Once a year, the local hill-walking club in Archidona climbs the mountain known as La Maroma, the highest in the province of Málaga at 2069m; I am keeping up this tradition as well, as it’s a way to test stamina with each year over the age of 70. It is a majestic creature, and can be traversed up one side and down the other if you have the right transport.

The overall massif and summit plateau reminds me just a little of that between Cairngorm and Ben Macdui, which I crossed many times in late adolescence: bare, stony mounds, austere and wind-scoured, Also, this outing is one that is more typical of hill-walking in Scotland, which always has a summit or chain of summits in mind, whereas in Spain, the walks are usually more meandering, partly to avoid a long tiring ascent, but also to take advantage of the vast system of existing paths. One thing memory had preserved from the two previous ascents, was that the descent was the really tiring part of the day: going down for 1350m in contrast to going up for 1000m.

The autumn sunshine was warm and brilliant. A couple of groups of sturdy pine trees survived near the summit, surrounded by a bedraggled and discontinuous stockade of metal fencing. The noble conifers had merited sanctuary, perhaps from deer; but they were surviving in the waterless mesa, outlasting their protector, shoulder to shoulder, in the cleansing winds, a hardy band of Macedonians. All the pines that we met on this walk had my goodwill and commendation during the extended stress of the drought we are living through.

The next walk was in one of those summer-hot and winter-warm south-facing valleys up from the Mediterranean coast, this time in the province of Granada, one of the areas dedicated to the growing of avocados. Three villages hug the steep slopes: Guájar Fondón, Guájar Faragüit and Guájar Alto. As avocados require a continuous supply of water, there must be sufficient in the river Toba all year round. Circular, raised water-holding concrete drums were dotted about near the leafy avocados. One side of the valley presented the unmistakeable signs of a fairly recent forest fire, though the highest widely spaced pines looked instead desiccated rather than burnt out, as it was difficult to see how fire could have spread between them. The history of deforestation in Spain for firewood has been balanced by the planting of pines in the last hundred years or so, one reason for this being to limit erosion, and the dry side of the valley here clearly showed erosion, while the other gentler side had ample pine cover with some secretive avocado groves.

Many people have used the following quotation from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, and I can’t resist doing the same, even though its use here is hardly justified by the threadbare realisation that the village I could see below me, was really the same one that we had started out from, the highest of the three villages, Guájar Alto; such are the joys of circumambulation in unfamiliar territory.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

But in the photograph here, you can see the opposite side of the valley with the margin of burnt forest, the erosion, the parched land, a real contrast to the place we were trekking.

Descending finally to the middle village, we passed through mature avocados, pomegranates, apple trees, and this quite ancient and massive olive tree, still bearing fruit.

Gratitude and appreciation are in order after rambling and roaming in the folds of the secretive glens of Granada.