the times Saturday April 30 2022
Travel 41
Liz Edwards was a guest of Casa Olea
(casaolea.com), Hotel Zuhayra
(zercahoteles.com), Caserio de Iznajar
(hoteliznajar.com) and Sunvil, which
has seven nights’ B&B split between
the three hotels from £732pp, including
flights and car hire (sunvil.co.uk).
See destinosubbetica.esNeed to
know
Hidden between Cordoba and Granada lies a beautiful
region of olive groves and Moorish ruins, says Liz Edwards
A
ndalusia, as anyone who
has ever heard of Fuen-
girola will tell you, is not
without blemishes. Nor,
as anyone who has strug-
gled to breach a wall of
American tourists in a
Seville bar will know, is it short of a honey-
pot or two. But it’s a big place and what it
also has, stashed between folds of moun-
tain, are little pockets of joy, where even
domestic tourists are few and far between.
One such region hides in plain sight,
slap bang in the middle of Andalusia: the
Subbetica — an unSpanish-sounding
name that would work nicely for the
codified rules of Subbuteo. If it also
sounds vaguely Latin-papal that’s
because it relates to the Roman
name Baetica, the province that
is, roughly, today’s Andalusia. It
was the Romans who first plant-
ed the olive trees that now char-
acterise the Subbetica. Miles and
miles of them, garrisoned in their
millions over slopes and fields, in
vast groves and back gardens and
roadside verges. It’s the olive oil belt,
as expansive in Spain as it was diminu-
tive in the Popeye cartoon. The trees give
the gradient-dense land the look of a bolt
of dusty-green velour caught mid-billow.
That topography — hills, crags, gorges
— makes mechanical harvesting tricky, so
much of the oil produced here is artisanal,
global-championship stuff. It also has fun
with your car radio, flinging it haphazardly
from station to station. I find Flashdance
mashes surprisingly well with flamenco.
When I arrive with my family at Casa
Olea, though, the music that really makes
me catch my breath is the birdsong. At this
former farmhouse turned dreamy hotel it
is full-throated and richly, orchestrally
textured. It would take a better ornitholo-
gist than me to tell the calls apart but over
pre-dinner drinks on the terrace another
guest tells me she hears a nightingale.
It’s a magical spot where bee eaters
nest in the river banks and short-toed
eagles soar overhead. The British owners,
Tim and Claire, transformed the place
from a ruin and now, with fab food and
impeccable local intel, welcome a steady
stream of peace-seekers: birders, star-
gazers, walkers.
My eight-year-old son makes
instant lifelong friends with their
nine-year-old, who with his dog
Ruby takes us off on a walk post-
breakfast (pan con tomate, with a
slug of oil from home-grown
olives). This is frontier country,
where in the 14th cenury Catholic
Spain met Muslim Al-Andalus, and
the hills bristle with Moorish watch-
towers — three in Casa Olea’s vicinity
alone. Ruby knows her way to the most
scenic, and we wind up along paths shoul-
der-deep in wildflowers, the two boys col-
lecting wild asparagus and the ammonites
that lie there for the finding. That haul is
their reward; ours is the view from the top,
over scudding clouds, distant white vil-
lages and horizon-to-horizon trees.
And yet. In a region of awesome views,
the crown must surely go to Zuheros. Per-
haps a half-hour drive west of Casa Olea,
the village has the kind of looks that post-
cards were invented for. The houses are
little and white. The Moorish castle is lofty
and proud. And the whole lot sits crowded
on a ledge above a cliff, beneath mightier
peaks. The food at Los Palancos, the res-
taurant on the mirador of a village square,
is fine (we eat much better that night at our
hotel, Zuhayra) but they could serve beans
on toast and no one would care.
We admire the village from inside its
tangle of lanes, beneath swooping
swallows and martins. We admire it from
below on bikes hired nearby — not on the
roads beloved of the Lycra-loving Vuelta
pelters but from a section of the easy-does-
it Via Verde del Aceite, a track that follows
the line of a railway once used to transport
olives (from £4 an hour; centrocicloturis-
tasubbetica.com). And we admire it fromabove, following a circular route through
the Bailon river gorge and along old dro-
vers’ paths, beside dramatic cave-pocked
limestone cliffs. I spot some bee orchids;
my son’s more taken with the ibex skeleton
we have to step over.
Andalusia has an embarrassment of em-
balses — reservoirs — and the largest is
down in southern Subbetica, providing a
handsome looking glass for hilltop Iznajar,
the old Moorish town after which the em-
balse is named. It’s Good Friday when we
visit, so I can’t promise that my experience
is representative — unless there are al-
ways icon-bearing, drumming, trumpet-
ing processions of locals dressed as apos-
tles, centurions and pharisees. What I can
tell you, via one tourist leaflet boast, is that
the castle cemetery was a finalist in the
Cemeteries of Spain Competition (2016).
At the beach across the water from the
old town’s craggy peninsula we find other
locals, enjoying their bank holiday picnics.
There’s much more beach these days —
droughts have left the reservoir just 30 per
cent full. But there’s enough for us to hire
paddleboards, and enough for the shoals of
fish that arc obligingly out of the water as
we go (£17 an hour; alua.es). Back at our
hotel just above the old water line, the
finca-style Caserio de Iznajar, we find even
more locals — ordering their post-lunch
coffees, just as flitting bats join the swal-
lows and the moon rises over the castle.
Next morning we drive back over the
hills towards the small town of Priego de
Cordoba. Of course, it has a Moorish cas-
tle, but it also has a good collection of foun-
tains, a pleasantly bustling atmosphere,
and some eye-popping baroque churches.
Jan Morris, the historian and travel writer,
wrote that the ornate churches were “of
such cosmetic elaboration that they look
less like ancient shrines than stations onthe Moscow underground”. The Iglesia de
la Virgen de la Aurora y San Nicasio, a
small chapel despite the mouthful name,
certainly goes the whole wedding-cake
hog: gold paint, plaster curlicues and so
many cherubs, the collective noun should
be “swarm”.
For lunch we drive to Vaquena, a restau-
rant recommended by Tim. We don’t quite
buy it when he says people sometimes get
car-sick on the approach — until we’re zig-
zagging up a rocky, goaty hillside.
Have I mentioned Subbetica’s views?
They just keep giving, and the one from
Vaquena is up there with the best: olive
hills reach out into distant haze; Cabra’s
white buildings glint below in the middle
ground, while the foreground is, for a
change, pasture. Vaquena’s speciality is
vacuno de pasto y bellota — beef fed on
grass and acorns — and there they are, the
small black Andalusian cattle that keep
the kitchen busy. The restaurant is smart
but it’s still a bargain: entrecot, which we
sizzle at the table on a hot stone, is £15; a
glass of the local fino is £1; olives, as every-
where, are on the house. It’s panorama-to-
plate dining and I’m sold.10 milesCordobaGranadaMalagaPriego de
CordobaZuherosIznajarCasa OleaAndalusiaBarrio de Villa, the old town
of Priego de CordobaViews of olive trees at Casa OleaIznajar and its reservoirGETTY IMAGES; ALAMY; SUNVILThe secret side of Andalusia