Under the hammer

I've just started to use a feature on Pure Holiday Homes called Bidango.  It's like eBay for accommodation - I offer a specified week in our house to the highest bidder, and there's a reserve, a closing date and a buy-it-now price. I'm just experimenting with a couple of weeks to see if there's any interest, but I suspect we're too cheap. Under this system, you could 'win' a £300 week for £200 or something, which hardly seems worth the uncertainty. (Whereas if I could get a three-grand-a-night Bond villain's lair for forty quid, I'd get quite excited by the prospect even if it was located somewhere I didn't want to go.) Mind you, on eBay people regularly pay more for useless old tat than they would for nice new stuff from John Lewis - something to do with the psychology of bidding - so it'll be interesting to see what happens.

Anyway, if you're reading my blog, I'll discount the price just for asking - at least outside of main holiday periods.  We've got about five weeks booked for 2012 at this stage - which isn't bad, as I don't think we had anything before Christmas last year - but we could do with more.  NB: I'm putting in an extra single bed, so from about March it'll sleep six. 

The best snow in Europe just now..?

Well, that might be pushing it, but while the Alps are suffering with a lack of the white stuff, our own Sierra Nevada opened this weekend with more piste (40kms) than ever before at this time of year. The season's been getting steadily longer and better since we've been coming to the Alpujarra - about eight years - during which global warming has wreaked havoc with the ski industry hundreds of miles north. Here, where you can see Africa on a clear day, no operator is going to give you a guarantee of great snow, but it's getting more dependable every year. Here's a shot from local paper Ideal, showing the first skiers to venture out this year. (They're not going to win awards for photography at Ideal, I'm afraid.) Our house is not for a single-minded skiing holiday, as it's an hour's drive to the slopes, but for a mixed trip which combines winter sports with, say, walking, visiting the Alhambra and a day on the beach, it would be perfect.

This is one of the few places in the world where you really can ski in the morning and swim (comfortably) in the sea in the afternoon of the same day. If you're at our place, you're about half way between the two, as well as close to Granada and surrounded by great scenery in every direction.

Welcome Huelvans

We won't be in our lovely house in Juviles for Christmas this year, as we're going to Mexico instead. (I know it sounds extravagant, but it will be the first long-haul we've done since we embarked on restoring the house back in 2006. And we booked it months ago, when I was getting loads of work...) So we're delighted to have accepted a booking from a family from Huelva, who are arriving Christmas eve (Nochebuena) and staying till after New Year's Eve (Nochevieja). I just hope they have some idea of just how cold it can be between the Noches at an altitude of 1,250m.

Huelva is the Andalucian province - the capital city has the same name - that butts onto Portugal, in the far West of the community. It's quite a long way for our guests to come, despite being still in the same general region - probably a six hour drive or more. An interesting city little visited by foreign tourists, Huelva was heavily influenced by the British industrialists of the Rio Tinto mining concern in the late 19th century. Amongst other achievement, the Brits founded the first football club in Spain here - Recreativo de Huelva is still the oldest professional team in the country - and built a remarkable garden suburb reminiscent of Port Sunlight or Letchworth. Here's a shot of a typical street in Barrio Reina Victoria - or Queen Victoria District - it's only the Spanish street lights that give it away. What was home-from-home for British mining engineers in the 1890s is now a predictably gentrified corner of a modern Spanish city.

Meat is murder. Tasty, tasty murder.

I'm linking here to a blog entry about being a vegetarian in Andalusia. There's no disguising the fact that it's tough. I eat meat, and love it, but even I find the ubiquity of pig flesh round these parts a bit much at times. There's no problem if you're self-catering in a lovely property like ours, with a nice big fridge, excellent cooking facilities and some decent chef's knives (not something you can bet on in the average holiday rental). The availability of wonderful fruit and veg, delicious fresh eggs and an excellent variety of pulses, nuts and dairy make meat-free cooking easier even than in Northern Europe. The problems start when you eat out, and for most visitors, eating out is a major element of a holiday.

The problem is that barring a few classic dishes like pisto (something like ratatouille) and pimientos de padrón (fried baby peppers, above), Spaniards assume that the addition of a little meat or fish is necessarily an improvement to anything, for everyone. So although soups, tortillas and salads may look harmless and veggie-friendly on paper, there's always a high likelihood that some ham or tuna will be strewn over the top, or some meat-and-bone-based stock will have made its way in at an early stage of preparation. It doesn't even always help if you say you don't eat meat: "no como carne" means "I don't eat meat", but to an Andalusian it kind of means "I don't want a rare steak right this moment". They won't think you mean ham, or black pudding, or pork fat.

Then there are tapas, without which a visit to Spain would be unthinkable to many, including those who reject animal flesh. In most provinces of the country, you pay for and specify what you want when you get tapas. Not in these parts. Here in Granada they're free with your drink, and you get what you're given. It might be snails, it could be cod, but the chances are it'll be something that used to be part of a pig.

All is not lost, though, meat-dodgers. Every bar will have some cheese, olives, eggs. And they'll be happy to give you a tapa without meat. I suggest you learn how to say you'd like a cheese or egg tapa - la tapilla ¿puede ser de queso? should do it - and remember that you have to specify it as you order your beer or wine. Otherwise it'll be too late, and it'll be black pudding.

Pure dead brilliant?

Just renewed our listing on PURE Holiday Homes' website. The house has been there for a year and we haven't had so much as a single enquiry from it, but they dropped the price to about £30 in a desperate attempt to get us to stay on. The site looks great and I think it's potentially useful, but like all the rest it's aimed squarely at mainstream resort-style holiday homes rather than places like ours - a proper house in a real community. There's no means on the site to search for the Alpujarra or Granada, for example. Just 'Rural Andalucia'... which hardly narrows it down.

Anybody know of a website for people who are looking for a genuine unspoilt rural experience, rather than a kiddy-on resort holiday? Let me know.

Looks like we'll miss the figs this year

I'm extremely disappointed. We have to call off a planned visit to Juviles for a week from October 15th, which is the half-term holiday in Glasgow, and this means we're unlikely to get there again until Easter next year. This is a wonderful season in the Alpujarra. This time last year we enjoyed some fantastic walks, saw lots of interesting wildlife and, amongst other pleasures, ate lots of free figs and chestnuts.

So, our house is unexpectedly available to rent. As it's short notice, we'd accept a reasonable offer for rent. Get in touch if you fancy it. Oh, and as the English half-term is coming up soon, together with a few Spanish puentes, now's the time to book for later in the month too.

All the tweets you can handle

The Alpujarra and the Sierra Nevada are amongst the richest areas in Europe for birdlife. I'm certainly no expert, but there are loads of species which seem to be pretty common here compared to anywhere else, including the black redstart (that's one above), crested lark, golden oriole, griffon vulture, Bonnelli's eagle, hoopoe, bee-eater, rock bunting, alpine accentor and dozens more, including a wide variety of owls, which I tend to hear rather than see. The photograph above is from this fantastic website from Birdwatch Alpujarras, a specialist company based in Lanjarón. The site promotes their services to visiting ornithologists, but is also of great interest to the casual visitor who sees an unfamiliar bird round these parts and wonders what it might be, or who wants to know what to look out for on a walk. Personally, I just love the abundance and proximity of even fairly common birds in and around our village. The resident swallows, for example, raise several broods in a year, so we'll often see ten or more scruffy little fledglings lined up on the telephone wire immediately outside our window, screaming to be fed. The adults' complex call starts with a melodious trill, then morphs into a rattling metallic cackle - it reminds me of the sound the old dial-up modems used to make - and in summer, with the windows open, it makes owning an alarm clock entirely unnecessary. Here's a shot of a little one taken through the slats of our bedroom window blind - hence the odd diffused light.

Stein squeezes us in

I'm hardly a fan, but Rick Stein's series on Spanish food has at least taken in some beautiful locations and great dishes. Last night in Extremadura he helped himself to some guy's migas in a shed on an allotment in Trujillo, and was treated to ajo blanco by the Duchess of somewhere or other in a stunning aristocratic dehesa - a hunting estate complete with stags, wild boar and cork-oaks. Then crossing into Andalusia and arriving in Seville, he claimed to have accidentally stumbled upon El Rinconcillo - the oldest and most famous tapas bar in the city, a fixture in every guide book and travel article on Seville ever printed, and in my limited experience (I've only been once), very disappointing. To be fair it's not Stein or his cooking that annoys me, but the tired and desperate efforts to make the whole thing more engaging by having him drive an old camper van (alone but for a crew of maybe thirty people), having him 'help' with the saffron harvest or whatever, mugging to camera at every opportunity and mispronouncing everything. And all with the most appalling background music. For contrast, check out The Good Cook with Simon Hopkinson on BBC1 at the moment.
No novelty form of transport, no pretending to be best friends with the fishmonger, no groups of implausibly attractive friends round for brunch. Just Simon Hopkinson making five great dishes per episode; simple, honest and brilliant.

Anyway, just when you thought it was over, Stein found ten minutes to visit Chris and Anne Stewart of Driving Over Lemons fame, down our way in the Alpujarra Granadina. The Stewarts live on a cortijo in the river valley at (I think) Barranco de la Sangre, not far from Orgiva. They served Stein some not-very-good-looking tabbouleh (which isn't Spanish, let alone Alpujarran) and a kind of wild boar tagine which probably tasted great, but which looked terrible on the telly. Stein drove a LandRover along a dirt track (the camper van wasn't up to it), but other than that, and the Stewart's terrace, you didn't see anything of what's probably the most beautiful region in Southern Spain. He kept going on about how remote and difficult it was to get to - so after making the effort, you'd think they'd have shot a bit more footage.

The only time I've bumped into Chris Stewart, he didn't have a parrot on his head. It was in the Pizzeria in Capileira, a restaurant which despite its name does much more than pizza, including fabulous boar and extraordinary wild asparagus with scrambled egg. I'd recommend it highly - along with the rest of the eating places in that pretty, busy little village.

So many tapas, so little time

We stopped in the beautiful, atmospheric little town of Alhama de Granada while coming home from the Alpujarra at the end of last week, and what a pleasure that was. Built above a spectacular gorge, it's the site of natural hot springs which give the town its name -'Alhama' coming from the same root as 'Hammam' (what we'd call a Turkish bath). It wasn't the Moors who started the bathing though; the Romans, who loved a good scrub, developed the place as a thermal spa well before the Muslims got there, and pre-Roman populations had already settled centuries before, presumably attracted by all that free hot water. The air temperature was already about 32 C last Friday, though, so we didn't see the attraction of warming up further. Must go back in winter.

About 40 minutes from Granada city (and an hour and a half from our place), Alhama is the main town in the southern part of the Poniente region, not far from the border with Malaga. With about 6,000 residents it's hardly a metropolis, but it has a big-city, dressed-up feel to it of a weekend evening - at least in comparison to the Alpujarra, which we'd just left behind us. It's an odd mix of seeming affluence (lots of beautifully kept and restored buildings, well-dressed locals, smart cars on the street) and picturesque decay (many elegant old houses and churches are abandoned and falling down, as are the beautiful flour mills in the gorge below).

Alhama has one of the best tapas circuits I've personally encountered - and that's saying something. As in the rest of Granada, your tapa comes free with a glass of beer or wine, and sometimes with a soft drink. Unlike most other places in the province, they'll often give you a choice when you order. Reportedly 38 bars are to be found here, and over two nights we managed ten or twelve , most of them around the central Plaza de la Constitución. I can remember salmorejo (thick gazpacho), aubergine fritters with honey, huge prawns served both hot and cold, fillets of sea bass on skewers, pinchitos (of course), excellent hot miniature roscas (like filled bagles), mackerel on toast, black pudding (of course), chorizo, cheeses, pisto (like ratatouille), ham, miniature omelettes and, most satisfying of all, a pile of shredded hot roast pork on some lovely fresh bread, with olives and pickled garlic on the side. Each of these was served free with a drink costing between one and two euros. Most impressive was the consistency - while none of the bars was quite up to the standard of the very best in Granada (such as Cunini or Las Castañas) - there wasn't a single duffer either. Even the perfunctory slice of cheese on bread was, well, good cheese on fresh bread.

The bars were busy with locals out grazing each evening (Granadans often skip a proper dinner, for obvious reasons), but the town was unaccountably devoid of foreign visitors. It's only an hour or so from Malaga and the surrounding resorts, and would make a great stop on a circuit of the big cities, so I don't know why. But it's one of the delights of Spain that you can find these exquisite little places - others I can think of are Priego or Osuna in Andalusia, Caceres, Vic and Tudela elsewhere, but there are hundreds - and if you're lucky you can turn up for a night's stay and have them almost to yourself. If these towns were in Italy they'd be packed with hoards of tourists being herded from church to ruin to palazzo and shown what to take photographs of by multi-lingual tour guides. None of that in Spain.

We stayed at Casa Sonrisa, an aristocratic old house converted into a slightly eccentric, antique-filled hotel. Sixty euros a night for the two of us, including breakfast. Deserves to be much busier.

43 degrees in Malaga

I've never understood why Malaga city isn't better known to Northern Europeans. Millions of us fly into its massive airport every year, but we all seem to head a few miles west to the province's overdeveloped resorts, or maybe drive off in hire cars to somewhere perceived as more interesting, like ummm... the Alpujarra. Yet Malaga has masses of charm. Where Seville is authentically gritty and Granada is all about the romance of history, Malaga is a big, blowsy strumpet of a place packed with elegant 19th and early 20th century buildings, fantastic bars, good shopping and excellent city beaches. Young Malagueños and Malagueñas are a good-looking body-conscious lot, given to posing around the pedestrianised streets of an evening and giving the place a distinctly party feel. As the birthplace of the 20th century's most significant artist, Malaga has a great museum dedicated to Picasso's works (the best stuff may be in Paris, Madrid and New York, but he was so prolific that there always seems to be enough to fill another Picasso Museum when someone feels like opening one. Why should his home town miss out?) There's also the great man's birthplace, and the brand new Carmen Thyssen Museum - I've not had a chance to visit yet, but I believe it has an impressive collection of mostly modern Spanish art including Miró and Tapíes as well as, yes, Picasso again.

Anyway, we called in to the city yesterday for a great lunch of gazpacho and pescaito frito - mixed fried fish in the lightest imaginable batter. It's more like Japanese tempura than cod from the chippy, which is just as well as the temperature in the city centre was 43 degrees - 109 if, like me, you prefer to think of high temperatures in Fahrenheit.

They're adept at decorating the streets in Malaga, and their ingenuity stretches to lovely cooling canopies over the main drag, Larios, and some of the neighbouring calles and plazas. Even in the shade, though, it was v. hot.

If you're planning to visit our place in Juviles, you might like to know that with the fast-improving coastal motorway you can get from Malaga airport to our door in about 2 hours and 15 minutes. (OK, that's my best time so far, but it is feasible.) I would, however, recommend a night out in Malaga on the way to or from our place. The sophisticated urbanity of this great city is quite a contrast to the bucolic charms or our tiny village, and a quick fix of glamour is well worth a slight detour.

Chicken in almond sauce

I was asked for a typical Alpujarran recipe for a website the other day. Now the ultimate local dish is probably the plato Alpujarreño, which is great, but it's not unlike a British breakfast and sounds less impressive than it really is. Then there's migas, a kind of grainy semolina porridge which comes out rather like uneven couscous - again it's one of those hearty local dishes that doesn't really travel that well. So I made up a user-friendly recipe for chicken in almond sauce instead - I'm not sure if it's precisely authentic, but with great handfuls of almonds and garlic, lashings of olive oil and wine, plus pimentón and cumin, it should be close enough; and the results were delicious. This almond sauce is also great with meatballs - albóndigas - and of course with pork for carne en salsa.Ingredients to serve at least four people:

1 chicken, jointed, skin on, or a mixture of thighs and drumsticks sufficient to provide two or three pieces per person.
100 grams raw almonds, preferably with the skins still on.
300 mls white wine
Chicken stock or water, as necessary
1 head of garlic, cut in half horizontally
1 onion, peeled but kept whole
2 large tomatoes
2 or 3 slices from a baguette or similar white loaf, preferably slightly stale
Olive oil
Flour
A good pinch of saffron threads
1 tsp ground cummin
1 tsp of hot and 2 tsp mild smoked paprika (or adjust to your taste)
2 bay leaves
Salt and pepper

1. Brown the chicken on all sides in a non-stick pan, in batches, adding more olive oil when necessary. Transfer to a flame-proof casserole dish.

2. Add the wine and bring to the boil, then reduce the heat to a simmer, add the 'bottom' half of the un-peeled garlic (it should stay in one piece), the tomatoes, bay leaves, paprika, cummin and saffron. Add stock or water to just cover and simmer for half an hour to 40 minutes, with the lid on.

3. In the same oil you used to fry the chicken, brown the almonds, making sure they don't burn. Peel the 'top' half of the garlic and add the peeled half-cloves to the pan, frying until just golden. Fry the slices of bread until golden. Put the browned almonds, garlic and bread into a pestle and mortar (or a food processor) and pound (or blend) to a thick paste.

4. When the chicken is just cooked, use a slotted spoon to lift the tomatoes and onion from the casserole and add these to the almond mixture. Lift out the half-head of garlic, squeeze the cloves from the skin and add these. Continue to pound or blend until you have a thick sauce.

5. Return the sauce to the chicken and its juices in the casserole dish, stir to blend in, and cook for another 10 minutes or so. Add a little water or stock if the sauce is becoming too thick. Check for seasoning and, if you have it, sprinkle a little chopped parsley over the top.

Serve with fried or roast potatoes. Good with the rough local rosé known as costa, or manzanilla sherry, which has a great affinity with almonds.

Great walks in Sierra Nevada

I just found this really helpful site that has detailed descriptions of walks in the Alpujarra and the wider area of the Sierra Nevada Parque Natural.

Alpujarra from the sky

Just found this clip of Andalucia es de Cine on Youtube - the show is a travelogue filler which appears on Spanish telly at odd times of the day and night. This particular clip is aerial photography of our area - the eastern Granadan Alpujarra. Shot during almond-blossom time.

See the footage here.

That amazing voice-over! Three packs of Ducados a day for several decades.

All day breakfast

Sam and Dave, the British first couple not the soul duo, had plato alpurrajeño when in the Albaicín the other day. This hearty dish is not unlike a good British breakfast. It consists of at least black pudding (morcilla), fried eggs, and potatoes stewed in oil with green peppers (papas a lo pobre). In addition, there will be chorizo, lomo (fresh pork loin) or ham, or a combination of one, two or all three.

You know when you've had a plato alpurrajeño, and I can't imagine SamCam would be indulging on a regular basis, although Dave might make it a weekly ritual, perhaps shared with the fluent hispanohablante Clegg. César, the owner of a restaurant near us, does one that's baked in the oven, but then César is originally from the Basque country, so what would he know? No, for an authentically alpujarran experience, the constituent elements of the plato must be fried in plenty of extra virgin olive oil, like everything else round here. Sadly though, the idea that alpurrajeños have been sitting down to this traditional dish for hundreds of years is unlikely to be true. It was apparently invented - like the Ploughman's Lunch in the UK - in the seventies, as an easy-to-make money-spinner for bars and restaurants. But if you've been working hard in the fields all morning- or perhaps assembling flat-pack furniture for you holiday house - the plato Alpurrajeño is just about perfect, especially with some rough red wine and a siesta afterwards.

Steady, Cam.

DavCam and SamCam on holiday in Granada this week. Ideal wrote this sweet article saying that although SamCam's birthday is really during Semana Santa (18th, apparently), they'd come early for a bit of peace. I like how it assumes that British people would know to avoid Semana Santa, but doesn't acknowledge that we've got a referendum on. Anyway, they had plato alpujarreño in a restaurant in the Albaicin.

Ryanair at it again

So Ryanair take huge subsidies from provincial government and local business associations to run relatively successful Granada-London and Granada-Madrid services, cancel them without any consultation, then hold the city to ransom, demanding an even bigger bung to reinstate the flights. If I didn't loathe Ryanair already, this would swing it.
Si sabes castellano, puedes leer el artículo aquí.