The Alpujarras - Sierra Nevada National Park

We had thought we would spend 2 days touring Granada, but after one day we have had enough of big cities so decide to head out to what we had read was the `Little Switzerland of Spain` in one of our guide books.  Wow, what a great day.  

This area is not too far out of the way from heading back to Nerja, in the Sierra Navada National Park.  Again we are going up, but this time it is in a car.   

We were close

Happy I did not live in the old days.  Can`t imagine bringing up all that stone

Best village sign ever seen

We follow the Pouqeira Gorge and visit three small towns, Bubion, Pampapaneira, and Capileia.  These three town together are quite famous, Capileia being the 2^nd highest town in Andalusia.  You can see the snowpeaks directly above the town.  The area is called the Alpujarras, would be a great place to spend some time if you were into hiking. 

We stopped at all three towns and walked around.  All of them are built on the side of the mountain less than 10 km apart, and lots of walking up and down in each town as they are built on the side on the mountain not in a valley.  All were the beautiful white buildings that you see in pictures of Spain, and with the snowy mountains as a backdrop it was beautiful.   

The first village was quite touristy, lots of shops and restaurants along the main street, but as you ventured back off the main streets and saw were the people lived it was not nearly as touristy.

Lots of narrow streets

Down we go

Can you say Happy

Lots of these around

We visited a small museum in the second village, when you enter the museum they close the front door so they can give you a guided tour for 1.80 Euro.  It is a home from the 1500`s, quite something.  This home was the first one in the village to get a TV, she was proud to tell us that.  It was quite the tour, her broken English with our very broken Spanish, it was fun.  The house had 2 floor, family on top, animals and storage in the bottom floor. Since it is on a mountain side, both floors have doors leading to the street. When we left she gave us a package of Bay Leaves, I think this was worth more than the price of admission!  

Firewood

Museum

People eat late here

Chimney

The third village is where we decided we would have lunch, it was now around 1:30 and so far we had only had our leftover pizza from last night for breakfast.  Oh, we did go into a small chocolate factory first village as we were leaving and the woman came out and told us to sample as much as we wanted, there were about 30 kinds of chocolate to sample, I think I tried 20.  Andre felt guilty so we bought 2 chocolate bars, so besides pizza we had chocolate as well before lunch.

Lunch was fun again, English was basically non-existent by our waiter so it was a bit of a guessing game over what to order.  Andre took a picture of the menu for the day, hope it turns out. I am just so glad that I did not order what Andre did, he had the Alpujarras platter special, which when it came was a sunny side up egg, 2 kinds of icky looking sausage, a piece of ham and some potatoes .  I think I would have only had the potato if I had his plate.  We also ordered some tapas here, which we think may have been curry pork, whatever it was it was delicious and free since Andre ordered a beer.

Outside the restaurant

Bread soup with something in it

We know sopa is soup

Sopped here and bought some ham for later

Time to head back home, back down the very windy road to the main highway.  When we got back to the first village we came across an accident between a tour bus and a car, it didn`t look like anyone was hurt, but still scary to see.  These roads are very twisty and narrow, and many people driving way too quickly, I was glad to get to the bottom safely. 

We decided to take the old beach road home.  Lots of pretty views.  Stopped a few times to get out and enjoy the views.  We stop at a lookout viewpoint, only a short hike up.  We were both glad it was short  as we were pretty tired at this point.  Fantastic view from high above.

Tower at lookout

View from Lookout

Home at around 6PM, it is a beautiful night and we can`t believe there is no wind.  This is the first time we have seen no big waves crashing on the rocks below us.  There are actually people out walking around them on the beach, you would have never been able to do this earlier in the week.

Leftovers for supper, back to reality, and back to work tomorrow.  It has been a fantastic week-end, but I am ready to not climb stairs or hills for a couple of days.  Not sure if I will be able to jog walk tomorrow, we`ll see how we feel when we wake up!

So calm