Órgiva: A treasure trove of information

We hit the jackpot today with our visit to the ADR (Association for Rural Development ) office in Órgiva. The information collected by the Inventario de Patrimonio Histórico project is stored here. The general manager, Francisco Pérez Ortega, emailed me a few months ago saying that they had maps in their office that we could look at when we arrived. So we arranged to stay ten days in Órgiva in order to be able to see the material at leisure plus have time to walk in the area.

After getting a bit lost on the way to the ADR office this morning, we arrived a few minutes late for our 10 AM appointment, hoping we wouldn’t be disturbing things too much. The exact opposite turned out to be true. Francisco had a work space all set up for us, complete with a marvelous collection of very large maps,(each one as long as my arm!) one for every Alpujarran village and its surrounding area. As you can see in the photos, the base maps have numbers entered for each of the inventory elements. This will be extremely helpful in planning out our walks because we can see at a glance which inventoried elements are close to each other.

I was in heaven when Francisco brought out the notebook with all the original fichas (data sheets) done by the field technicians. Each page details the history and significance of a single “element”, as the items are called. They are now available online (https://www.alpujarradegranada.com/patrimonio-h…) and are what we’ve been using for several years to plan this trip.

After Ned photographed all of the maps, we walked out to Francisco‘s office to thank him. He stood up to hand us a final surprise gift: a pen drive with a photo of each of the more than 2500 elements cataloged in the province of Granada. What a tremendously useful and generous gift!

The kindness of the people in Spain who have helped us out with this project is so appreciated. These include not only Francisco today, but also the librarians in Almería who in 2023 helped us find a copy of the out-of-print book that gives a general look at each category included in the inventory, everything from agriculture to transportation; and the casa rural owner in Bérchules who borrowed a copy of the team’s investigation of traditional architecture of the region from a friend of hers so we could photograph that out-of-print book.

Luckily, we now have seven more days here to put all this information to use on our next walks.Læs mere