Bubión: Casa Las Alegas

Even if today were the biggest fiesta day of the year in Bubión, there is absolutely no chance that the festivities would be taking place in front of our house. Casa las Alegas sits on the edge of a precipice that drops 230 m (754 ft) to the river. This sheer wall is named Tajo del Diablo, and is so steep that there is no trail down it. To cross the river from here, we will have to angle towards one of the other two villages in the Barranco de Poqueira. Needless to say, we are delighted with the peace and quiet of our new location.

(In Órgiva’s defense, I must add that the Mother’s Day music ended at 6 pm, so we did get plenty of sleep last night.)

Here in Bubión, we spent the entire afternoon getting organized. In spite of the fact that Bubión is a small village of only 350 people, it took us an hour and a half simply to find the house. It’s not on a street, just on a pedestrian trail, so there is no identifying street name or number. We had photo directions to the house, but they were hard to follow through the maze of very steep streets. I think we will be better at this by the end of the week.

Once found, the house was full of interesting details. We were especially surprised by the stone-filled ceilings. We’ve never seen anything like them before even during our other stays in the Alpujarra. Because Bubion is so high (1330 m/4363 ft) and is not close to any river, there are no local reeds to use in making a traditional ceiling. Here the material above the lathes are slate rocks. Very beautiful. I can’t imagine how much work it must’ve been to gather all the flat slate rocks that are in the walls, ceilings, and roof of this house. We hope to learn more about the history of the building soon.

As I talked about our walk for tomorrow with Javi, the owner of the house, he told us we will see lots of fallen trees and walls due to an exceptional period of rain and wind that lasted for weeks this last winter. There were landslides in this area and some extremely heavy snowfall up in the mountains - where there is still lots of snow. The ski resort just on the other side of the mountains nearest us still had snow four meters (13 ft) deep yesterday! I wonder if we will reach any of it?Read more