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.