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Almeria

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Villages of cave-dwellers

Almeria Province is famous for its "troglodytic" villages, which are towns in which many or most of the homes are caves dug into the soft, sand-coloured cliffs. They local peoples prize these homes because they provide excellent protection from the searing desert heat in summertime. They are usually composed of an initial living room with other dependencies furrowed further into the rock - a convenient way of building, since every time a new child is born, all the owner has to do is dig out a new room! These "cave homes" or casas-cueva, as they are known, often have façades with windows and tiled roofs like conventional houses, and chimneys which jut up from the earth behind. Chimney-like skylights are dug to provide interior lighting.

Some of the most interesting cave-dweller villages are Alhabia, Gádor and Benahadux, in the region around Sante Fé de Mondújar and near the recently-excavated Bronze Age settlement of Los Millares, with a prehistoric fortress built 2,000 years before Christ. There are also caves in the Alpujarra de Almería at Fondón and at Láujar de Andarax, which has gone down in history as the place where died the mother of the last sultan of Granada , the banished Boabdil.

Spaghetti Westerns and solar energy in the Spanish desert

In the 1960´s, Italian movie-makers filmed their own version of the Wild West among the mesetas and cactus trees of the Desert, and the ramshackle movie sets have been preserved as a curiosity, complete with trading posts and double-door saloons. The arid hills contain another, more seriously interesting site, although it is not normally accessible to visitors: the Solar Platform of Almeria ( PSA ), a European Union solar energy research centre. Even if you´re not allowed in, you can, from over the wire fence, admire the rows of futuristic heliostats reflecting the sun´s rays into the towering solar oven, and many other devices for turning sunlight into electricity. The village of Tabernas is a quiet place with a charming church in the mudejar or Moorish style.

Pottery and Ceramics

One of the most prosperous regions of the Almeria hinterland is El Campo de, which has produced earthenware pottery since the Phoenician period, using the same primitive techniques. The barren hills are sprinkled with picturesque villages such as Sorbas, Uleila del Campo, Lubrín, Bédar and Vera.

Coastal villages

Mojcar is especially famous, partly because it was one of the first to be discovered by the tour operators, but there is also the charming fishing village of San José sheltered cove and marina. You must go through San José to drive to the unspoiled Playa de los Genoveses and Playa de Monsul, on a rugged dead-end road. To the north we. Roquetas del Mar is a fully developed resort 15km west of Almeria .

Northern Almeria Province

The villages of northern Almeria Province have a flavour all of their own, since they were reconquered by the Christians much earlier on. The austere Castilian influence can be seen in the stone castles and palaces of Vélez Rubio and Vélez Blanco, whose elegant Renaissance courtyard now stands in the Metropolitan Musem of New York. The region is crossed by the Almanzora River , and famous for the villages of Sèron and Tíjola with its famous fountains, Purchena, Olula del Río and Macael with its marble quarries.

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