Our base for the Sierra Nevada portion of our trip is Bubion, the middle of three Alpujarran White Villages. We are excited about this as Beck’s hairdresser, a keen walker and mountain biker, had been there and filled our heads with recommendations! We aren’t disappointed. Our hotel is the Hotel Villa de Bubion, a pleasant three star place which meets our needs perfectly, namely in the form of large glasses of wine for €1.80 and three course set meals with appetisers for €12! On our first night we sample the traditional Alpujarran dish of fried egg, fried potatoes, serrano ham, black pudding and sausage. To burn it off, the next day Beck takes Ben on a half marathon walk, with over 900 metres of ascent. We use the excellent Trek Sierra Nevada website as our guide and a full description of the walk can be found here. The walk is fabulous, tough, but very rewarding – highly recommended if you are in the area. We have perfect conditions, blue skies all the way around, sunny with a cool breeze, and stunning vistas. We stop off at Capileira, the topmost of the three White Villages for refreshment on the way home – there is a fiesta going on and the town is buzzing. If we were to return, we might consider staying here in preference to Bubion for a little more variety – but we are also very happy where we are. In the evening we reward ourselves with more wine and delicious food back at the hotel.
The following day we decide to take on a slightly shorter walk, through forest tracks as the weather is colder and the winds have picked up. It makes us realise how lucky we were to get the conditions we had yesterday for our high mountain ridge walk. Today’s route is meant to be 13.5km with about 550 metres of ascent. Only the Mazda doesn’t like the unpaved road leading into the trailhead and we decide to dump it and walk the remaining 3km to the official start. This adds an extra 350 metres of ascent and 6km of distance, for the round trip. All of a sudden, we are doing almost the same distance and ascent as yesterday! Still, it’s another very pretty walk, much of it following the acequias which criss-cross the terrain around here. We picnic at the Puente Palo recreation area, which bears a striking resemblance to the set of the film Severance but luckily, that’s the only disturbing part of an otherwise beautiful walk! For variety we feast in Restaurant Angel’s, on Ensalata Angel and, yes, you guessed it, Pizza Angel!
We are sad to leave Bubion and I can definitely see us returning, perhaps later in the year next time when the weather is warmer and more settled, to do more walking, biking and exploring. What happens next makes us even more determined to return….
Our plan en route from Bubion to Granada was to take in the amazing looking gorge walk of Junta de los Rios. Ben had scoped out a Mazda compatible entry point and we were suitably prepared with swimwear, towels and provisions. What we hadn’t accounted for were the rows and rows of bee hives right on the pathway down. This wouldn’t normally be a problem – we had encountered the same on a walk in Turkey and had successfully skirted them, however, in the meantime, Beck had taken up bee keeping, been stung a few times in succession and had ended up in hospital after a sting to the neck had caused her whole body to blow up like a balloon. Despite giving the hives a wide berth, Beck manages to get a bee stuck in her hair, which goes on to sting her again on the neck. We are now a few kilometres down a dirt road and, once back on the main road, about 45 minutes from civilisation in Granada. Luckily, we have an epi-pen but although her face and arms go beetroot red, there is little swelling and we simply about-turn back to the car, sacking off the gorge walk and heading into Granada earlier than expected.