Microclimates
Snapshots in a melting pot
This side of the valley is Africa. The earth is parched fine dust, sticks of prickling grass, thorn thickets, luxuriant capering cacti and agaves topped with pears. Relentless sun except under the pines nested in the dry creek which leads to the lazy trickle of riverbed bisecting the valley.
The other side is an Arabic fort bedded in the cypresses and poplars of Mediterranean Europe. It is hearty forest and foliage rising to the sheer walls of the Alhambra.
Hard fought. Granada. A place of clashes.
On the outside of the old city walls no buildings protrude. They exist though. They exist in the thin folds and the path bends of the Sacromonte hillside. Bare sierra suddenly broken by small neat doors. Little else. Just a hanging, sheet or beads and subtle signs of life — battered chair, remains of bonfire, bicycle. Outside one an immaculate but minute garden hedged off with a motorbike in it under dust cover. There’s traces of whitewash around each door. A solitary figure with sagging T shirt, dreadlocks, carrying two plastic tubs slopping water down a winding hillside path.
Passing maybe a dozen well spaced doors and very little else, no sound except faint city echoes — someone is always cutting or drilling something — there’s a view down to more formal bright white buildings with visible walls and a way to the road below. I keep hitting high fences when I try to drop down the slope.
Over the creek. The concrete channel is hot to the touch. Every step crisp. Round the tight elbow of the hill an unexpected rivulet of water in the dust running rapidly down. Two small black puppies delighted to meet a visitor. The path goes through some human-high reeds and their home.
He comes out instantly offering a warm friendly hand, substantial but not obese, short grey plaits, couple tattoos, bare chest, shorts, little thorn cuts on arms and legs.
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He is welcoming. Fresh water from the hose. Would I like to come see his cave? Es grande.. Si. Perhaps a bit of guitarra, fumar..?
We talk a little. He in bad English. Me in worse Spanish. I convey I am trying to get down the valley. He tells me the direction and points enthusiastically — there are bars he tells me.. y mucho mas!
Another warm handshake, both hands clasping mine. Nothing insisted on. Just hospitality offered. It is another 5 or 10 minutes before I see another building of any sort. Then I open a screen door and I am in the tourist caves of the gypsy flamenco quarter.
This guy felt almost like a reproach. Not because he was coming across as resentful, furthest from. But because he seems to live the simplest life and still welcomes visitors. In my town people spend half a million pounds on a house and throw up barriers around it.
This place has been occupied for centuries by the marginalised in bio-chromatic, naturally insulated/cooled housing hewn from rock. Instead of removing and rebuilding the rocky hillside they live inside it. Evacuated sixty years ago and now semi-gentrified as housing is so expensive everywhere. It’s possible to find a cave on this hillside on Air BnB.
Descent brings a different texture to every breath. Hot still, but smooth. And lower. That flat smell that signals water.
Down by the river the girl with heavy swirling blocks of tattoos across her legs shown to striking effect draped across the lap of cool cool boyfriend. She’s slim, good looking, severe, short dark hair, sucking a lollipop, sleeveless top, sunglasses. They are at perfect rest on a broad wall with a long drop to the river beneath.
Dragonflies, swifts, pigeons, doves, bats all in the hour of sundown. The rolling gait of passers by, lazy and seamless, the serial placement of foot at end of stretched leg. In the square hot hotpotch of commuters, police guarding something or someone, tourists, occasional nun.
The evening is just beginning and it stretches out long and languid into the finally comfortable night — people out chatting, young children along with their families. Spontaneous conversations on buses between different ages. It’s like the pooling of many streams and subcurrents.
The sun’s residue inside us.
Ice creams near midnight.
