Granada - Sacromonte

There were two places I wanted to visit in Granada: La Alhambra and the Sacromonte where the gypsies have been living in caves for centuries. I had fantasies of hanging out with the Gypsies. So, I took a short cut through the old Muslim quarters and started going up the hill on a small back street I thought would lead me there. I stopped when I saw street sign for a “dead end”. I took it literally, not thinking twice that it may have been directed at cars and instead made a left on an even smaller alley made of broken stairs that also went up the mountain, After walking past mostly inhabited and abandoned cave dwellings, pointing my finger at a couple of wild mangy dogs, I saw a dirt path, more of a goat path, cut up the mountain. It was seven PM and the sun was still burning bright. As I trekked up through the Dr. Seuss like cactus flora I could see the whole of Granada under me. Then, out of the dust, literally, small cave dwellings inhabited by African immigrants began to appear, trashed leather couches; water barrels for rain; a hippie couple fixing a motorcycle, and old man smoking a cigarette, traces of large bone fires…These people were out of the grid with the best view in Granada!

I came to a large fortification wall I had seen the day before from the city and thought it would be fun to climb it. It was built like a staircase for giants, maybe twenty feet high, three feet wide. It zigzagged up the mountain, ending against what looked like an abandoned church. This was Sacromonte? I got close up to the wall and noticed that someone had chiseled away pieces of stone, creating a way to climb it without superhuman powers. I secured my camera bag and went up.

The view was even more breathtaking. On the other side of the wall I could see another hill and the faint glint of tourist buses. Allright, I was not on Sacromonte after all. But what the hell, I was going to make it my Sacromonte. I decided to take a chance and follow the wall up to the top. The steps were sometimes five feet high. I took off my shirt and started climbing, quickly transforming myself into a goat. It seemed endless. The son was hot, the wind cool, the sky electric blue and the dreaded Alhambra just another dot in the distance. As I spent myself I stepped out of my goat personae and could see that there was no way of actually getting down again. Every step I took, I was going to have to take it back. And that would have been lame. So, I kept going until I came to a spot that looked like a possible descent without the risk of severe pain and broken bones. I sat down, letting my legs dangle like a child, drank some water and lost myself in thought.

When you’re down, you got to go up. And there’s nothing like climbing a mountain to remind you that you’ve got to earn the climb. And when you do, with a little blood ( I did scrape myself) and sweat then you’re back to normal. You’re not “high”, actually. You are back to yourself.

I went down the mountain and took the street with the dead end. It led to Sacromonte, the real one, and I quickly came to a small plaza overlooking the Alahmbra. The sun was setting, the palace was turning red and there was a little café bar with some tourists, children running and a stunning Gypsy man with a white gleaming pants, pointy leather shoes and an open bright yellow shirt revealing a golden cross resting on a field of thick black chest hair. His hairdo was slick and he wore golden raybans. I wanted a soda and he directed me to an older woman who asked me where I was from. I said Chile and she replied that the wife of her nephew was from Chile. Her name was Paloma and she was standing right there against the parapet of the hill.

I introduced myself. She was in her early thirties and looked like the typical Chilean woman: small, beautiful round face, a bit of an overbite and jet black hair. Except that she had a small black dot tattoed right at the base of her forehead: she was a Gypsy. After some chitchat we quickly realized that we both spoke French. She asked me how come.

The Pinochet Scholarship I said.
She looked at me weird. Never heard of it she said in all seriousness.
I laughed and explained to her that in exile, Chileans who had gotten to travel the world, learn languages and expand their universe beyond anything imaginable if they had stayed behind, called their gains the “Pinochet Scholarship”.
She smiled and said that she left Chile in 1981, when she was seven. So she had been born one year after the coup and had lived her entire childhood during the darkest days of the dictatorship. But she didn’t remember anything. She had left just in time without being poisoned. She wound up in France and that’s where her mother is. How she wound up with a Gypsy, having a child and standing here, she didn’t tell me. But she had big dreams. In the past years, Sacromonte has been gentrified to the point where the gypsies are moving out selling their cool caves to Germans and Scandinavians who fix them up and rent them at exorbitant prices. Imagine. You get to live among the Gypsies! Not for long she said. In twenty years, there will be no more Gypsies here. Only Gringos. Her dream was to go back to Chile and figure out how to build luxurious cave dwellings and sell them all along the coast. The only problem she thought was the issue of earthquakes but she had an engineer friend that could test the ground. It all sounded like total madness but I smiled and egged her on. Why not, right?

Her six year-old daughter came up with her ten year-old cousin and I gave them one of the organic lollipops from Whole Food I had brought with me for precisely this occasion. They smiled and ran down the hill to play at another house. Paloma whispered: there’s my mother in law. We don’t get along. That’s why I’m taking my daughter back to Paris. I glanced at the woman in question and got hit with the evilest eye I had ever seen. Half her face was disfigured by a skin disease and the other half looked like white glass. I felt a jolt and decided it was time to leave. I wanted to see if I could go into one of those cave restaurants for tourists where they play gypsy music. We bid each other farewell and I started walking down the hill. I quickly came up to a large cave house where I saw the two kids eating their lollipops. I stopped and asked them how it was. They smiled. I looked up and saw the sign at the entrance: Gypsy Music School. Two gypsies were fixing a generator and a skinny young woman was smoking a cigarette.

I said hello, They stopped. The younger gypsy asked me if I wanted to smoke pot, in other words if I wanted to buy weed. I said no thanks. I had smoked so much in my life it drips from my fingers, I joked. The woman asked me where I was from. Chile I said. Just like Paloma. The older Gypsy, who was the master musician said he was her brother in-law. The exchanges went back and forth and they decided they liked me enough to have one of my cigarettes and chill out sitting on the parapet. The sunset by now was stunning. A few seconds later Paloma appeared running down the hill. There’s a big fight and the witch (the mother in law) is accusing the ten year-old cousin of sexually molesting the little girl. The young Gypsy woman gets all pissed, grabs a metal bar and walks up the hill shouting that there was no way that Shit Faced Whore was going to talk like that about her little brother. (There’s no easy way to translate Gypsy insults here.). We smoked our cigarettes and five minutes later she comes back saying that the Whore is going to call the cops. The young man takes out his knife and says it’s time to get it over with. Everyone tries to stop him. He is screaming at the top of lungs that he going to cut the bitch up and feed her to his dog. Neighbors are now running to see what’s going on. Just when it looked totally out of control, everyone calmed down suddenly, just as fast as the fire started, someone pulled out a joint, it was smoked and a murder was averted.

The master musician sighed and looked at me. All I want is a meal at night and some peace and quiet. He was the most forlorn Gypsy I had ever seen.

I decided to go back to my hostel. I didn’t need to “see” a gypsy show. I had witnessed the real thing. It’s funny but Unesco has declared both the Alhambra and the Sacromonte world heritage places. You can guess which one is more alive. I had seen both and now I was ready to go to Morocco.