellow nonchalantly tripping past me in a pair of battered slip-on shoes, with devil a wheeze or pant out of him.

He can’t have been on the gaspers as long as I was, for sure! A bizarre feature of some remote shepherds’ huts, used in summer when cattle are grazed in the high meadows, is the presence of white enamelled baths lying about in fields nearby. Perhaps water is scarcer in summer, and they are used for animal troughs. But to hike a bath on mule back many kilometres along mountain tracks would seem an extravagance. Surely, by muling up a few bags of cement, one could build a trough. However, the owners, I’m sure, know best what’s required.

Trevélez is famous for its dried, salted hams and there is hardly a building in the village not dedicated to this business. In summer, Spaniards arrive in bus loads, as on pilgrimages, to buy these hams at source.

The key to producing good Spanish cured ham (after the quality of the meat, of course) is the dry, cool air found only at high altitudes where humidity is low. Then, salt your ham and leave it hanging for anything up to two years.

Trevélez is just the place to find these conditions and its jamón serrano, though not quite reaching the stratospheric quality levels (or prices) of jamón ibérico or pata negra, is much prized, and I personally would risk a hernia to take one home in my suitcase.