Órgiva: Arrival

This trip has been eight years in the making. In 2018, we heard about a team of biologists, geologists, geographers, environmentalists, art historians, and anthropologists who set out to inventory the historical heritage of the Alpujarra, the area of high mountain villages located south of Granada in the Parque Nacional de Sierra Nevada in Andalucía.

The final inventory, produced under the direction of ethnographer Augustín Sanchez Hita, included 5,488 items - everything from water-management channels laid out in the 800’s to mines dug in the 1950’s. Wouldn’t it be great, we thought, to walk the traditional tracks through the mountains to see some of these treasures? And might it also be possible to post gpx tracks of the inventory locations on the app Wikiloc so other people could find the items?

We shall see!

Today our jet-lagged brains were not up to anything more than a short exploration of the upper part of the village of Órgiva, our starting point after four days of travel. The high point for Ned was the connection between the Ermita de San Sebastián, and Claude Debussy’s music, “The Martyrdom of San Sebastián”. For me, it was seeing the library where a dedicated librarian collected more than 300 different editions of Don Quixote in multiple languages.Read more