The cave dwellings of Guadix, 1991

English – Español

The church bells ring without pause. It is All Saints’ Day in Guadix. The air is a little chilly. The leaves have turned yellow on the trees around the parks and squares. Snow shines white on the peaks of the Sierra Nevada, where we glimpse them between the rooftops. We walk through the old part of town, past the arcaded square, the Alcazaba, the cathedral, and a little farther uphill.

There the houses suddenly come to an end beside the remains of the old city wall, and we look out over a strange landscape. Extraordinary formations of sandstone, a fairytale landscape of brown hills winding away towards the horizon and the white snow of the Sierra. From these rocks grow things that look like enormous mushrooms. They are everywhere, sticking straight out of the rocky knolls.

They are chimneys.

Whitewashed chimneys from the cave dwellings of Guadix.

As we walk into the hills, it is like walking straight into the pages of The Lord of the Rings. The landscape rises and falls in gentle curves, and the caves, carved out by hand, have adapted completely to the terrain, scattered across different levels and heights. The front of each has been cut vertically into the rock, creating a small terrace in front. The façades are kept exquisitely whitewashed, and their rough surfaces create a play of blue shadows.

Sometimes a room has been added, a washbasin, a shelter above the door, a henhouse. But the whole language of form is organic, an architecture that has grown directly out of the rock and become a natural part of it. The façades move in soft surfaces; there are no straight lines or angular corners, and every dwelling is entirely individual. The forms have been further rounded and softened by years of whitewashing.

An old woman dressed in black spreads washing on the stones in front of her cave to dry in the morning sun. The grille over a window hollowed from the rock has been painted pale blue. A dog barks. A little bird sings from a television aerial. Red peppers threaded onto strings hang drying against a wall. A woman sweeps autumn leaves from in front of her door. A cock crows.

The scrap collector has his entire stock outside his door. Small green-painted birdcages containing partridges hang on a wall. The birds are almost as large as the space inside the cages. They are used as decoys when hunting in the mountains. A yard with goats has been enclosed with wire fencing, with an old lightweight metal bed frame serving as a gate. Playing puppies tumble about in the dust. Smoke and the smell of a fire. Someone is loading manure onto a cart.

An old man sits on a wooden chair, with a tobacco-coloured moustache and a cap. He has put some fifteen cages of partridges out in the sun.

“They’re for the children’s amusement,” he tells me proudly in a rough voice. “I have thirty of them. I usually put them out for a while in the morning sun so they can warm themselves. Go up here, and then to the left. After that you can carry on for several hours, and still you won’t have seen everything,” he says, looking at me with friendly eyes.

The area of the caves stretches in an arc south of the city wall and covers several square kilometres. More than half the inhabitants of Guadix live in them. It was in the middle of the sixteenth century that the Moors who remained, fleeing Philip II, hollowed out the first caves. They were later joined by Gypsies who had fought with the Christian troops, and afterwards by other inhabitants of the peninsula. It is therefore a motley population that lives in this area, where nothing is uniform. Here there is anarchy and individualism at every level.

The settlement reached its greatest extent during the 1950s, but then the depression and unprofitable agriculture here in one of the poorest corners of Spain forced large numbers of inhabitants to emigrate.

A paper kite has become caught in an electric cable between two wooden poles. A horse with jingling bells comes along pulling a cart loaded with ripe maize plants. The sound of pop music from a doorway. The distant sound of the cathedral bells rising from the town below. Rod Stewart blasts away somewhere inside a cave; flamenco answers from another. In the pauses, a car dealer advertises his wares in a hysterical voice.

A man stops his donkey outside an unpainted façade on the outskirts of the village. He shuffles down and, supporting himself on a walking stick, unloads large plastic containers of water. The abandoned cave is now a donkey stable, and it is feeding time.

A plump old woman with a fresh loaf of bread under her arm invites me to sit down in her simple kitchen garden. Her worn underwear hangs drying on the bushes around us. A patched sheet moves in the wind. A rusty bucket filled with earth, the plant in it withered. A few tomato plants, the faint sound of mopeds far away. A bird sings from inside the cave, stillness and the buzzing of a fly in the kitchen garden. The donkey snorts from farther up the hill.

I ask if I may take a photograph of the hospitable old woman, but at first she does not want me to at all. When I promise to send her a copy, she agrees and sits down on a chair, staring solemnly into the camera. I ask her to smile, but she cannot hear what I am saying and starts laughing for that very reason.

Then she gives me her address. There are no street names, only the names of the different areas, but I make out a whitewashed house number above the door. She seems puzzled by this, however. Her name, the area, and then Guadix, Granada. That is more than enough, she says, looking satisfied.

“Consérvese bien,” she says as we part. Take good care of yourself.

“Go with God.”

Her Spartan dwelling is the last one before the cliffs. Those farther above are all ruined or abandoned, apart from the goat enclosure. At one point you can walk straight through the rock, and from the other side you look out over the new brickworks, Nuestra Señora de la Angustia—Our Lady of Anguish.

Though perhaps it is rather the local craftsmen who have reason for anguish: those who once made bricks, roof tiles and pots by hand in caves that are now dark and abandoned. The potter’s wheels have stopped. Shards of clay cover the earthen floors, and fired and unfired pottery lies forgotten in the corners. Overgrown trenches in the yard where clay and water were once mixed. Abandoned, crumbling kilns.

We walk up the hills, above the roofs, where we meet a woman standing at a basin washing clothes by hand. I am invited into her small but clean and tasteful home. She pulls aside the curtain that keeps out the flies and opens the divided door, its upper half serving as a window.

We enter directly into the living room, with a round table in the centre and several comfortable chairs around it. The entire ceiling is vaulted and a little over two metres high. Space is limited, and I have to edge my way around the armchairs. On either side of the living room, and opposite the entrance, are the openings to the other rooms. The walls are a metre thick and bear the striped marks of the picks, but are impeccably whitewashed.

To the right is the kitchen. It is four metres long, with a gas cooker at the far end. There is a tiny table and a small chair, a cupboard, a few shelves and, nearest the entrance, an electric refrigerator.

She tells me that she lived in another, larger cave while her husband was alive, but afterwards the children took it over and she was given this one. She apologises continually for how simply and sparsely she lives. There are so many other caves that are finer and larger, she says, but I find hers both attractive and well cared for.

The floor is laid with red terracotta tiles. The whitewashed walls are decorated with miniature kitchen utensils, copper pans and vessels. Photographs of children, grandchildren and relatives. Colourful pictures of the Saviour and various saints in different sizes. She draws aside the curtain to the bedroom, which is occupied by an enormous double bed. At the far end stands a wardrobe of polished wood. Images of Christ.

In the sitting room a bare light bulb hangs from the ceiling, and a television stands in a niche carved into the wall. On the round table, covered with a white cloth with an embroidered border, stand some flowers and photographs of her husband and children. The last room is used for storage. She has relatives in Guadix and in Barcelona, from the wave of emigration.

“My family looks after me well,” she says. “I want for nothing.”

She does indeed look perfectly content.

We have been walking around for more than four hours, but have seen only a fraction of the whole area. A green sign advertises San Miguel, so I go in and ask for a beer. The room is larger and broader than any I have seen before, but vaulted in the same way and with the same thick, massive walls. I can see several rooms disappearing in different directions. There are said to be fourteen of them in this cave.

A group of men hangs around the bar, arguing loudly, drinking wine from Jumilla mixed with a carbonated cola drink. They are dressed in sweaters and grey, baggy trousers. One wall is decorated with a hunting scene. The owner himself has painted a fresco of hunters shooting birds beside a lake. Their guns point towards the fleeing birds, the hunting dog stands with its paws in the water in the sheer excitement of pursuit, its searching nose turned towards the escaping prey.

On another wall is a hundred-peseta note bearing a portrait of Manuel de Falla, who composed a classical piece of music for Alarcón’s book El niño de la bola, which is set in Guadix. A poster from Sanlúcar advertises Manzanilla, Solera. The image of Christ.

An old man in a beret sits on a chair, waving away the flies with an olive branch.

“They never leave you in peace,” he mutters.

Paco, a younger man with a moustache and a melancholy appearance, has worked in every corner of Europe.

“I am an anarchist,” he says, and launches an attack on the Socialist Party, which, he claims, buys votes cheaply throughout Andalusia in the form of unemployment benefits. At the same time, he looks with contempt at the new motorway outside the town. We buy each other another round of wine and cola.

“Pride means saying: I am who I am, and whoever wants to change me—out, away, disappear! Andalusia is Spain’s granary, but we have always been exploited. We are proud. We ask for no more, but this is a powder keg!”

Paco can also say, “Can I have a kiss?” in flawless Swedish.

He learned that in Ibiza.