Waking up to the warmth of Andalucia

IT WAS another hot morning at the Cortijo El Jabali and the jay birds wuz stealin’ the cherries.

For some reason, they insist upon stripping our landlord’s small tree when trees are weighed down with fruit a few wing-beats away. Cherries look lovely in the bright Andalucian sun, shining like garnets or rubies in the dark foliage of the trees. We have an ancient tree on our lawn at home and this year it produced cherries for the first time in years.

Jays are one of the few birds regularly seen here in the Sierra Nevada in southern Spain. Birds are scarce anyway and hard to spot at this time of year. The highlands are burnt, bare and birdless while the ravines are so crammed with extravagantly-leafed trees and scrub that its impossible to see the few birds flitting about in them. However, this morning we watched a Bonelli’s eagle circling in the blue vault above the house as we breakfasted outside.

The river valleys are beautiful, with the rush of water heard far below and the silver ribbon of the river glimpsed here and there as we walk on the high tracks a thousand feet above.

In the plains below these Alpujarra villages, the Guadalfeo is a busy little river as the water locked in snow in the high sierra is now released by the heat of the sun and comes tumbling down the mountainsides via ravines, irrigation canals and plain ditches to join it as it flows (after much extraction) into the sea near Motril.

The water is brown with silt, except where it flows white over rapids. Swallows skim the surface. Yellow wagtails flit over the shallows and alight on stones, wagging their tails as wagtails are born to do.

The river murmurs constantly, constantly moving. Above it, the dry hills stand still and silent, olive green against the blue, cloudless sky. The Guadalfeo’s lower reaches are a corridor of pink oleander, green rushes and tall, feathery bamboo.

Oleander follows watercourses here, as alder follows them in Ireland. It puts out a pink, showy flower, not lasting long. One sees it in dry wadis in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, ribbons of pink effulgence in a dead landscape. It must have deep roots.

Where there is water, the Alpujarra is as green as Ireland. Where there is not, the slopes are sere, with burnt-out terraces, long abandoned. There is a flat-roofed, thick-walled adobe house on a lag in the mountain opposite us — the Contraviesa range, much drier than the Sierra Nevada — that is large and solid on the land, but has been deserted for decades. I’m sure one could buy it for five bob, but how would one ever access it? How did people ever live there? They must have been mighty men and women, to have eked out a life in that unforgiving lonely landscape. Yet, there are terraces, seen when the light from the west slopes across the hillside in the evenings, terraces once, I suppose, productive, now covered in low scrub. There was water there once, I’m told, but the springs dried.

Spanish broom is the most widespread and dramatic shrub of the green places in the Sierra Nevada in June; it perfumes the evening air. Brilliant yellow, its dark green branches do not carry the protective spikes of furze. Thyme and rosemary are the scents of the bare, burnt mountains where it is easy to believe that sun might indeed split the stones.

This morning, at 10am, I picked up a rock in our garden and dropped it like the proverbial hot brick. The heat sucks the moisture out of everything and even the sturdy plastic outdoor chairs crack and bleach in a single summer. The cracks are like jaws that open as one lowers ones weight, and close upon whatever flesh is available as one settles. I’ve emailed our landlord in Argentina to advise him to provide new chairs at the cortijo. Otherwise, one day neighbours will hear an overheated foreigner how in agony as he charges about the garden with a chair attached to his derriere.

The local cherry crop was badly hit by hailstones in spring.

Raspberries are beginning to show pink on the bushes. In the small fields and terraces farmers scythe oats and hay; sometimes, they have a pair of mules attached to a mower. The hay lies in neat lines to dry. Dry? It would dry in an hour: but I’d hate to be a farmer working in this heat.