On looking without seeing

Guadix is a windy, dusty town on the slopes of the dry side of the massive ridge that is the Sierra Nevada in Andalusia, Spain. These slopes are the rain-shadow badlands of the province of Granada: a place few foreign tourists visit. The other side of the mountain, the Mediterranean side, is called the Alpujarra and seems a world away: verdant, flowery slopes with orchards, pastures and little whitewashed villages clinging to them: a landscape and people made famous by the English travel writer Gerald Brenan, who lived there.

But our side could not be more different. I say ‘our’ because my partner and I own two cave houses in Guadix, and often stay. We love the town, partly for its workaday ordinariness; but it’s not without history (going back to Roman times), civic pride, a scatter of fine buildings and a lively cultural life.

Last Friday we saw an early evening concert advertised: a Brahms sonata for piano and clarinet, and a piano quintet by Dvorak. We decided to go. The young musicians were local, and the venue was a beautiful salon on the upper floor of the ancient building that serves the town’s college of music. The flyer called the concert ‘Evocaciones’. For me, that title said more than it can have known.

The concert started at 8 p.m. It was a warm evening, and I was by a big window. To my left was the salon, the musicians, instruments, and an audience of about 50 people beneath a lofty, beautifully carved ceiling. To my right, beneath the window, was a little square.

It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that in this, the last hour of daylight, the sky was dark with thousands of swifts, just arrived over the mountains from Africa.