The Alpujarra is an area with lots of small “white towns” tucked into the Southern slopes of the Sierra Nevada in Spain. These seemingly random mountains are here because the tectonic plate of Africa is slowly crashing into Europe. There is a large ski resort in the Sierra Nevada range open for 5 months of the year. It’s definitely cold enough up there but sometimes they have to make some snow.
A brief history lesson of Spain goes something like this:
Since the Iberian Peninsula (modern-day Spain and Portugal) is hard to miss, it’s had a long history of conquests and evictions for many centuries.
Some 35,000 years ago, the first tribal people came to Spain. They were known as Tartessos. The first invasion came from the Greeks, then the Phoenicians, and then the Carthaginians. In 218 BC the Romans came and started to assimilate the folks in Spain into the Roman way of life, including by using the Latin language. Latin was used but it also crept into the local languages coalescing into Spanish and Portuguese after some centuries. After the fall of the Western Empire, Iberia was conquered by the Visigoths and then the Moors, who were various people from Northern Africa who practiced Islam.
Then in around 1492, when Spain became a world power because of the discovery of North and South America, there was a whole lot of unpleasantness when the Catholic rulers in the north decided to take back the country and turn it Catholic. At first, many Jews and Muslims were allowed to convert to Christianity.
The Jews who converted were called “conversos” and the Muslims who converted were called “Moriscos”. Not feeling particularly welcome in much of Spain, the Moriscos fled to the hills and built the little villages of the Alpuharra.
Later, even the converts were considered suspects, and many people were evicted from Spain, which was a deep tragedy for the country. Imagine the loss of the people who for over 800 years brought Spain algebra, spices, Flamenco, chess, advanced agriculture, many additions to the Spanish language, literacy itself, and astronomy.
So my trip to La Alpujarra was an obvious history lesson, but I enjoyed the scenery, food, weather, and the folks I was with quite a bit. I’ll finish this post later but I want to post my pictures.
