You can live somewhere your whole life and never feel the ground under you. I don’t mean that in a poetic way—I mean really feel it. Like your weight, your noise, your breath pressing into the dirt. I didn’t get that until I started walking the trails above Pampaneira. Not strolling. Walking. With purpose, or maybe no purpose at all.
London was all… railways, coffee, alerts. You’d blink and it was Tuesday. Then Friday. Then your life, in reverse, packed into a Google calendar. Here? The trail between Pampaneira and Capileira is nothing but rock, dust, scrub, and silence that feels like it might be looking back at you. Not empty silence. Not dead. The other kind. The type that makes you feel like a guest.
It’s not gentle, that trail. The incline burns, and the loose stones are just waiting for you to get cocky. You carry water, or you don’t finish. Simple. But then you hit the ridge, light catches the lip of the gorge, and suddenly… yeah. Worth it. All of it.
The gorge doesn’t just sit there. It remembers. You see it in the terraces stacked into the slope like someone’s grandmother carved them out of stubbornness and hope. The acequias are still working—tiny water veins built centuries ago, still trickling life through the dirt. That kind of history gets under your skin. You start thinking different. Slower. More bent toward the earth.
When I first came here, I walked to shake off London. Didn’t expect it to rewrite me. But it did. One hike at a time. At first, I couldn’t even hear myself think—my head was still full of meetings, texts, worry. Now? It’s just breath and rock and the occasional wild goat giving me attitude.
There’s a ruined cortijo halfway up—half-eaten by brambles, doorway collapsing in on itself like it’s had enough. Nobody’s touched it. Nobody’s pretending it didn’t exist. That’s something I love about here. Things are allowed to fall apart. Decay isn’t cleaned up and hidden behind scaffolding. It just… is. Part of it all.
Capileira’s at the top. Kind of. A town that looks like it’s been here forever, but never got bored. I stop for a coffee, usually. Sit still. Watch the path I just took and wonder why I feel different. Because I always do. Even when it’s the same trail.
In London, I’d be answering emails by now. Back-to-back calls. Lists. Urgency. Here, I’m just deciding which trail to try next. That’s it. That’s the plan.
And if you want to know what happens off the trail—what the town’s like when it breathes in, when people gather—I wrote about that in A Day at the Market: Embracing Local Life. That’s where everything hums loudest.
Anyway. Tomorrow I’ll walk again. Different path. Same shoes. Let the silence do what it does. Quietly rearrange everything I thought I knew.
