Pitres to Mecina

This morning we moved from Cortijo Jiménez outside of Pitres to an apartment in the village of Mecina. One of the realities of staying in a quiet isolated place outside of town for a week is that you accumulate a week’s worth of garbage and recycling that needs to be removed when you leave. Luckily we’ve been taking a bag or two with us on recent walks and depositing them in the designated receptacles in whatever village we are walking through, so today we only had two bags to carry into Pitres.

There is no grocery store or panaderia in Mecina, so we bought a week’s worth of supplies in Pitres before we left. That amounted to eight bags altogether, far more than we could carry, so we took a taxi to Mecina. Food in grocery stores has seemed very reasonable to us throughout this trip. Today’s groceries for an entire week for three people came to 120 euros or about $140 US.

Mecina is one of the seven villages that are part of La Taha. It is about 300 meters lower than Pitres, but much smaller in population. Being lower, it is warmer in the winter, and therefore an appealing place to live.

Our apartment, La Almazara, is on the second floor of a building where the ground floor of the house was an olive oil mill. Until the 1970s, olives were pressed here. Originally, a donkey was used to turn the wheel for pressing; later, it was done manually by the workers; and later still, it was electrified.

Tomorrow, we will get out the fichas and try to make a Wikiloc track to the documented historic elements in the village. The temperature is due to finally rise to summer levels and Marie and Ned will perhaps get to wear the shorts they have been carrying around for weeks!Read more