Before you book a walk with us, here's the place we're actually taking you — its land, its history, and the people who live here now.
The Alpujarras sits on the southern slopes of the Sierra Nevada, the highest mountain range on mainland Spain. The terraces, the irrigation channels, the villages stacked into the hillsides — almost none of it is accidental. It was built, over centuries, by people who needed to make a steep, dry mountainside grow food.
Órgiva sits at the bottom of the valley. It's the region's largest town, and the base for everything we do.
The acequias — the irrigation channels that thread through every village here — were built during the centuries of Moorish rule in Al-Andalus, some over a thousand years ago. They're still in use, and the rights to that water are still governed by the same logic the Moors set up.
When the Moriscos were expelled in the late 1500s, the valley was resettled with families from northern Spain. That's part of why this place feels layered rather than singular — it's been built, emptied, and rebuilt more than once.
Writers have been drawn here for the same reason for a century: Gerald Brenan in the 1920s, Federico García Lorca passing through Lanjarón, and more recently Chris Stewart, whose books about farming near Órgiva brought a wave of visitors who'd never otherwise have found this valley.
From the right ridge above Órgiva, you can see the snow-capped peaks of the Sierra Nevada and the Mediterranean Sea in the same glance. Few places in Spain compress that much contrast into so short a distance.
The seasons here are specific. Almond trees blossom white across the hillsides in February. By autumn, the chestnut forests at higher altitude turn before the olive and citrus groves lower down even notice the change.
Órgiva has long attracted people looking for something other than a conventional life — artists, farmers, and since the 1980s, a steady stream of international residents who came, stayed, and raised families here. Walk through town and you'll hear at least four languages before lunch.
Every Thursday, the market takes over the streets near the plaza. It's where the town's two worlds — traditional Andalusian and the international community — actually meet, trading olives and honey alongside handmade jewellery and secondhand books.
Órgiva is roughly 90 minutes from Granada and just under two hours from Málaga by car — there's no train or direct bus route that makes sense for most visitors.
The last 40 minutes are mountain road, not motorway. That's part of the experience: the landscape opens up gradually, valley by valley, until the road drops you into Órgiva itself.
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