Postcard from Sierra Nevada

In his biography, author Gerald Brenan captures a world that was well on its way to disappearing for good.

In my late 20s, having read a bit too much of Lorca, taken some Spanish language courses, and made my way through Almodovar’s cinematic output and a lot of Buñuel for good measure as well, I thought it would be a fine thing to save up some money and go spend some time in the Spanish countryside. Preferably somewhere near Córdoba or Seville, where I could soak in the Andalusian sunlight, the Moorish architecture and the pleasures of flamenco music. While eating a blood orange or two.

As the years passed by, there never seemed to be a good enough bank balance or a large enough chunk of time when I was free and had the money to put this plan into action. So I had to experience the dream through the lives of people like Gerald Brenan who moved to a village in Andalusia after the first world war and wrote a biographical account of the many years he spent there. South from Granada was published in 1957 and it’s more an anthropological study of the fertile rural areas of the Alpujarras, on the southern side of the Sierra Nevada.

When Brenan first went to the Alpujarras, it was 1919. All he had as his worldly possessions were thousands of books and an army pension. His intention was to find a quiet village and settle down there to read. It seems a wild ambition these days — but somehow Brenan managed to do exactly that with just a few pounds in his pocket. After walking the area and many miles on foot, eating dodgy food and staying in a posada (an inn), he finally ends up in Yegen, a small village. He managed to find a small house for himself and rented it from the owner, a rancher named Don Fadrique.

While Brenan (who came from an upper-class Anglo-Irish family) occasionally let slip the prejudices of his era when narrating his experiences and interactions with the residents, he found much to admire. He wrote with a poet’s sensibility of the landscape:

“The general impression that the place gave was of being at a great elevation above the rest of the world. There was a total isolation, a silence, broken only by the notes of the village and by the burble of running water — a feeling of air surrounding one, of fields of air washing one that I have never come across anywhere else.”

Unspoilt by modern technology or “development” (the village didn’t even have electricity or phone lines even though most of the rest of Spain did), life in the early years of the 20th century in these parts was pretty much like it had been when the Moors were driven out in the 15th century. Outside these valleys and mountains, the great world had gone to war and thousands had died, but for the villagers of Yegen, those events might as well have been happening on Mars.

As a member of the Bloomsbury group (though very much on its outer periphery), Brenan was friends with Lytton Strachey and Virginia and Leonard Woolf. They make appearances in South From Granada, visiting Yegen and suffering through the arduous journey to the place and food that upsets delicate digestive systems. Brenan continued to read and travel around the region and he would eventually write a seminal study of the Spanish Civil War titled The Spanish Labyrinth. By the time he left Yegen and eventually Spain during Franco’s era, Brenan’s love and affection for the place and its residents had only grown in feeling, inspiring him to write South from Granada and capture a world that was well on its way to disappearing for good.

The author is a writer and communications professional. When she’s not reading, writing or watching cat videos, she can be found on Instagram @saudha_k where she posts about reading, writing, and cats.

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