Christmas in Andalucia

The white pueblo on Christmas Eve

I guess it was a tell-tale sign that it had been a less-than-stunning climbing year. Just before putting my foot in my rock boots at the sun-drenched crag, I found that a mouse had decided to call it home. To be honest, I couldn't fault his logic or his interior decorating skills: a pile of wheat nesting in the heel (neatly extracted from my not-cheap wheat bag for heating up sore muscles), some tufts of yellow fluff no doubt pulled out of an expensive fleece, a few nips out of the boot's lining to add a bit of interest, and a name plate nibbled out of the heel tab. And above all, it smelt of cheese.


A mixed, roller-coaster of a climbing trip really...starting out gingerly on a duff knee, slightly dodgy weather, mixed with climbing highs and lows in unexpected places.


A memorable experience was a pilgrimage to the mighty El Chorro. A knot of limestone, pushed out of the plain and slashed with knife-like river gorges that expose a dizzying number of hard cliffs. Flooded in the 1920's for a hydro-electric scheme, there's a blinding number of man-made constructs to negotiate- train tunnels, wobbly, crumbling bridges, wires and the fearsome Camino del Rey. It is a mad, vertical world, like the workings of a crazed mind.


A Perfect Dawn Rising Over El Chorro

Stuck to the vertical cliffs way above a dizzying drop is the Camino del Rey, a pathway built for the then king of Spain in the 1920's, King Alphonso XI. I would have liked to have seen his face, quite frankly. Now replete with bits that fell off, huge sections just disappeared and the like, people crawl along it, attached in via ferrata style to rusting fragments of time's passing with more than a prayer on their lips. This is the recommended route to the crag.


The Space Between Your Feet: the Camino del Rey

We chose the other, less risky route- skipping through the tunnels shared by the Spanish train system. Yes, up and over a 12 foot steel fence and into a series of eery tunnels, with all the trepidation and excitement of meeting the 11.05 from Madrid when you least wanted to.

An iconic place to climb, with a unique atmosphere induced perhaps by the challenge of even getting there. Andalucia has a well-known charm in photographic circles. Somehow even the pattern of furrows in farmed fields, the shades of drying earth have a devastating photographic richness to them. It's all abstract art painted with earth colours.

For us middle-grade climbers with bad knees, the best place to be was the smaller, greyer crags. There's a neat, natural colour coding that goes on with limestone: steep and nasty=orange, nice and slabby=grey. You can't go wrong if you stick to the grey ones...The crags here tend to be on the steep or overhanging side, meaning we ended up driving a long way to find gentler ones to pander to our pathetic climbing standards.

It didn't matter though. Tucked up in a medieval street of tiny white houses, burning olive wood in the stove, the goats bleating outside, it seemed as though richness isn't about money at all. It's a quality that can come upon you quite simply, and probably isn't far off what my ancestors would have had within their grasp.


Happy New Year.