Conquer Spain: Andalucia

Explore the rich cultural heritage of the Moors on a walk through Andalucia

THE MOORS are winning for the moment, but history must out. It's a hot midday in Valor, a village in the Alpujarras, the rugged Andalucian hill country on the southern slopes of the Sierra Nevada, and the main plaza is reverberating with gunfire and fireworks. The locals are going through the age-old motions, not to mention an arsenal of blank cartridges, of their Moros y Christianos fiesta, which marks the defeat of the Moors in the late 15th century.

The racket is ear-numbing. Spaniards love noise when they cut loose, and apart from the whiz and slam of rockets, there have been bursts of recorded flamenco-pop muzak and squeals of feedback as the MC makes announcements – such as a cheerful disclaimer, that the organisers take no responsibility for injuries.

There has been much belligerent speechifying from uncompromising looking guys on splendiferous horseback – "We will defend our faith until death" – and much brassy to-ing and fro-ing from the local band. Now, however, round a little chipboard stage fortress erected in the square, the Christians – in helmets and yellow and red slashed doublet and hose – and the white-robed Moors are locked in mortal combat. As the air is laced with the whiff of powder, you see old and young – sometimes, one suspects, fathers and sons – grappling as costumed enemies, waltzing up and down the square in a good-natured ritual tussle. You could call it the reconquista two-step.

The reconquista is what Spaniards term the gradual recapturing of their country by los Reyes Católicos, the Catholic monarchs, from the Moors, who had established states across much of the Iberian peninsula. Andalucia, the Arabic kingdom of Al-Andalus, was the final stronghold against southward-marching Christianity, until in 1492 Boabdil, the last Muslim ruler of Granada, surrendered to Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile.

All this is somewhat academic, however, as the Valor debacle adjourns for a leisurely lunch. The Moors have taken the fortress but later in the afternoon the Christians will, of course, win the day. We amble off into the countryside – exit, pursued by rockets – with a view to eating our picnic lunch and retrieving our hearing. We're walking in the Alpujarras on a self-guided tour with Sherpa Expeditions, whereby our main luggage is dispatched from hotel to hotel as we peregrinate through this often breathtakingly beautiful country.

So what survives of the Spanish Moors, you might wonder, head still ringing from this explosive village pantomime? To find out, go into the hills, where that most fundamental necessity of the desert Arab, sweet water, still flows through the network of acequías, or watercourses, established by the Muslims a millennium ago. Our walks often follow such water channels across the hills, sometimes encased in modern concrete channels, sometimes gurgling companionably through old ditches like mountain burns. And in the Alpujarran villages, spotlessly white-painted and clinging tenaciously to the hillsides, you're rarely far from the sound of water as it streams into troughs and fountains or flows under the streets.

When the Moors were finally expelled from Andalucia, Basques and Galicians were brought from the north to settle the area but, received wisdom recounts, two Moors were kept in every community to maintain the all-important water courses. At the wonderfully welcoming Las Chimeneas, in the village of Mairena – the "balcony of the Alpujarra" – where we begin our week's walking, our English host, David Illsley, suggests this still wild area would have been so unpoliceable that many Moors, especially those with no money to settle elsewhere, would have stayed. There are still Moors here, lurking in the local DNA.

Whatever the ubiquity of the acequías, the farmers are deeply concerned at the seven consecutive summer droughts they have experienced, as the traditional water source, the snows of the Sierra Nevada, retreat further every winter against the reconquista of climate change.

So we peregrinate through the September heat and through a landscape that, particularly in level morning or evening light, can look positively Martian, red and riven with deep barrancas or river gorges. We skirt terraces of olive and almond trees, big tangled whorls of agaves, their flower stems like primeval tree trunks, and bristling clumps of prickly pear cacti, their orange fruit lying pulped on the roads. One barranca resembles a miniature Grand Canyon, its rocks thrown into vivid delineations of red and purple, the aspens at the ravine bottom haloed in morning light.

At our greatest height, we stop at a cairn at 1,682 metres before descending a zigzag track through the welcome shade of pinewoods into the river valley below Trevélez, the highest village in the Alpujarras. This is ham city, its pure mountain air making its Serrano famous. And at the restaurant of the Hotel La Fragua, with its stunning view down the valley, where we dine on Moorish lamb, the bar is festooned with hams and black puddings.

After the airy solitude of the mountain paths, arriving in the urban rush of Granada is something of a culture shock, although a walk in the Albayzín, the city's old Moorish quarter, feels familiar enough. We find it as precipitous and labyrinthine as some of the hill villages. In contrast to those villages, though, both the guidebooks and locals warn of muggings in the area.

For the sensible visitor, the Albayzín offers a rich Arab legacy, from its hidden, lushly gardened courtyards to its horseshoe-shaped Moorish gates and churches that were once mosques – their spires still bearing telltale keyhole-shaped windows, or perhaps a hidden well and courtyard of lemon trees.

Our hotel, the wonderful Casa del Capitel Nazari, is in one of the quarter's lower streets, concealed behind an ancient wooden door. A restored Renaissance palace, it is inward-facing in the Moorish style around open courtyards, with unexpected quiet corners housing fountains, and everywhere heavy timber beams and elaborately capitalled stone pillars.

From the top of the Albayzín – the place to be at sunset – there are spectacular views of the pantiled roofscape below and across to Granada's glory, the Alhambra, the last and most extravagant flourish of Moorish culture in Spain. A partly rebuilt church is a reminder of more recent conflicts and that the Albayzín was a Republican stronghold during the civil war, shelled by Franco's Nationalists.

Ironically, the morning we visit the Alhambra, we experience our first Andalucian rain (are they enjoying the benefit, back in the Alpujarras?). It's 8:30am, and already the queues are building up – advance booking is virtually essential. Neglected for centuries, this magnificent Moorish complex was brought to the travelling public's ken by the American, Washington Irvine, who took lodgings here in 1829 and whose widely selling Tales of the Alhambra helped shame the Spanish authorities into doing something to stem the decline of such an astonishing legacy.

The Alhambra is breathtaking, whatever the weather, with its spectacularly carved stone as intricate as fretwork, its delicate arches and pillars mirrored with geometric exactitude in long, still pools. At its heart stands the palace of the Nasrids, the last Moorish dynasty to rule Granada, alongside the interloping Renaissance palace of Carlos V – built in a much heavier style, with an imposing circular courtyard. This now houses the Museum of the Alhambra. Outwith the main battlements, the gardens of the Generaliffe, the Moorish summer palace, glisten in the rain and are pungent with the interlacing smells of herbs and box hedges, with fountains discharging glittering arches of water.

He may have had an uneasy, and ultimately fatal, relationship with Granada, but someone who loved the Alhambra's "breeze of sweet basil, dark moss and trilling of nightingales" was the great poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca. His two homes are now museums: one, the Huerta de San Vicente, now surrounded by a park named after him, was the Lorca family's summer home in the 1920s and 1930s; the other, the Museo Casa-Natal Federico Garcia Lorca, the poet's birthplace, is in the outlying village of Fuente Vaqueros, a short bus ride away.

Contemplating his original manuscripts, first editions and whimsical, Miro-esque drawings instils a poignant sense of too late connection. So too does a brief film clip, showing him on the road with the Baraca touring theatre company he co-founded "to divert the public nobly" – a grinning Lorca exudes the kind of enthusiasm you'd see in students making their first Edinburgh Fringe appearance.

That was in 1934, just two years before he was arrested by Nationalist louts and shot dead – for celebrating life and dreams, for being openly critical of Granada's bourgeoisie and, of course, for being homosexual. The fact that he described the reconquista as Spain's greatest tragedy probably did him no favours either.

Today, the visitor can sense something of Lorca's mercurial spirit, and contemplate the Moorish and Christian palaces of the Alhambra, brooding side by side on their hill, still fighting, as he put it, "the fatal duel that throbs at the heart of every Granadan".

Factfile: andalucia

PACKAGE

An eight-day Andalucian walking tour with Sherpa Expeditions (tel: [phone], www.sherpa-walking-holidays.co.uk) costs from £500.99 per person, excluding flights.

HOW TO GET THERE

EasyJet (tel: [phone], www.easyJet.com) flies from Glasgow to Malaga from £29.99 one way. Jim Gilchrist then took the train to Granada, where he was met by David Illsley (www.alpujarra-tours.com).

WHERE TO STAY

Casa del Capitel Nazari (tel: [phone], www.hotelcasa capitel.com). Rooms from ¤72 (£59).

AND THERE'S MORE

Scotsman Reader Holidays offer seven day trips to Andalucia from £665. Tel: [phone] (quote scotsman.com) or e-mail [e-mail]