Published by Sort Of Books, 1999, 247 pages.

In 1988, Chris Stewart and his wife Ana bought an old, remote farm in Las Alpujarras in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Andalucía. This is the first book in his trilogy about living on their farm, El Valero.

Chris, a former Genesis drummer, doesn’t pretend that living on the farm is easy. El Valero is rundown and takes years to fix. There is no electricity, access road, or running water (the farm’s on the wrong side of the river).

The chickens and quails are eaten by stoats and weasels (“Unfortunately, as I was eating the egg, a stoat or a weasel was eating the chickens”), and the vegetable patch is raided by sheep, who eat everything except the chilies and aubergines. But there are olives, almonds, oranges, and lemons that are so abundant that there is no way to avoid driving over the “fallen yellow orbs”

But while Chris can get a little romantic about the farm and his neighbours, Ana puts things into perspective. She is a no-nonsense woman, who does not suffer fools gladly or the annual ritual of slaughtering pigs. She isn’t taken in by the “helpfulness” of Pedro—from whom they buy the farm—and is eventually proven right.

Neither Chris nor Ana have any experience of farming, but through sheer determination, they make a go of it. It made me feel like giving it all up and moving to Andalucía. To be able to go out on a sultry summer night with a full moon for a swim in a little pool and see the shepherd next door going past with his sheep. To see the orange blossoms in the spring: “exquisite white five-petalled stars” with a “delicate and heady” scent that lasts for months. And to become part of a community that goes back to a simpler way of living in tune with nature—a world away from our hyperactive, hyper-connected lives.

The book is a celebration of the Stewarts’ time at the farm. Chris’s love for the place and his affection for (most of) his neighbours comes through vividly. Funny and moving, the book is a magic carpet that transports you to this uniquely beautiful region in southern Spain. With the Stewarts, you share the seasons, the traditions, the disasters and the triumphs.

A version of this review was posted on the website Women on the Road.

Read my review of the sequel to this book, A Parrot in the Pepper Tree.