Time for the final blogpost in this series: Guadix. In the last two weeks I’ve written about parts of this trip already, like when we hiked in a beautiful river canyon near Nerja and when we visited the arid coastal area of Cabo de Gata. The final part of our trip took us to Guadix, which is again a completely different and unique environment. Guadix is a city about an hour from Granada and it is surrounded by strange sandstone formations which also pop up in the city itself as well. The locals decided to exploit this feature and build many of their houses into these rocks. This makes the place feel like you are walking on Tatooine… I visited this place a couple of times before, but it was the first for Aisling!
We booked a room in a cavehouse-hotel/hostel called Cuevas Abuelo Ventura where I stayed a few years ago while I was travelling around Spain. It is a little bit outside the city among olive fields and farms, so it is very peaceful, it has views of the Sierra Nevada and it’s a great place to watch the night sky. After taking a bus from Almería, we walked out to the place only to find it super quiet during siesta… Eventually someone arrived to the reception and told us that our booking didn’t go through from the booking.com system to theirs. That turned out to be really lucky, because instead of the basic room, we got upgraded to a really beautiful huge cavehouse-room that had a jakuzzi inside. Not bad when booking accommodation for 30ish Euros…
Since I already wrote about Guadix on the blog previously, I will skip the long story and just say that we had a fantastic time exploring and I really enjoyed showing Aisling this unusual, beautiful and often underappreciated part of Spain. I am happy to say that I see some developments in the city in terms of renovations and improvements aimed at boosting tourism, but still too few people know about this amazing place!
I will admit that cutting this blog short was also due to all the youth exchanges that I am helping organize and run in the last month of my EVS. That means that I have things to do 24/7, I don’t sleep enough, I drink more coffee in a day than I usually do in a week and I am trying to remember the names of way too many people. It is great fun, but really exhausting. So the blog is a bit on the slow burner for now…
PS: Do you think this series format is interesting or do you prefer a single, longer blogpost?