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Our Trip to Spain - March 2003 Daily Travel Log 2 - Frigiliana

The heart of our vacation (and definitely the best part) was a week in a villa in the little Andalucian village of Frigiliana. The first few days were spent close to home, in Frigiliana and Nerja. Later we ventured out to Granada and Gibraltar for longer day trips.

Frigiliana is an amazing little town - very old, even for Spain. It's built on the side of Mount Enmedio, a foothill of the Almijara mountain range, at an altitude of 1,200 feet or so. Like all the small hill towns in Andalucia, the mostly 2-story houses are scrunched together on the smallest possible amount of terraced land to maximize the space available for olives and grape vines. It's all white walls, red tile roofs and patterned cobblestone streets, many of which are more staircase than street. This architecture is typically Moorish, but Frigiliana's history goes back well before that, to Roman times and before that to Phoenician.

Even though it is less than 10 miles from the appallingly overbuilt Costa del Sol, it has managed to retain its historical character even as it rakes in the tourist dollars. Perhaps its secret is that the non-Spanish presence is more expat than tourist. I got the impression that maybe 25% of the houses are owned by foreigners (mostly British). Some of them live there year round, others vacation there and rent out their villas by the week the rest of the year. Tour buses come up from Nerja each day but the day-trippers don't stay long or venture very far up the precipitously angled streets. The top of the old town, where we were staying, feels very Spanish. We bought our groceries at Camilla's, a tiny little store in a building that looks like all the other white-washed houses, opening directly onto a street that looks like a sidewalk but is actually Main Street. Uphill from Camilla's, the streets turn into flights of broad stairs. Deliveries to the restaurants and bars up there are made via mule.

Sunday, March 16 - Around Town

Weather: 17C (63F). Cool, breezy, but partly sunny in the morning. Gray in the afternoon, raining lightly in the evening.

A really good day, at least for me and Amber. Richard, getting into the main part of his cold, slept all day. In the morning, Amber and I hiked to the top of the small mountain that old Frigiliana nestles against. When we were hiking up to the villa on Saturday night it seemed like it must be at the top of the mountain, but in fact there were dozens of houses above us. The half-washed-out, stony path actually improved as it continued upwards, at least in places. It's hard to tell what a Spanish house is like inside by looking at the exterior, but the landscaping of the path and the tiny front gardens kept getting more and more beautiful as we continued upwards. There was something slightly Japanese about the elegant designs and carefully sculptured small trees. After a while there were no more villas, and we started noticing little tags labeling the flowers and trees. Artfully placed sculptures began to appear. By the time we reached the top of the hill we were in a full-blown formal sculpture garden. The flat top of the hill had been left wild, or so it appeared at first. However, on closer inspection we noticed a network of small black hoses snaking among the wildflowers and shrubs -  an irrigation system. We remembered that Steve had told us that the top of the mountain had been landscaped by its eccentric South African owner. He did a nice job. The view from the hilltop was stunning. Once you reach the top, it becomes apparent that Frigiliana's little mountain is really just a foothill to the real mountain range.

Here and there in the steep valley below us we could see what looked like large turquoise swimming pools. One seemed to have a large house next to it, the other was all by itself on the side of a mountain. There were also a few gigantic covered cylinders positioned on the hillsides, and eventually we found a little aqueduct on the far side of the mountain carrying clean-looking water downward. Steve had told us earlier that the water in Frigiliana was perfectly safe to drink, being pure mountain water, and now we had found the waterworks. According to the Frigiliana website, these aqueducts were originally built by the Moors, those water wizards.

Richard still didn't have the energy to venture out into the drizzly evening, so I had dinner with Amber at La Taberna, a very nice restaurant near the church. Like all the restaurants we tried in Frigiliana, the menus were printed in 4 languages: Spanish, English, French and German. In this particular restaurant, the waiter actually spoke English, and very likely all the rest of the languages as well; he seemed to have an awfully continental flair for such a small town.  The food was delicious, and elegantly presented, but the whole meal came to less than 30 Euros. We had swordfish and salmon and white wine and flan, and brought back chicken soup for Richard.

Monday, March 17 - Caves of Nerja

Nerja photo gallery

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Weather: windy, gray and chilly all day. About 17 Centigrade, much like the day before, and the day after, and the day after that...
Afternoon trip to Nerja. Richard finally got up about 3pm, still coughing and feeling shaky, but ready to venture out. We decided on a simple, non-stressful trip to nearby Nerja, the closest coastal town. It turned out to be a very pleasant day, despite the forbidding weather. Walked along the paseo by one of the beaches (not the Balcon de Europa - we were on the other side of town).  The sea was gray and stormy, and the nearly-gale-force winds whipped up the waves into impressive breakers and whitecaps. The little thatch-roofed beach shelters were deserted, the beach palms bent over sideways, and the gulls were flying backwards. Very dramatic. The next day we saw in the local paper that the winds that day had been up to 100 km/hour, the highest winds in more than a decade.  Spent an hour in an Internet cafe checking email. Richard bought some new reading glasses, Amber bought a shawl and I bought a detailed book on Axarquia (which came in very handy later in the week, despite the fact that the only copy they had was in French). We stopped in a deserted tourist restaurant by the beach and had 3 different kinds of paella. It was probably not the best Spain had to offer, but we enjoyed it. All in all, the afternoon was low-key but satisfying..
Caves of Nerja This large series of limestone caverns was home to ancient humans tens of of thousands of years ago, but was only rediscovered in the 1950's by a group of boys hunting bats. Since then, an auditorium has been installed in one of the first caverns which is used during the hot summer months for music and dance performances. A very extensive system of walkways and lighting in the remainder of the cave shows off the stunning flowstone and gigantic stalactites. Visitors pay an entry fee, then walk through the caves at their own pace.The fee was about 8 Euros each, which is high by Spanish standards, but well worth it. It's a big cave; takes at least an hour to walk through it at a leisurely pace. The largest chamber (which is immense) contains the biggest stalactite I have ever seen. Actually, I guess it's a stalactite/agmite merged into one gigantic fluted column.  It may well be the biggest in the world. Embedded in the floor of the cavern, far below the walkways, you can see semi-trailer sizes chunks of a couple of smaller stalactites that broke off and fell many centuries ago.

 

Tuesday, March 18: Nerja - Balcon de Europa and along the coast

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Weather: Partly sunny and pleasant in the morning, gray afternoon, raining in the evening.

We had originally planned more ambitious day trips than this, but Richard still wasn't feeling very well, so we stuck close to home again. Back to Nerja; this time we located the Balcon de Europa, which is more impressive than the beachside walkway we'd been on the day before. After hanging around on the Balcon for awhile admiring the view, we decided to drive down the coast to a small town Steve had mentioned: Marina del Este. The drive was fun, lots of hills, tunnels, scenery (in pretty much that order, repeated indefinitely). Also, lots of big blue trucks full of dirt. Southern Spain is in the middle of an international land boom - people from England and Europe are frantically buying up scenic real estate and building hotels, villas and townhouses. You can see construction under way somewhere from pretty much any point on the coastal highway. There's a tremendous amount of road-building and road improvement going on as well. All of this apparently requires immense amount of dirt to be trucked back and forth from one side of Spain to the other. This results in a lot of very slow going on the coastal road, which is mostly 2 lanes. When you get to a long uphill stretch there will usually be a passing lane, and all the cars go streaming by the slow truck, only to come upon another identical truck at the top of the hill just as the passing lane ends. And since the road is curvy, they go down the hills almost as slowly as they go up them, resulting in quite a lot of opportunity for looking at the scenery. It just takes longer than expected to get anywhere.

The best part of the day was the Secret Beach. We stopped on a clifftop pullout to stretch our legs and look at the view. There was an abandoned wreck of a house clinging to the side of the cliff, which we investigated. We came upon quite a few of these, which were really rather perplexing. Why would anybody abandon a house in such a gorgeous (and no doubt valuable) location? Then we noticed a steeply switch-backed gravel road leading down and decided to follow it. After an exciting downward journey at about 3 mph, we found ourselves on a lovely little beach cut off by cliffs on each side. There were 2 restaurants down there, but neither was open. There was also a sign that seemed to indicate that this beach was part of some park system. At the rockier end of the beach, Richard discovered a small hole in the cliff that looked like a cave, but actually went through to the other side. Amber and Richard crawled through the hole and discovered a hidden valley inside the cliff, with some signs of campfires and an abandoned shack, but no sign of any way in or out except through the hole in the rock. There must have been a dirt road back there somewhere - surely they didn't haul the materials for the shack through that little hole? But they never found it. They thought all this was pretty exciting, but I was enjoying sitting by the ocean and didn't feel like crawling through a hole. To each his own.

At the opposite end of the beach from the gravel road we found what looked like a much better road (i.e., paved) so we took that back up. It turned out to be far more nerve-wracking than the bumpy gravel one for two reasons: (1) the tight switchbacks tended to skirt the unprotected edge of the cliff and (2) there was 2-way traffic. Not a lot, but enough to be pretty hair-raising. To our amazement, we discovered a whole colony of posh-looking houses clinging to the side of the cliff. We had a lot of fun driving past them and imagining what it must be like to live there.

We had planned to get something to eat in Marina del Este, but we got lost in an endless chain of half-built "Urbanizations" and never did find the town. We finally threaded our way back out of Real Estate City and drove home. By the time we got back to Frigiliana it was raining dismally, but we were starving and decided to walk down into town and find a place to eat. The restaurant we were aiming for, Las Chinas, was on the top of the other hill (the New Village). We got sick of walking up the hill in the rain and stopped at a little place full of locals halfway up the hill. It turned out to be just fine. The food wasn't fancy, but it was well-prepared and the wine was good. I think we had figured out by this time that a bottle of local wine cost about the same as 3 glasses - an important discovery. Richard had the best fish soup of the trip here.

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