Reserve a stay in Las Alpujarras for a week, three weeks or a season

You can reserve a stay in Las Alpujarras at three lengths, and they are not one product in three sizes. The place is a run of villages along the south face of the Sierra Nevada in Granada province, sitting between about 450 meters at the valley mouth and 1,476 meters at Trevélez. The houses are flat roofed and packed against each other, one family's roof serving as another's terrace, and the roofs are sealed with a grey mica clay called launa that has to be rolled flat again after heavy rain. Streets duck under the upper floors of houses in covered stretches called tinaos. Mulhacén stands at 3,479 meters over the whole arrangement and keeps snow in its north gullies into July.

Water explains why the villages sit where they do. Channels cut along the contour, some of them a thousand years old, carry snowmelt around the hillside and let it down onto terraces of almond, olive, fig, chestnut and vine. A second set of channels higher up spreads water over bare ground so that it sinks in and comes back out of springs six or eight weeks later, which is why a village at 1,300 meters still has water in August while the river below it is down to a thread. Every village has a turn. If your house has a garden, somebody will tell you within a day which afternoon the water is yours and how long you get it.

What separates the three lengths is how far into that arrangement you get. Seven nights gives you the shape of the place. Twenty one nights gives you the same ground three times over in weather that has moved. Fifty six nights puts you inside one full turn of the farming year, and somewhere around the fourth week people stop asking how long you are staying.

The Thursday market, the bread van, and the bus that stops everywhere

Órgiva is the market town at the bottom of the valley, 450 meters up and about fifty minutes from the sea at Motril. The market runs on Thursday morning, roughly eight until two, and it is the one day of the week when the upper villages come down together. Fruit, cheese, work clothes, plastic buckets, seed potatoes in March: about forty stalls in winter against seventy in July. On a seven night stay you catch it once, and you will spend part of that hour working out what the shouting is about.

Higher up, supply is thinner and it runs to a timetable. In the small hamlets of the Taha the van that brings bread and a little else comes twice a week and sounds its horn once at the top of the street, and if you are out on a path you go without until it comes again. The butcher in the larger villages shuts Monday, as does at least one of the two or three places to eat, and in February one of those usually closes for the whole month. The bus up from the provincial capital covers 70 kilometers in a little over three hours because it calls at every village on the way. There are three of them on a weekday and two on Sunday. The school buses down to the valley floor do not run in July or August, which catches people out.

Trevélez has the ham sheds, at 1,476 meters, and they are there for the air rather than the view: cold, dry and moving, for fourteen to twenty months a leg. Pórtugos has an iron spring that has stained its own stone basin orange. Neither of those is a sight you look at for more than four minutes, which is the honest measure of this valley.

What the fourth week reaches that the first cannot

Almonds come off from the last week of August through September, knocked out of the trees with cane poles onto sheets spread across the terrace. Figs are picked in the second and third week of September and laid on cane frames to dry, and the grapes on the Contraviesa ridge to the south go in from about the fifteenth. That fortnight is the busiest of the year and also the least sociable: people start at six and will say hello and keep walking. Chestnuts follow in the woods above Pórtugos and Pitres from late October and run for about three weeks, and the first fires go in around the same time.

Seven nights lands in one of those weeks or in none of them. Twenty one nights will usually straddle two. Fifty six nights takes you over the join, so you see the same terraces before, during and after, which is a different picture of the same ground rather than more of it.

The other change is domestic and it happens without announcement. By the third week you know the shop keeps a second, better bread behind the counter for people who ask. By the fifth or sixth, most landladies stop itemizing laundry, because nobody is stripping the bed every Saturday. The track that climbs north out of Capileira is barred to private cars at about 2,150 meters, and the park minibus above that point does not begin until the snow is off it, which in most years is the last week of June. Arrive in the middle of May for eight weeks and you are there on the day it starts.

Your legs change as well. A walk along the channel path to the next village that takes four hours in your first week takes two hours forty in your third, because you have stopped breathing like somebody who lives at sea level.

Gradient, stone, and the parts of this that are simply hard

Nothing reaches a house in the upper villages by car. You park where the street narrows and carry the rest, and in Capileira that can be sixty or seventy steps with a bag in each hand, twice, because you always forget something. The walls are two feet of stone and they hold whatever temperature you left them at. In August the valley mouth runs to 100 F in the afternoon while 1,400 meters up it is 84 F and the night drops to about 58 F, which is the entire reason people have been coming up here in August for two hundred years. In late December there are nine and a half hours of light, the sun is off the street in the Poqueira gorge by about a quarter past four, and a house nobody has heated sits at 54 F in the middle of the day.

Outside the four or five villages that see walkers, the working language is Spanish and there is no second one. Nobody will be rude about it and nobody will switch.

Entry rules for Spain are a matter between you and the authority that issues your documents, at any length of stay, and this office does not advise on them.

How a stay here is priced and who sends the bill

Slow Latitudes is the name Slow Latitudes Bookings LLC works under at 9422 Common Street, Suite 2, Baton Rouge, LA 70809, in East Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Nothing that carries or houses a traveller is owned at that address. The house or the room is held by the company that runs it on the ground, under a contract of its own, and that company sends you the bill and takes the money. This agency places the reservation, checks it against what you asked for, and stays on the file until you are home.

You buy your own flight. Nothing with wings appears on a figure from here, and the transfer named in the price is a road transfer made by a licensed local operator under its own permits.

The three figures on this page hold at seven, twenty one and fifty six nights with two people sharing. That works out at $335 a night for the week, $252 a night for the three weeks and $194 a night for the season, and the reason the nightly figure is not the same at each length is that a room let for eight weeks is not turned over, cleaned and re-let every Saturday. Nobody is doing that work, so it is not in the number.

Costing the exact weeks you pick takes two to four working days, because the operating company answers first and it answers about specific dates rather than about a month in general. Send the weeks you have in mind and how many of you there are to bookings@slowlatitudes.com, or call +1 (225) 766-2418 during the working day in Baton Rouge. If something needs correcting after a stay is confirmed, that goes to corrections@slowlatitudes.com.