Left behind

We went to El Acebuchal for lunch today. It's a hamlet in the hills above Frigiliana, once a base for cultivating crops and raising livestock. In 1949 the Franco government forcibly ejected all the inhabitants, and the Guardia Civil then used it as a base for hunting down the armed guerrillas who were hiding in these hills with the complicity or forced cooperation of the inhabitants.

The guerrillas held out until the 1950s, until all of them had been either killed or captured. There's a fascinating book about this, Between Two Fires, by British journalist David Baird, who has lived in Frigiliana for many years. It certainly casts a different light on this now picture postcard village, with its glamorous villas in the surrounding hills.

A single family returned to El Acebuchal in 1998 and started restoring houses, which they rented out as holiday lets. They also opened a bar and restaurant, which is where we had lunch. The restored houses are immaculate, as you can see from the photo I took when we last visited in 2011. This blip shows the raw material they had to work with. There are still a few unrestored houses, and actually the village in general looks a bit less pristine than it did on our last visit.

Evidently the restaurant caters exclusively to tourists. Perhaps that's why the kitchen misunderstood our typically Spanish order of one starter and one main course to share, and they were delivered to the table simultaneously. Sigh. We had to eat the wild boar stew first, before it got cold. It was excellent, but the standout was the salad: tomato, orange, and red onion with soft fresh goat's cheese from the Montes de Málaga, dressed with vinegar and miel de caña (light molasses). It was really delicious, definitely something I'm going to try at home. They also make their own bread, so that was unusually good too. Every table gets a whole loaf, so you can take away what you don't eat.

Due to the method of service, we were done and dusted in half an hour, less time than it took us to drive there (the last 5 km are along a very rough dirt track). We'd got a bit chilly sitting in the shade with a light breeze blowing, so we went home to sit on our sunny terrace.

Intercambio in the evening -- there were a lot of people there, hence it was very noisy and a bit tiring trying to hear what people were saying.