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.