Guadix

Last week we visited a town about an hour north of us called Guadix.  The drive was quite spectacular through a dusty red lunar landscape backed by snow capped mountains. The town is on the edge of the area where they filmed the ‘Paella Westerns’ in the seventies, (so think Sergeo Leone, Clint Eastwood & A Fist Full of Dollars).

Guadix is famous for it’s cave houses with about 10,000 people still living in modernised caves buried into the hillside with only windows and doors at the front. Apparently very comfortable with a stable 21°C summer and winter.  All very strange and more like a home for smurfs or teletubbies!  From my perspective, a visit to an authentic cave museum with its claustrophobic rooms was only bearable because of 21st century lighting. I think the whole experience nearly passed Madeleine by until our ‘television starved’ daughter found the “Presentation Suite” with a 40” flat screen monitor showing a very dramatic publicity film for Guadix, which could have rivalled a pitch for the Olympic games. As Clint might have said... it 'made her day'!