Bedrock

Thursday is the day for the Huescar market. As you can probably tell from the photos, I originally wrote this back in 2009 when we were new to this part of the world. Here is an update. Huescar of course is in Granada, Andalucia, Spain but ”Granada” covers one hell of a large area and in reality the town of Huescar (population under 8,000 in 2016) is 90 minutes by car from what most people think of as Granada.

Maureen and I parked on the outskirts of Huescar and walked in (just a few minutes walk) – the town for the most part has only the most gentle inclines and is largely flat (unlike nearby – and larger – Baza) and so parking just about anywhere is easy except in August when the number of visitors swells a lot.

The market is bigger than the Wednesday market at nearby Galera, has lots and lots of fruit and veg as well as spices, pottery, clothes, shoes and more and spans much of the town. To the newcomer it may seem massive. In reality there are much larger markets at the coast (Vera for example) however this one should keep you occupied for an hour or two, longer if you meet up with friends for coffee.

Here’s one for you – a popular snack here looks like fried batter and that’s because it pretty much is. Churos. They fill up a syringe maybe 20mm diameter and star-shaped) – and inject it into a pot of boiling oil… swirling it around as they go. It is in there for minutes at most then taken out, cut up into strips and sold. What most of the locals do is shower it in sugar, order hot chocolate and dip the churos in the chocolate… Amazingly most of the locals are thin -  but then, many SMOKE LIKE CRAZY – indoors and outdoors. There’s a message in this somewhere. We tend to limit ourselves to churos once a week at the Thursday market.

For most of the morning when I wrote this, the temperatures were in the middle 20s, by lunchtime it was up to 32c, not untypical for the summer here. Maureen bought herself some fried chicken at the market and I experimented with chicken slices and tuna for lunch! We finished the afternoon at the local pool to cool off.

The next day we took a drive down to Aquilas – that’s not taking a chance on the weather of course, it WAS going to be hot and sunny, but back in 2009 we’d never been to Aquilas before and knew nothing about it – but a trip around the place on Google Earth suggests it has much to offer. It is about an hour and a half, maybe more from here in Galera, not as the crow flies but as the winding Spanish back-roads take you and we like to do things the hard way.

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