Across Andalusia on horseback

This is a story about a chicken called Joséphine, who, like me, took a journey she wasn’t expecting — and got completely lost.

It was late April, and I’d travelled to Andalusia. My plan was to join a riding adventure starting out from a 16th-century farmhouse called Taramona, just outside the village of Cazalla de la Sierra in the Morena mountains. I’d be travelling in a group of seven — three from Germany, an American and three Brits — led by an Englishman called George Scott, for whom Taramona is home. An Argentine horseman called Jose Miguel Zega would be bringing up the rear.

The plan was to travel about 170km over six days. We’d stay in different locations fixed up with bell tents and fireside kitchens by a team who’d break and make the camps. Our route would weave through the dark granitic hills that until recently were a habitat for Iberian wolves (last year, the Andalusian government recognised the species as locally extinct). Occasionally crossing over into the neighbouring region of Extremadura, we would make our way to Cumbres de San Bartolomé, which looks out towards Portugal, ride with the flow of the Río Múrtigas, and finish up at the border near Encinasola.

“I know where we’ll camp each night, but the rest is looser,” said Scott. “In Andalusia alone, there are 60,000 kilometres of cattle trails, mule tracks and pilgrimage routes horses are allowed to use.”

Five years ago, I’d taken one of Scott’s first riding trips, a much shorter circuit starting and ending at his mother’s home, Trasierra, which I wrote about for this newspaper. I therefore had an inkling of what to expect: camps festooned with hurricane lamps; tables dressed in ginghams and antique damasks; bridles braided with hot pinks and yellows; hours of riding through groves of evergreen oaks where charcoal-coloured Iberian pata negra pigs root and wallow. I’d returned because of the ambition of this new journey, and because I knew Scott is too restless to repeat himself.

I arrived under a bruised sky presaging a week of rain and sun. In Taramona’s crumbling courtyards, the moving shadows from scores of candles evoked the feeling I was among people from another time whose spirits weren’t asleep. Orange trees flourished against powdery stone walls. Jasmine billowed from balconies, like clouds of tiny white stars. We dined inside an old olive mill where saddles hung high on the wall. Bedrooms were scattered through the old buildings, including Taramona’s chapel, the bed positioned under an altar.

Taramona was also Joséphine’s place of residence, in a henhouse beside the stables. The next morning, I watched her pecking for bugs in the lawn, her domain presided over by a magnificent peacock who strutted Taramona’s walls, his iridescent breast lighting up the froth of wildflowers, the uncut swaths spilling out in folds of buttery foam.

We were assigned our horses — mine an elegant grey Hispano-Árabe gelding — and rode out for the first valley, Garganta Fría (literally Cold Throat), named after a stream of bright water. While my horse found his footing, I worked out how to juggle saddlebags, neck-reining and taking photographs while dodging sprays of briars. The river bank was bejewelled with birds. The wild peonies were just beginning to perish. A new sward of grass was thickening with bees and butterflies. Then a flash of yellow the colour of an overripe lemon.

Scott followed the bird, a Eurasian golden oriole, with his finger before it disappeared into the canopy.

“I’ve seen them so rarely — maybe five in my life,” said Scott with a mix of wonder and regret.

As the day progressed, we eased on to a looser rein. When someone wanted to canter, Scott resisted, despite us all being experienced riders. “The horses give so much with the distance, I don’t think it’s fair to ask more,” he said.

Riding, like walking, has a cadence which allows you to be with your own thoughts. I felt comfortable dropping back and listening to the goat bells, or the clack of hooves on cobbles. When I saw two deer staring back at us from the other side of a forested valley, the tableau looked like a Renaissance tapestry. Zega saw the deer too. We both stopped to watch, then rode on without saying a word.

For large parts of the day, we rode through pine forests and dehesa — an ecosystem unique to the Iberian peninsula, made up of grassy pastureland and evergreen Mediterranean oaks, which shimmers in April with blue irises and spikes of purple viper’s bugloss.

The farther we went, the more words for Spanish pathways opened up: cañadas reales (wide “royal” trails, traditionally used for moving herds); cordeles (narrower drovers’ paths); caminos de herradura (“horseshoe paths”), and my favourite, rutas contrabandistas (“bandit trails”). The way these routes threaded the landscape conjured up the lost world that tumbles out of the pages of one of my favourite travel books, Two Middle-Aged Ladies in Andalusia. Written by Penelope Chetwode, John Betjeman’s wife, it describes a horseback journey she made in the summer of 1961.

“I then turned off the road on to a track leading towards the east which satisfied my sense of direction and put the sun where it ought to be,” wrote Chetwode. “The splendid inaccuracy of the maps led me to many such places which I would otherwise have missed.”

The first camp emerged in front of us on a riverbank. As the horses grazed nearby, we ate a slow-cooked lamb stew on a table decorated with candles and sprigs of wild rosemary. The next day, we rode through hamlets where children waved at us from half-open doors. When we stopped in larger villages, we’d water the horses at town troughs which have served this function for centuries.

We took a long break at Bar Antonino in Almadén de la Plata for tapas, including delicious spinach, cumin and chickpea washed down with cold Cruzcampo beers. Later in the ride, we visited El Perico, a bar in Cumbres de San Bartolomé, for a reviving shot of Amarguinha — a bitter almond liqueur that is a taste of Portugal — while our horses rested in the narrow street outside.

Sometimes I’d ride beside Scott to better understand the cultural layers, including bullfighting (we passed a matador training at a country estate), shepherding (Spanish mastiffs are raised as puppies with the sheep, and live outside with them for life), the local “brotherhoods” who carry images of the Virgin Mary through Seville’s Semana Santa (a loyalty inscribed as a tattoo on a bar owner’s arm), and the unspoken atrocities of the Spanish civil war — a period still cloaked in silence in these small communities.

One day, near the village of Cala, we rode up a hill known locally as Cerro de los Lobos, or Mountain of the Wolves. We were joined by a friend of Scott’s: a singing arriero, or muleteer, who called himself “El Maestro Sarabia”. (“I wouldn’t swap a day with this man for anyone else in the world,” said Scott.) Sarabia rode “side saddle” with one knee hooked over the mule’s withers, in front of straw panniers carrying our mountain picnic. He worked short seasons collecting cork with his string of mules and donkeys; in the winter months, he laboured for a scrap metal merchant. Over a fire — branches from cistus bushes emitting a sweet, woody aroma — he cooked hunks of fresh Iberico pork and doused the meat in manzanilla sherry. We ate it with our fingers as he sang flamenco to Scott’s guitar.

As we were saddling back up for another long afternoon of riding, Sarabia suggested we should get beyond this stretch of wilderness before it was dark. “I’ve seen the ears of the wolf in these mountains,” he said.

“He means he’s seen more than appears to the eye,” explained Scott. “This isn’t just a route we’re following. There are so many stories soaked in this landscape.”

From time to time, the paths Scott wanted to take were blocked. The rivers were running too high, there were fallen trees, or the path proved too steep. He was constantly adjusting, for reasons which at times felt more whimsical than real. A red kite circled above us, tipped a wing, and flew out west. I watched Scott observe the bird’s movement, then change our direction, as if he were following a sign.

Rather than look at his phone for a GPS position, Scott rode loosely towards certain landmarks: a medieval tower, a copse of bobble-headed, Dr-Seuss-style pines, a valley glimmering with water flowing in the right direction. So yes, we got lost. Yes, a horse fell and dunked its rider in a river because the pool was deeper than it appeared. Yes, we ended up riding for two hours in darkness. There were moments when this journey felt unsettling, difficult, emotionally exhausting. But that’s also the kind of dream you don’t forget.

This was a landscape emptied of people, which was something I hadn’t expected to find in western Europe. From start to finish, the only tourist we encountered in six full days of riding was a German hiker when we briefly rode a stretch of the Camino Santiago de Compostela. Cell-phone coverage was often non-existent, which suited Scott. Travel in our digitised, industrialised, mechanised world makes it harder and harder to connect with the gentler notions of a landscape’s interconnectedness. Fences are everywhere. Over-scripted days kill the poetry of serendipity. Scott’s ride to Portugal was in pursuit of the opposite.

As for Joséphine’s relevance in all of this, it turned out she’d hitched a ride from Taramona in the spare tyre of the trailer which was used to transport the tents ahead of us. She’d only made herself known at a river crossing, flapping in panic when the wheels struck water. The chef decided to keep her with us. Each evening, Joséphine clucked around the fire. Each night, she chose a tent to sleep in, mostly preferring the American’s. She always laid her single white egg by eight in the morning, then after breakfast, would get back into the trailer to travel the next stage.

I imagined her telling her unlikely journey to the Taramona barnyard on her return.

Oh, the things we saw. At El Real de la Jara, we camped inside a bullring painted the colour of dried blood, with the moon rising behind in a great silver disc. We picnicked in an abandoned railway station in the middle of the countryside. We ate seafood rice, white winter gazpachos, and strawberries blackened and sweetened on embers. I saw a flooded abyss in the middle of the mountains — a quarry for bronze and iron where they’ve found skeletons of Roman miners — which looked like the gates of hell. Sometimes we slept beside rivers, sometimes in groves where the horses grazed freely around the fire, the grey Arab glowing against wet greens from the spring cloudbursts. One night, just outside the village of Cumbres Mayores, we camped in a storm, in the shadow of a convent where the bells were rung at midnight by cloistered nuns.

Joséphine’s journey was accidental; she was literally carried away in her sleep. I’d signed up willingly to Scott’s approach, which leaves space to feel the “thin places” in a landscape where nature is powerful, where there might be signs we see but don’t quite understand.

“This sort of landscape gives you an insight into Eternity,” wrote Chetwode. “It is so vast and so beautiful and so still that you would like it to go on for ever.” Her words hold true, in a part of Spain where there’s still enough mystery, both alluring and ominous, to believe you might glimpse “the ears of the wolf”.

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