Guadix

During our brief stay in Guadix, we’re going to concentrate on the unhappy marriage that has been religious diversity in Spain.

As a tourist you go to various monuments and hear stories about how, as if by the clicking of fingers, the Catholics chased away the Romans and built a cathedral on top of their temple, then the Muslims came over and demolished that cathedral to make way for a mosque, and finally the mosque was destroyed to make way again for a catholic church. Same goes for various palaces and forts.

In the middle was a tide of poor people who really couldn’t do anything about the power and land struggles, yet needed somewhere safe to live. That old refugee chestnut in Guadix goes back to the 9th Century. The way that at various times persecuted Catholics, Muslims, Jews and Gypsies found a safe haven was to literally dig their houses into the hills as man-made caves.

Nowadays, the Cave Museum operator assures us, it’s quite a fashionable thing to do. The Barrio de las Cuevas, or Cave Suburb in Guadix has hotels, restaurants, bars, a church and souvenir shops all in the comfy settings of caves. Actually, it does work. Because the hills are mainly clay, it was quite easy to carve rooms into the hillsides and make them weather proof: a cave house maintains a stable temperature of about 18 C year round. And we paid to sleep in a cave? You bet ya.

What we ate: pretty much everything was a highlight, Calatrava’s free tapas – juicy, grilled lamb and potatoes, gherkin-stuffed olives, toasties with jamon and crushed red capsicum; and El Churrasco’s deer cooked in a cognac, mushroom, shallot and garlic sauce with fruits of the forest. The restaurant is owned and manned by outdoor enthusiast Rafael, who hangs heads of whatever he’s hunted throughout the years including two of his house specialties: wild boar and deer. He assures me that the former bodies of the trophies have all been hunted ‘in the region’ by himself and eaten at the restaurant, like the deer we just had on our plate. As Amelia has said, this country is no place for vegetarians.