La Alpujarra doesn’t just feel like another place. It feels like a whole other world. I noticed it straight away—how time stretches, how the air carries something quieter, something older. There’s no rush, no urgency, just space.
London, on the other hand, was full of noise and movement. The streets always dragged you forward, schedules locked in from morning to night. Here? The trails wind wherever they like. You can start walking and let the path decide where you end up.
One of my favourite routes starts just outside Pampaneira, cutting up toward Capileira. It’s a tough one—steep, rocky, and absolutely unforgiving if you set off without enough water. But the second you hit the ridge and look out over the Poqueira Gorge, you forget every single hard step. Terraced fields stretch below like an ancient staircase, carved by generations of farmers who knew the land better than it knew itself. It’s a different kind of history than I knew in London. Not written. Lived.
And the silence. The real kind. Not just the absence of noise, but the kind that settles inside you, that makes you aware of your own breath, your own heartbeat. I never had that in London. Even in the quietest parks, there was always something humming in the background.
Walking these trails, you see how the land still holds onto its past. The old acequias, those irrigation channels the Moors built, still thread their way through the hills, feeding crops and filling the air with the sound of running water. A soft trickle. A whisper. It’s easy to forget they aren’t just part of the landscape—they’re engineering masterpieces, still keeping this land alive centuries later.
Sometimes, I pass abandoned farmhouses, half-buried in vines, their roofs caved in but their stories still standing. Back in London, places like that would be fenced off, deemed unsafe, stripped of their past. Here, they just sit. Nobody tries to erase them. They just become part of the land again.
I think about London a lot when I walk. I wonder if I’ll ever miss that pace, that structure. If I’ll wake up one morning and feel the pull of the city again. Maybe. But right now, I can’t imagine swapping this for anything. There’s something about the stillness here that feels more alive than all the rush I left behind.
And maybe that’s what I needed. Not just a new place, but a new way of moving through the world. Step by step. Slower. More aware. More here.