There’s something I like to call small scale traveling versus large scale traveling. You could consider this the difference between spending a week in New York City seeing all the attractions and spending a week in Greenwich Village. I love both of these modes of travel. You kind of have to do the first type of touristy traveling to be able to do the second, and this usually happens when you’re a local. For example, in St. Louis, since I’ve gone to school there for the past three years, I’ve been to the Arch, but I’ve also eaten soul food at Sweetie Pie’s in Tower Grove, seen a comedy show at the Ready Room, and been ice skating at Steinberg Rink.
Sometimes the best compromise can be to have a local take you places that you wouldn’t have had exposure to otherwise. Being in Granada last week was interesting, because I’d never been there and I did the touristy things like see La Alhambra, but Ramiro, our program director, also took us down a less traveled path. Last Saturday, we departed on a bus to the outskirts of Granada to visit an olive orchard. A local owner of an olive oil shop walked us through the orchard, which was surrounded by the Sierra Nevadas. She pointed out the characteristics of the different olive trees, how they water them, etc. Apparently a green and a black olive are the same olive, just picked at different maturities. She let us try some straight from the tree. I passed, because I hate olives, but I did realize that I love the olive tree. It’s leaves are long and narrow, paler than a typical leaf. It makes sense why to offer an olive branch is a symbol of peace. It’s beautiful, and our guide told us that olives can grow from the branches, giving the receiver’s community sustenance.
From the orchard, we departed to a mill where we learned to complicated, multi-tiered process of extracted the oil from the olives. We got to taste this olive oil in a tasting. I have to be honest here…I was not the biggest fan. There was something very unappealing about swishing olive oil around in my mouth and feeling it burn the back of my throat, but it was an experience for sure. After a 2+ hour lunch, we took the bus further up into the mountains, circling El Valle de Lecrín (Lecrín Valley) with El Lago Beznar (Lake Beznar) at the bottom. Ramiro was taking us to Albuñuelas, a tiny, speck of a town surrounding the valley where he had friends who ran a B&B called El Cortijo de Pino.
El Cortijo de Pino
I could write all these sentences about what we did, but because this was small scale traveling. It was more about the things we did, the people we met than the attractions we saw. The fact is there wasn’t anything particularly drawing about Albuñuelas. The intrigue came in the way a man tossed us oranges picked from his tree as we climbed to El Cortijo de Pino and the way when we got to the B&B we were served hot tea on the patio with natural honey and homemade fruit cakes.
Jimmy’s art studio
El Cortijo de Pino, for anyone looking for a secluded, but beautiful stay in Andalucía, was my favorite place I’ve visited in Spain so far. It’s run by a Scottish ex-pat name Jimmy and his Spanish-born wife Antonia. I could list the spectacular amenities of the place, but it was honestly the people that made the experience. I found Jimmy completely fascinating. The house is covered in watercolors he painted himself, and when I had the chance to talk with him after the tea, he told us that he used to be a professor at a university inGlasgow and then Kenya before settling in Spain. He showed us his studio, which is filled with landscapes from every part of Europe. He told us that he paints his favorite place in each city, and I could help but think that I one day would like to have favorite places in Europe. It’s possible that Albuñuelas could be one of those places not because it has the best clubs or the most famous museums, but because I connected with its people and the untouched nature of its attractions. Sometimes small scale travel pays.