Jardín Botánico de Cactus

Although Casarabonela doesn’t seem like a likely place to have a cactus garden, it actually has the largest collection of cacti and succulents in all of Spain with 11,000 plants. The collection was started by two botanists who lived on the island of Mallorca. In search of a more suitable climate, in 1 995 they moved to Andalucía where it turned out that the slopes of the Sierra Prieta offered the necessary microclimate. We were the only visitors today, so with the attentive resident cat as our guide, we were undisturbed as we pored over the beautiful blooms on many of the cacti.

On our return, we stumbled across an Arrabal neighborhood we hadn’t seen before, and ended up spending almost an hour poking around the barrio which preserves the layout of the Islamic portion of the town after the Reconquest. We saw 5 of the town’s 35 hornacinas (niches with Christian symbolism) - which we’ve just learned to recognize as the markers between the Christian neighborhoods and the Muslim neighborhoods after the Reconquest. Now, of course, there’s no religious requirement as to the neighborhood where one can reside, but it does appear that a significant number of Muslim families live in this area. We also saw several adarves (lanes with no outlet that give access to the middle of a block) and a tinao (roof over a street that connects buildings), the first time we’ve seen one outside of the Alpujarra region. It was just fascinating to discover these all on our own without a guidebook or signage pointing them out. Casarabonela definitely has had the best preserved historical landscape of any of the villages we’ve stayed in on this trip.

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