Day 42 – to Pampaneira

It was a good time to leave the Veleta parking, being Saturday morning. From first light the place had started to fill up with walkers and mountain bikers, and by 8 am it was completely full. So different to how it had been the last couple of days.

I managed to fit in a quick bit of dog exercise, down to the track at the High Performance Sports Centre. I’d socialised last night with a young German couple next to me, and they were really keen to actually run on the track. Despite there being no one there at all for the last couple of days, they were refused permission.

I was headed down to the south of the National Park, via a supermarket stock up and refuel. That meant descending to 750 metres asl and with a lunch time temperature of 27C it was a relief to leave the autovia and head up again, on a much smaller road through the villages of Lanjaron and Soportújar. The road was very slow, packed with day trip drivers, cyclists and buses. On a quiet day it would be a good ride, but today I’m not so sure. Soportújar village was so busy there was illegal road parking two kilometres either side of it. Arriving at Pampaneira that was pretty much the same. These are tourist villages. Most people seem to be in the finest clothes arriving for a late lunch, then walking extremely slowly round the various tat souvenir shops browsing completely useless items.

Some stock the characteristic Alpujarra’s jarapas, or multicoloured carpets, which were originally made by Arabic people who moved into this Alpujarra mountainous region when expelled from Granada in 1492. Down a steep path below the village are the communal was basins that date back to the early 1500s.

These villages change completely at weekends at this time of year. A bar owner told me they are busier now at weekends than in high season. Each village has about 6 buses of day trippers in at one time, it’s a amazing they can find parking. It seems such an effort to make for the customers on board, for just an hour or two in the village.

Pampaneira is the lowest of three staggered villages ascending the valley, the others being Bubión and Capileira. Buses don’t go up to the higher two , and they are smaller, but still crammed with visitors. I found some shade, read a couple of short books. The Argentinian, César Aira, is one of my favourite writers at present, and this novella was about a doctor who could administer miracle cures, but was losing interest, in a type of mid-life crisis. The other book turned out to be of less interest, about a dysfunctional family who take refuge in their bathroom when a tornado hits; it’s horror for laughs (Max Booth III’s We Need To Do Something), but not as good as I had hoped, as an author like Grady Hendrix, who does it so well.

As the day trippers headed for home, about 6 pm, I drove up to the highest of the villages and found a good spot for the night above it, the car park for walkers. I wandered back into a now much emptier village, found a bar and had a couple of beers. To my great fortune, there was a Hindu restaurant also. It opened at 8 pm, surprisingly early, so I collected a takeaway on the way back to the van. It was excellent.

As the reader may have guessed, I’m still figuring out how to get the photos in the right place using this blog platform..

The left photo above in at the Hindu restaurant, taking a beer while waiting for the takeaway order.

The right hand photo belongs a few paragraphs higher, the multicoloured carpets on sale in Pampaneira.