Years ago - now that I really stop and think about it, probably about 20 years ago at least - we went on holiday in Almería with a couple of friends. Somewhere underlying it all was the idea that we might at some time in the future all retire together to somewhere warm and sunny. And so for a couple of weeks we hired a small villa in the mountains of Almería, where we could look down on morning mist forming lower down the hillside and watch hawks hovering over the valley.
We had arranged to hire a car and had been told by the agency organising the villa rental that we would need a four by four. As we drove from the airport we wondered why; the roads seemed fine. And then we arrived at the rendezvous point to follow the agency representative to the villa … down a steep and winding track. Bang went our thoughts that we might be able to stroll into the nearest small town for breakfast or for a late dinner. We might have strolled there - it wasn’t really too steep for that - but staggering back in the dark late in the evening was not really a possibility.
So my co-driving friend and I resigned ourselves to braving the rough track at least once a day and taking turns to be the one who did not drink wine with our dinner. The idea of tackling that descent, far worse than going up, with even a drop of alcohol in our veins was a definite no-no.
But we had a swimming pool, albeit a very small one the length of which we covered in just a few strokes. It was early in the year for swimming anyway, the Easter holidays, and the water was very cold. But we has fine weather and were determined to make use of the facilities.
We visited Nerja and decided that while it’s a nice seaside place we had made the right choice to be up in the mountains. We had a day in Granada but had neglected to find out how to book tickets to visit the Alhambra palace. So we admired it from a distance. And I had a serendipitous reunion there with a couple of my former A-Level Spanish students, one of whom was about to spend a term in Granada.
The nearest town was a small place called Cómpeta, 4,000 inhabitants at that time or so the guide book said. That was where we went to dine out. Because it was Easter time the town had Holy Week processions every day, usually accompanied by worst brass band imaginable, and we should know as we were all brass band connoisseurs who live in brass-band country in the NW of England!
I was reminded of all this when I read this article about El Acebuchal, a village in the hills of Almería not too far from Nerja. Back in 1948 Franco ordered the 250 inhabitants of the village to pack up and leave. They were being punished for helping, or at any rate providing food and shelter for, the guerrilla fighters who were resisting Franco’s regime. Some of them ended up in Cómpeta, seven miles away, the small place we visited. We have a tendency to think that the Spanish Civil War ended in 1939 and that that was the end of the matter. History moved on for the rest of Europe as the second World War began. But in Spain pockets of resistance to Franco kept on popping up here and there, only to be harshly suppressed.
And so El Acebuchal was abandoned but apparently has been restored, indeed transformed largely into another of those place where few people live permanently buy where tourists go, especially those who enjoy hiking in the mountains. Presumably that transformation had not taken place when we visited Cómpeta all those years ago.
We had a splendid holiday with our friends but never again talked about retiring together as a foursome. Those odd occasions when one or other of us could mildly rub another one or other of us up the wrong way convinced us that living together permanently was not really to be considered, even though we never put that into words. But we remained friends and had other holidays together. So it goes.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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