This day, Wednesday, we got up at our usual time, and after breakfast stashed all our bags at the front desk of our hotel. Ths plan was for them to be picked up later by the bus, which would meet us in the lower village of Pampaneira, to tak us on to our next hotel,in Grazalema, some distanct to the west.

But we weren’t going to walk downhill to Pampaneira: rather we’d walk up above the village somewhat higher than Bubión, named Capileira. Then drop down to that town, and continue walking down to Pamapaneira for lunch, after which we’d pick up the bus.

Bidding farewell to our hotel, we started on the climb. Not a very demanding one: in particuloar, nothing like what we had had to do the day before. The weather was much clearer, and we got lots of views like the one to the right (small image; large). On occasion, we could see the Mediterranean, but I’m not sure just which of my pictures may show the sea, since it was fairly far away, and obscured a bit by the haze of distance.

Sometime our walk uphill was in open terrain, sometimes in the woods. I like this one of Mark, to the left. In spite of the air of exhaustion it seems to depict, it really was early in the day, so the appearance is just a trick of the camera.

From our trail we could frequently look down to the villages below. Mark and I have had endless discussions as to whether his picture of the church that we used for our Christmas card showed Capileira or Bubión. Most of the time, I’m convinced it’s Capileira, but there are still doubts. I like his picture somewhat more than this one here, taken from a nearby spot, but the tonalities and the croppings are different, so you can take your choice. One of the reasons I think that the town is Capileira is the presence of the unusual chimney pots, which you can see very clearly in the large image, less well in the small.

All the three towns, Capileira, Bubión, and Pampaneira, are built into the side of the valley. We eventually descended into Capileira, and within the town, there were few level walking-ways. In the upper picture to the right, a number of us pause in a narrow alley (small image; large), while in the lower (small image; large), Mark and Teague make their tired way up an passageway. Probably everyone else was ahead of us: we were hardly the most athletic of our group. Capileira was an interesting town: there seemed to be much more going on there than in our up-to-now base of Bubión. In particular, there was a nice bookstore-souvenir shop, where we looked for possible gifts for the Three Lovable Little Girls, and Mark wound up buying a copy of South from Granada, a book written in the Twenties that Nick recommended to Mark.

For our amusement and edification, Nick bought for the whole group a bottle of Ave María beer, label liberally decorated with marijuana leaves, and contents supposedly made with hemp. Mark snapped a picture of it, which duly appears on his page for this day. While the two of us were sitting and relaxing, admiring the bottle of beer, others of the group shopped in the little boutiques that we had been missing in Bubión. I think several people bought leather goods in the village.

Before long, we were on our way again, descending along the slopes of the valley so that we could get a nice upward view of Capileira (upper left picture in block at left, small image; large), and frequent pleasing vistas (upper right, small image; large). As we walked along, we hit some surprisingly muddy places, and some nice shady resting spots (lower left, small image; large), although some of our walk was also along the highway. I think it was from the roadside that I got the last shot of a nice view downwards (lower right, small image; large).

We got to Pampaneira around 1:00, and spent a bit of time relaxing at the visitor center of the Parque Natural there, before going to an unpretentious restaurant that served a nice lunch of salads, cold and hot meats, cheeses, and bread—good country food. From there we climbed onto our bus, which took us to the pleasant little city of Grazalema. The ride had some wonderful views, but I was very tired, probably because of not having slept so well the night before, and dozed for most of the first half of the trip. I do recall groggily looking at an amazingly picturesque castle in a town at the top of a hill—I was hoping that Mark might have taken a shot of it through the bus window, but I see on his page for this day that there’s no such view there. At any rate, by the time we paused for a snack and rest stop, the nice weather had left us, as you see inthe snapshot at the bottom of the page. The snack-place we stopped at was on a tasteful par with the road-rot cafés we get along our highways in the US, but I can testify that the coffee was far superior.

Our drive continued into Grazalema, and our hotel, the Puerta de la Villa, was much more elegant than the one in Bubión, and we settled into it gratefully. My journal says nothing about the dinner that night, so I guess the meal must not have been particularly memorable.

Relaxing, off the highway