For the following description of the Alpujarras Valley, we are indebted to "Al Sur de Granada", a shop in the Calle Elvira No 150 in Granada that sells produce from this area. They are next to the Puerta Elvira , just a short walk along from the main square, Plaza Nueva. It is named after the book by Gerald Brenan "South from Granada" that recounts the years he spent after the First World War in a tiny Alpujarras village, Yegen, lost in the depths of time.

You might be interested to read this excerpt about Orgiva and Las Alpujarras from "Our Lady of the Sewers and other adventures in Deep Spain." by Paul Richardson, Abacus, 1998.

........ Las Alpujarras is a great place to go on the rebound from disappointment. When Boabdil was kicked out of Granada in 1492 he came this way, though not out of choice. He was given a fiefdom over which he ruled until the autumn of the following year, when he limped south to Fez. But the mountains remained a last stronghold of the old culture and religion for another century or two. The Moors' longest-lived achievement in these parts was a complex system of acequias, canals that supplied water to the meanest village, the highest terrace, and certain old families were still charged with its upkeep long after the Reconquest. When Gerald Brenan came to the Alpujarras in 1920, dazed by the horrors of the First World War, he found ice-cream-makers who continued to fetch their snow on mule-back from the summits of the Sierra Nevada just as they had been doing since Arab times, and was once given 2,000-year old coins as part of his change when buying cigarettes in the village shop. At the end of the twentieth century little of that legacy is left, and this is now just a slightly undernourished mountain area, magnificently beautiful, where old Spain is still the dominant key of life but has almost been drowned out by modern harmonies and dissonances. The New age has settled here, as it likes to do in traditional rural societies where rents are cheap. In a paradisiacal valley outside the village of Canar, a teepee city has sprung up, populated by gentle people from all over Europe. There are fruit and olive trees, vegetable gardens, and a river of melted snow running among the tents. Before the teepee people arrived, Canar was slowly dying on its feet. The youngsters had left and the birthrate was plummeting, but in the last two years there have been seventeen babies born in teepee town, and the births have all been registered in Canar. Swelled by these new citizens, the village is booming now, and the mayor is beaming. Beliefs and ways of life outside the Western Christian norm have always found fertile ground in the Alpujarra. These days, they have tantric meditation workshops, American-Indian sweat-lodge rituals and wild nights of druidic magic. The village of Bubion has its own fully fledged Tibetan monastery, headquarters of the reincarnation of a famous lama in the form of a small Spanish boy. And Orgiva has its own Muslims. Or so I'd been led to believe. In the town's covered market was a notice board pinned all over with adverts for drums, guitars, lifts to the airport and flat roofed Alpujarreno farmhouses - for £10,000 apiece. Among the handwritten notes was one that read - "Wanted. Mountain bike. Call 34-70-56. Ask for Muhammad Scott". A case of bringing the mountain bike to Muhammad. The lady at the health-food stall (specialties: goats cheese, dried tomato bread and hand-made soap) told me where to find the new people, the ones that wear baggy trousers and headscarves in the street. They had made their base in an old boarding-house known to villagers as the Fonda del Pescado, the Fish Hotel. The Spanish word Fonda is a hang-on from the Arabic fonduk, meaning hostel, guest house, pension. It was five minutes walk from the market, in a narrow street behind the Orgiva church. A woman in an ankle-length patchwork skirt and a headscarf answered the door and peered at me through thick bottle-bottom glasses. She had the pale, squinting face of someone who spends most of her life indoors. She led me into a courtyard and sat me down at an old multi-coloured splay-legged sixties table and a chair painted roughly in bright kiddy colours. The little furniture there was in the Fonda all looked like this - battered, fifth-hand, slapdashly enamel-coloured. It felt like Africa. Electrical wires snaked and swooped around the walls, intertwining perilously with a water pipe that emerged in mid-wall and disappeared back into it a few inches away. There was the same childlike celebration of 'precious' objects, gaudy, tinselly or shiny, in this case a Moroccan lamp with coloured glass facets, a little rug with a floral design, a cheap brass ashtray that you see in working people's houses everywhere else, but in Europe. The metal railing that ran up the staircase to a gallery around the patio had been painted in jumble-sale blue and yellow, and the arched doorways around the ground floor of the dorm were formed with ancient red bricks. The walls were whitewashed. Whether by accident or design, out of knowingness or naivety, the inhabitants of the Fish House had got the Arab style to a T ....