Nerja: costa dystopia or hillwalking utopia?

I have never been on a flight to or from Malaga, Costa del Sol, which hasn’t been full or nearly so – and I travel mostly mid-week and avoid peak holiday periods. The departure gate waiting areas are interesting for the amateur sociologist.

Just after the Easter school holidays, the hobby was easy enough to indulge. At Gatwick there was a scattering of families with pre-school infants. Almost all the rest of the 180 or so passengers were what the Americans call “snowbirds” – the grey or white haired folk who migrate, either temporarily or permanently, from the frozen or wet northern parts to The Sun.

Copies of the Daily Mail or Telegraph were being read by many, almost a badge of club membership (how conflicted are these particular readers over Brexit? - apparently a lot think some deal will be done even if their journals of choice prevail).

One man joked that he couldn’t understand the accent of the Asian-heritage gate manager, and got an appreciative chuckle from the seats around him.

I had a dark, Ballardian, reverie (See my previous post for the genesis). I assigned the majority of my fellow travellers to Ballard’s sunny Hell, set out with relish in his Costa novel, Cocaine Nights.

The Easyjet plane was surely carrying a goodly percentage of its travellers to:

“..the residential complexes [which] stood shoulder to shoulder along the beach…[where] people sat on their terraces and patios, gazing at an unseen horizon like figures in the paintings of Edward Hopper.

..Perhaps this was what a leisure-dominated future would resemble? Nothing could ever happen in this affectless realm, where entropic drift calmed the surfaces of a thousand swimming pools.”

Such prejudicial fantasies are, of course grossly unfair – well, in some part.

Ballardian truths are indeed evident, from the depressing densities and architectural disasters of the urbanizaciones to the bars advertising English football and traditional roast Sunday lunch. Many visitors and residents slow their life to a crawl between fridge and terrace, punctuated by excursions to beach and bar. There are seaside hotels in Nerja with parade grounds of loungers, rank upon rank, occupied by the unselfconscious pink and fleshy (Ballardian metaphor: sun morgues of the living).

But that is certainly not all. In the Costa towns where the mountains come down behind, some visitors and residents do shrug off the easy caricatures.

There is walking. If you are very fit and/or masochistic, there is cycling. (I write as a low-medium level cyclist. The hills going up are punishing. Going down they are scary. Also, on one long, bendy 15k route from the coast up to the mountain village of Competa, there are large wild dogs (or at least one..) that even assault cars (or at least one car..).)

The hills and mountains (the sierra) are largely protected spaces (parques naturals). This means that the wild and rugged areas remain so. You can stand on a ridge and look one way towards hills and valleys without a sign of human habitation.

Look the other way, and the hills and valleys are covered with chaotic encroachment of villas and smallholdings.

Walking in the coastal foothills is a huge pleasure, even if you are caught in the fine penetrating rain that sometimes swoops in from the higher mountains. The walks can be strenuous, in the way of steep ascents and descents; and even beyond strenuous if one goes long distances into the mountains, mixing in semi-climbing. Some even enjoy the vertigo of walking along the acequias, the Moorish stone water channels that cling to steep valley sides.

There are plenty of English-language guidebooks (but check whether a guide is translated from the Spanish – the result may be not so much a guide as a challenge in linguistic reverse engineering). Maps are at best reasonable, at worst misleading. There is nothing to match the quality of Ordnance Survey.

Shorter circular walks around Nerja, Maro and Frigiliana can be undertaken with the help of a suitable guide or map. If you are tempted by longer, higher challenges, it might be advisable first to explore a walk in a guided party – for two good reasons.

First, way markers, though improving in number and visibility, are still hit and miss on a number of routes. Not losing one’s way is a priority. It is easy to go badly wrong in the rugged terrain, especially in poor weather. People do get thoroughly lost.

The terrain is bewilderingly complex, with ridges and barrancos (ravines) sinuously and abruptly entwined. When you are up on a ridge or summit, the panorama seems all very comprehensible. You can, so it seems, satisfactorily plot villages, peaks, valleys and tracks. But away from the heights, sense of direction may be rapidly lost, if one strays from the popular tracks.

A gently descending barranco develops into a steepling wooded gorge, with no further way down except over a cliff. It won't be a gorge you've seen from your survey from the heights, because then it was hidden. The mountains and foothills are chock-full of such valleys. Take a wrong turn and you can be lost very easily and very quickly (even if, disconcertingly, in wilderness spots near the coast, one can hear the shouts of children enjoying the fun in the safe next valley).

Secondly, some parts of some routes can be dangerous if not negotiated with great care. A guide shows you how to tackle those features, or physically assists you. People do fall and get injured or worse. (Being on a guided walk does not render anyone immune to accidents, however. They happen not infrequently. But better they happen when skilled assistance is at hand.)

Guided walks also have the benefit of throwing you, for several hours, into the company of usually congenial strangers, from (the phrase is not to be resisted) “all walks of life”, and of many nationalities. On the whole, everyone has a love of walking, though one or two may have aimed above their current competence. (The guides complain that, as the high summer season comes on, nightmare clients turn up in flip-flops.) The ages of the walkers vary hugely, but that is not usually a problem either of standards or of socialising. Parent- older child combinations are common.

In the easy-going camaraderie which emerges on a walk, it easy to assume lazily that new stranger-friends share one's values and so forth. Do not so assume. Unless you are confident of having read a co-walker's cultural-political signals correctly, stick to neutral conversational topics. Otherwise an unpleasant standoff on the benefits of, for example, globalisation may persist for several hours... ( I have yet to see a fight with walking sticks).

How would Ballard account for all this unwonted activity just inland from the Costa? His eye would, for sure, pick out with relish the boundary marked between sierra and costa by the motorway, carried over the valleys and rivers by long viaducts perched on vast legs of concrete. On the coastal side of this boundary, he would argue, is the true future of civilisation, whose proper denizens do not, or should not, dream of setting foot in the hills. Your hikers in the sierra are the real artificiality, a manufactured and desperate respite from the true call of Sun and Sangria.

April 2016