Don’t look at the scenery. I know this is unusual advice for the beginning of a travel article, but I mean it. You are driving along the A7-E15, which is reputedly one of the most dangerous highways in Europe. The part you’re on dips up and down and in and out of the coastline east of Malaga. You’ll be fleetingly aware of images: tunnels, parched mountains, churches and villas, urbanizaciones on the hills, ships and beaches, the Med opening up in a blue-white haze as the bay of Malaga disappears behind. But the main sight in your rear-view mirror will be a Spanish driver sitting 5cm from your bumper. He might be a farmer in an old pick-up or a high roller from Marbella in an Audi with blacked-out windows. It doesn’t matter: he thinks he should be in front of you, even if there are 50 cars ahead in a line, every one of them 5cm from each other’s bumpers.
It really is best to concentrate on the road. (I’ve tried lots of vigilante tactics to tell the driver behind that he’s too close: waving furiously at the Mantén la distancia de securidad signs, braking or switching on the lights to make him think I’m braking, taking both hands off the wheel and making a kind of concertina gesture in the rear view mirror. Every tactic is more dangerous than the actual tailgating.)
Then there comes a point, about 15 miles out of Malaga, when you can relax a little. The road opens up, the traffic thins, you coast down a big hill and there’s a sign for the town of Vélez-Malaga. You can look at the scenery now. You can’t help it, in fact. It fills the windscreen. There’s a huge, graceful mountain, the sea curving past white tower blocks to a series of rocky bays, a wide valley narrowing inland, as the green of the lowlands gives way to the white-grey of the limestone outcrops. This is the entrance to the Axarquía.
In The English Patient, Katharine congratulates Almásy, the eponymous character, on writing a 500-page book on archaeology without a single adjective. There’s a lot to be said for the technique, especially when you’re writing about the south of Spain, which attracts adjectives the way a half-drunk margarita attracts wasps. So I’ll allow myself just one to describe that first view of the Axarquía – epic. You’ve left the heat and chaos of the airport (which is mainly a building site right now) and the speed and stress of the road, then you emerge into this landscape. It’s like opening the first page of a big, thick book: an epic.
Almásy would, and you will, want a few facts at this point. Here they are. The Axarquía is a mountainous area between the Montes de Malaga and the beginning of the Sierra Nevada. It’s described accurately, if prosaically, by one writer as ‘ham-shaped’. Though it’s close to Malaga and even closer to the popular tourist seaside town of Nerja, it remains remote and little talked-about. I have a big, thick guidebook to Andalusía, which devotes no more than five pages to Axarquía. None of the writers on Andalusía, from the old ones, such as Washington Irving, Richard Ford and Gerald Brennan, to the new ones, Michael Jacobs, Chris Stewart and Jason Webster, have written about the place. Yet it lacks none of the wild beauty and romance of the region beyond. It probably has more. Bandits and guerrillas used to hide in its hills. It has endured poverty and conquest and rebellion. The Moors built higher and bigger fortresses here and held out for longer against the invading Catholics. Five hundred years later, so did the rebels from the Spanish Civil War, who hid in these mountains from Franco’s vanquishing forces.
Those of us who care for the place have mixed feelings about its obscurity. We get cross and bemused that the areas of Rhonda and Mijas get all the attention from the tourists looking for an excursion into the authentic Spain of the mountain pueblos blancos – the white towns. We are simultaneously relieved that they don’t come: who wants pizzas, coach parties and plate-sellers? That’s why, despite owning a house in an Axarquía village, Comares, for nearly ten years, I’ve only written about it once; and then I made them put the headline ‘Don’t go to Comares’ on it.
