Analucía’s Hill towns

While Sevilla was a charming city, we actually got out of there one day earlier that we had originally planned. This was largely because we had already ticked off all the must-see stuff, but also partially because we weren’t too happy with the hotel we were in (it was a nice place, but nowhere near nice enough to justify what we were paying there). So we split early, giving us some more time to explore the pueblos blancos, the small Andalusian hill towns. If your Spanish is dreadful, they’re called pueblos blancos because, yes, they’re all white (and because they are pueblos). They’re also all located in the Sierray Nevada mountains, usually capping hilltops, and are filled with tight, narrow, winding cobblestone lanes. Arcos de la Frontera was the one we stayed in for two nights. We didn’t have a hotel reserved ahead of time, and when we arrived the only one we could get was in the attic at some place and had a sloped ceiling which at its high point in the room was around 7 feet tall, and dropped down to about 5 ½ on the opposite side of the room. My neck definitely got a little stiff in the two days I was there, but it was a bargain and the view was amazing as the hotel was right on the edge of the cliff the town sat on and we had windows on that side overlooking the whole valley below, filled with orange groves, a river, and the local shepherd tending to his flock.

We used Arcos as a home base to drive around the area and hit a couple other pueblos blancos the day after we arrived. We ended up cruising through the mountains, checking out Grazalema, Zahara, and Ronda on the way. The scenery in the mountains was amazing, and the towns were all really cute. Grazalema had a lively town square with a bunch of old guys hanging around on benches and chatting up the pigeons, Zahara had some tasty chow and was incredibly picturesque sitting in a valley floor under its obligatory Moorish castle on the hill overlooking the town center, and Ronda had an amazing cliff-side setting with a massive river gorge running right through the middle of town. Ronda was also interesting as it’s home to the oldest bull ring in the country and had an interesting bullfighting museum there.

I’ve continued to score really great food as the trip has progressed. I say ‘I’, because I think Juls is in hell. Being kosher and a picky eater that doesn’t (for some inexplicable reason) like uncooked tomatoes and anchovies, there just isn’t a lot here that she can eat. The food suits me just fine, though. If I did have one complaint, however, it is that it’s not very diverse. If you go to a restaurant that isn’t deliberately trying to make another culture’s food, such as an Italian or Chinese place, you tend to see the same things over and over again. You definitely see regional variation, but within any single region you could probably pick any two mid-range Spanish restaurants and they will likely have 75% or more of the exact same items on their menus. And of the items which aren’t duplicated there’s probably yet another restaurant not too far away that’s got it. It’s also rare at the mid-range places to encounter items I haven’t seen before at other places. It must be said, though, that this is quite common in many of the countries I’ve traveled to in Europe outside of the food meccas of France and Italy. American food culture has some serious problems with it, but one thing we have that is unparalleled relative to any place I’ve traveled to is the incredible diversity of options available to us. And this isn’t only due to the high availability of ethnic food in the US, either. Even if you limited yourself only to places serving new American cuisine, at home you’ve got a diversity of options and a creativity in inexpensive food that I’ve never seen anywhere else.

The most egregious example of the lack of diversity in the food in Spain is the ubiquity of French fries as the side dish here. 95% of the time, whenever you order something which needs a side dish, it’s going to come out with an obligatory pile of fries. And for all the skill they’ve got for other items, it appears that most Spanish cooks couldn’t turn out a decent plate of fries with a crisp exterior if their life depended on it. I haven’t gotten nearly as much of them as Juls as I’m often getting things like tapas or paella which doesn’t get a side dish, but between the two of us I think we’ve thrown away enough, limp, soggy, greasy, and under-seasoned French fries on this trip to feed and entire African village for a month. This is one of the reasons I liked Zahara so much. I ordered the house specialty at the restaurant we popped into, the slow-roasted leg of lamb. When they brought the plate out, I was extremely pleased to see that instead of a pile of oily fries, I got some heavily herbed roasted potatoes. Both Juls and I sat there staring at the plate for a few seconds, a bit stunned that the de rigueur pile of wet frites was nowhere to be seen. “Wow, just look at that, potatoes”, I said. This place was obviously very avant-garde. Roast potatoes as a side with roasted/sautéed/grilled meat? Who would have ever thunk it. Both the potatoes and the lamb were absolutely phenomenal, by the way.

While Spanish food could get out of the box a little bit more, where Spain completely kicks our ass is in quality of ingredients. (Well, they also kick our ass in that people here eat actual real food, rather than the phony processed garbage that people eat at home, and that they eat out with friends and family instead of in front of the TV, and that a quarter of their population isn’t morbidly obese, but I digress.) A tomato here actually tastes like a tomato, compared to the typical tomato which you get in an American grocery store which tastes like, well actually, I don’t think they taste like much of anything at all. I picked up a plum as a snack from the market a couple days ago, and it was absolutely exploding with flavor. Many of the grapes you get here leave your fingers all sticky and gooey when you eat them they are so flavorful and intensely sweet. With a more educated consumer, farmers markets, and supermarket chains like Whole Foods that place more emphasis on quality ingredients we are starting to roll back all the damage that was done by half a century of inadvertently breeding all the flavor out of our and food and we’re thus starting to close that gap, but we’ve still got a long way to go. I can pick up any piece of produce here in a local market and it will usually taste better than something I pick up at a specialty store or farmer’s market and do so at a price ever less than that for the tasteless crap that most people in the States are buying every day.