Focus on the village of Saleres

We loved the village of Saleres when we were viewing houses in the area.It is one of the most traditional and less developed villages in the valley but has a unique feel to it, very traditional, you see the menfolk working with the mules and the women sweeping their paths and chatting to passing folk.

The whitewashed look of the village and narrow streets give it a lovely feel and people pride themselves on keeping there whitewashed houses regularly painted, usually once a year before the October festival.

The church is highlighted in guide books as worthy of a visit and it is possible to make some pleasant walks down to the river and up onto the hillsides above the village.

There is a river that runs through the village, called the Rio Santo. It's only small but it runs year-round which is quite rare in the south of Spain. This keeps the valley irrigated and beautifully lush and green. None of the locals know it's called the Rio Santo but name it after the next highest village in the valley, from whence it comes. It starts in the hills above Albuñuelas, runs through the Albuñuelas gorge, down through Saleres and on to Restábal. From there it empties into the large and very deep Béznar reservoir at the bottom of the valley. The people who live in Albuñuelas call it 'El Rio,' the people living in Saleres call it 'El Rio Albuñuelas,' and the people in Restábal call it 'El Rio Saleres.' There is a footpath that runs beside the river; for the inveterate traveller, this goes east to Istanbul in one direction and west to Gibraltar and on into Africa in the other. There are few roads and the locals use mules to transport fruit from the groves to the village whence it is picked up by truck and taken to one of the various co-operatives.

The people of Saleres are delightful in the main, polite, helpful and generous to a fault with their time and possessions. A pleasure to know. Everybody is related, if not brother and sister, then at least a 'primo,' or cousin. Saleres is full of characters, nearly all on the old side, as the youngsters have left to work in the cities of Granada or Barcelona.

If you ask the mothers of the ones who live in Barcelona what their children do for a living, they invariably reply 'Business People,' which means they are taxi-drivers or entrepreneurs of one kind or another. These prodigals come to the valley once a year, during the entire month of August, the only month when there is no work to be done in the campo, save perhaps the early harvesting of almonds. This means plenty of parties and is a good time to be in the valley, but a bad time to be waiting for a taxi in Barcelona!

The ones who now live in Granada are teachers, doctors or nurses, with a couple of agronomists and agricultural engineers thrown in. They drive sensible estate cars, come and stay at the parental home every weekend and work in the groves to help their parents, many of whom are well beyond retirement age. On Sunday evening they fill their cars to the brim with oranges and sell them in Granada's shops for a bit of cash on the side.

There are no shops in Saleres. but there is a small market once a week in the bottom square in front of the olive mill. When it is not market day, the village is serviced by dozens of white-van-men who drive into the square at all hours, their horns screaming like banshees. The local women can distinguish one horn from another. There are three different bakers who each come three times a day; the egg-woman; the frozen-food man, the red-meat butcher man, the chicken-meat-man and just about anyone else who has ideas of selling anything. Last week there was a man selling sofas and chairs, with a deafening loudspeaker atop his Transit van proclaiming to all that their luck was in and that the Chair Man had arrived.

The village bar is in the main square, the door hidden behind an old striped curtain and very basic, with a waist-high wall running down the middle to separate the bartender from the customers. Only the village men go in there; but tourist are welcome, these customers are at least two hundred years old, always wear trousers, boots, shirt, pullover and jacket, no matter what the temperature outside; they look as if they've never left the bar and speak an unknown argot.

The villagers all grow their own vegetables in the campo, as the alluvial soil from the Sierra Nevada is capable of supporting anything. Wild asparagus mixed with scrambled eggs is a dish worthy of a king. Many villagers have a room on the ground floor of their houses for breeding chickens, another for the mule and an extensive bodega for mosto-making, the subject of much discussion and, of course, testing.