(Richard) Common sense says that when you're going on holiday, don't burden yourself with a bag of books.

Pack a tablet instead, it's light and you can read it in the dark.

But I love the feel, the page turning.

Give it a good sniff.

So, I've got a case for clothes and a bag for books.

These books aren't the usual travel guide.

(lively music) Instead, I'm going to be traveling in the company of some of the great writers who've brought the places I'm visiting to life.

This trip, I'm heading to glorious Andalucía in the south of Spain.

♪ From the passionate poetry of flamenco to tales of brutality and civil war.

Stories set in spectacular cities, to accounts of life in rugged landscapes.

The traditions of local food to crime in the Costa del Sol.

This is one of Spain's most stunning regions, immortalized by some of the world's most celebrated writers.

♪ (upbeat Spanish guitar music) ♪ With its rich culture, often inspired by the centuries-old mix of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic religions, it's no surprise that Andalucía has captured the hearts and imagination of such a wide variety of writers, and I'm looking forward to following in their footsteps.

My reading material will be taking me from the city of Granada to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the dramatic town of Ronda to the eastern Alpujarras, the Costa Tropical to the Costa del Sol.

And what better place to start than the city that inspired one of Spain's most acclaimed figures?

♪ I'm in the magnificent ancient city of Granada, and I can think of no better guide than its most famous playwright and poet, Federico Garcia Lorca, who was born just outside the city in the plains known as the Vega.

(cheerful music) Handsome and charismatic, Lorca is an almost mythical figure in Spain today.

He was born into a wealthy family in 1898 and by the late 1920s was already famous for his darkly brilliant poetry and plays like The House of Bernarda Alba and Blood Wedding that highlighted social issues of the day.

But like his friends, artist Salvador Dali and filmmaker Luis Buñuel, Lorca was considered controversial by conservative Catholic Spain.

Gay at a time when homophobia was rife and fascism was on the rise, he could never acknowledge his sexuality and his books were banned until 1953 and censored until 1975.

Lorca's love affair with Granada began when he was 11 and his family moved to the city from the rural village where he was born.

"If, by the grace of God, I become famous..." he once said, "...half of that fame will belong to Granada, which formed me and made me what I am--a poet from birth."

♪ Lorca's Sketches of Spain and Selected Poems really take you to the heart and soul of Granada and encompass its spirit, traditions, and culture and history in a way that no guidebook could ever do in quite the same way.

(solemn string music) ♪ Sketches of Spain was Lorca's first book and was written when he was just 17.

Although prose, it's clear that he was destined to be a poet.

♪ Here's how he describes the Moorish quarter, known as the Albaicin.

"The streets are narrow, dramatic, with stairways infrequent and dilapidated.

Undulating tentacles that twist and turn capriciously and exhaustingly in order to reach little viewpoints from which the vast snowy spines of the mountains are seen.

There are houses placed as if a hurricane wind has whirled them there."

Although Lorca's genius is already apparent in Sketches of Spain, he had struggled at school, preferring instead to roam around the city he'd recently moved to, discovering its ancient secrets.

♪ (Juan Antonio) Coming from a very small village, it was like a--a very important shock, but a shock that came from beauty.

He was astonished when he came up to the Alhambra and saw the palace, so all the Moorish stories that he had read before came to his mind.

♪ (Richard) Today, the great palace of the Alhambra stands as a reminder of the city's Moorish, or Islamic, heritage.

For eight centuries from 711 A.D., Muslims, Jews, and Christians had lived peacefully together under Moorish rule until 1492, when Catholic armies conquered Granada.

♪ (Juan Antonio) The Moors, when the Christians came here, they were sacrificed.

They were even obliged to be baptized, too.

The city became quite a different city, and Lorca was very aware of what had happened in the history of Granada.

He was on the side of the persecuted, and many times he said he was on the side of these people who were Moorish, Jews, Blacks, et cetera.

So, just the people who need to be defended, he was on that side.

(mellow guitar music) ♪ (Richard) Lorca was particularly drawn to Sacromonte, in the east of Granada.

In the 16th century, Jews, Muslims, and Romani people fleeing persecution had arrived in this area, making their homes in caves.

Here, Lorca could immerse himself in the traditional Spanish way of life, later immortalizing what he saw in his Gypsy Ballads, a collection of poems based on Romani culture.

♪ "Oh, city of the gypsies, corners hung with banners, the moon and pumpkins and cherries in preserve.

Oh, city of gypsies, who could see and not remember you?

City of musk and sorrow, city of cinnamon towers.

As the night was coming, the night so nightly night, the gypsies at their forges were shaping suns and arrows."

♪ Lorca described Gypsy Ballads as being a book where the hidden Andalucía trembles, which is so true, and there's something magical about reading the poems in the location where they were written.

From spending time with the gypsies, Lorca learned about their music and felt a deep affinity with flamenco.

For him, it embodied the Spanish concept of duende, a form of passionate expression.

Juan Pinilla is one of Spain's most celebrated flamenco singers and has been inspired by Lorca's poetry.

Please, can you tell me about duende, what that means?

(Juan Pinilla) Yes, though duende is so difficult to translate, because when it arrives, you get beautiful moments between you and people that is listening or singing, you know?

-So it's heightened emotion?

-Yes, of course.

It's emotion, it's transmission, it's a feeling.

(Richard) So, do you feel that this heightened emotion is very apt to Lorca's poetry?

(Juan Pinilla) Of course.

The blood of the literature, the rhythms of the literature of Lorca is flamenco, is duende, is emotion.

(Richard) And have you set music to Lorca's poetry?

(Juan Pinilla) Of course, yes.

And we love Lorca's poetry, and we sing and we dance and we play guitar.

We have always the inspiration of Lorca.

(motorcycle's engine putters) -Can we hear it?

-Of course!

Ah, hey.

(flamenco music) (singing in Spanish) ♪ ♪ ♪ (Richard) Olé, wow.

Hearing Lorca's words set to flamenco music, I've experienced exactly what they're talking about when they say duende.

This Spanish word that is heightened emotion, that is a combination of longing, lust, nostalgia, and the promise of sex and melancholy that's all rolled into that musical experience.

I absolutely loved it.

(orchestral music) ♪ In 1926, when Lorca was 28, his parents moved to this house just on the outskirts of Granada.

Lorca spent much of his time here writing some of his most important works.

But like most of Catholic Spain, his family, particularly his mother, struggled to accept his homosexuality.

♪ His sadness and frustration would fuel many of the poems he wrote in this room.

♪ This is incredibly Spartan decoration in this room.

There's one theater poster, and this bed, clearly, according to his mother, there was no room for two people in here.

It's like the room of a monk.

And he was painting some of his famous paintings and drawings.

And, of course, he was creating in this same desk some of the most beautiful poems he ever wrote.

(somber music) ♪ (Richard) "I'm afraid of being on this shore a branchless trunk, and what I most regret is having no flower, pulp, or clay for the worm of my despair."

Gosh.

♪ During the 1930s, Spanish politics became increasingly polarized.

Tensions intensified between left-wing Republicans and right-wing Nationalists, led by General Franco.

Despite coming from a wealthy family, Lorca supported the left.

"I will always be on the side of those who have nothing," he wrote.

Aware of the danger his outspoken liberal views put him in, friends begged Lorca to stay away from Granada.

But three days before civil war broke out in July 1936, he returned home to visit his family.

♪ (Juan Antonio) Lorca was a very clear socialist.

And besides, he was homosexual.

And besides, he was criticizing all the time.

Although he loved Granada very much, he didn't like the people of Granada, and he criticized very much those people.

So, there were three different reasons, and, all together, condemned him to death.

In the last interview, Lorca said what he thought.

So, he was caught.

Not here, in another house.

But, in three days, he was shot.

(mournful music) ♪ (Richard) In his writing, there's a sense of the premonition of his own death.

(Juan Antonio) Yes, there is a number of poems where he predicts his death.

And there is a very moving poem, two lines only, that says, "If I die, leave the balcony open."

This balcony.

-This one here?

-This one.

♪ (Richard) Lorca was shot by a fascist firing squad on August 18th, 1936, and the quest to find his body continues to this day.

♪ An estimated half a million people lost their lives during the Spanish Civil War, many, like Lorca, left to rot in unmarked graves.

The war continued for nearly three years, from 1936, tearing the country apart.

When Franco's brutal regime came to an end with his death in 1975, Spain adopted a policy of forgetting, so that any mention of the atrocities of the war was discouraged.

♪ It wasn't until 2007 that a law of historical memory was passed that opened discussion of the war and recognition of the country's fascist past, a grim reminder of tragic times.

Lorca's death and the terrible consequences of the war have continued to inspire writers, including the best-selling author Victoria Hislop, whose novel The Return tackles the civil war and its aftermath.

♪ The Return was inspired by a visit to Granada, where Hislop, like me, found herself falling in love with flamenco and with Lorca, both of which are at the heart of her novel.

The narrative leaps between the 21st century and back into the 1930s during the civil war.

And when it was written in 2007, there were still statues and commemorations and evidence of Franco's rule all over the city, which have now since disappeared.

The main character, Sonia, has come to Spain to learn to dance and through a chance meeting is catapulted back into the past.

"Sonia asked the man if he'd ever met Lorca and the waiter told her that he remembered seeing him once or twice.

'Many people here believe that part of this city died with him', he added.

'Forgive me, but I don't really know very much about what happened in your civil war,' she said.

'That's not surprising.

Many people in this country don't know very much about it either.

Most of them have either forgotten or been brought up in a state of near ignorance.'"

(spirited music) If, like Victoria's main character, you're less familiar with the history of the civil war, The Return is a perfect book to accompany you on a visit to Granada.

It's an absorbing story that brings this city's history and traditions to life.

♪ Victoria's fascination with this city leaps from the pages, and having spent time here, I can totally see why.

♪ During the 1960s, the previously insular regime of Franco began to see the economic benefits of tourism, and more of us Brits discovered a passion for Spain, and particularly this region.

Unsurprisingly, some also chose to stay and found themselves inspired to write about their experiences as they lived their dream by starting a whole new life away from home.

♪ About one hour's drive south of Granada, at the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, lies the breathtakingly beautiful region known as the Alpujarras, once one of Spain's poorest and most forgotten spots.

Among the British immigrants to this area was former Genesis drummer Chris Stewart, who, like many foreign writers, came to Spain in search of adventure.

Chris fell in love with the place and recorded his experiences in what would become a phenomenally successful series of books that began with Driving Over Lemons.

It's an entertaining and eye-opening introduction to life in deepest rural Spain.

For Chris, it all started 30 years ago when he bought a dilapidated farmhouse called El Valero.

(vehicle rumbling) It's only taken half an hour to drive a mere five kilometers over an incredibly wobbly track to get here, so flash back 30 years to Chris Stewart's first impressions.

"Georgina," his estate agent, "turned and smiled at me.

'So, what do you think?'

'Well, you know what I think.

I've never seen anything like it.'

'Here's the house.'

'House?

It looks like a whole village.

I can't buy a village.'

In a matter of minutes, I was transformed from an itinerant sheep shearer and tenant of a tied cottage beneath an airport landing path in Sussex into the owner of a mountain farm in Andalucía.

This would take some getting used to."

I can't wait.

(lively music) ♪ The stables, goat pens, and outhouses that made up the original farm have now been converted for a variety of uses.

Chris's guided tour starts with his study.

Perched at the top, away from the main house, from up here, you get a real sense of the remoteness of the farm.

♪ The view down your valley, I mean, it literally looks like it's come out of a Western.

(Chris) It does, doesn't it?

Yeah, yeah.

It's wild country, savage country.

And that's part of the pleasure of it for us, in Europe, to find a place as little-inhabited as this.

To be able to look around and just see mountains and a river, and, well, there's one or two little houses you can see.

(Richard) So, how far is it, Chris, from your house to your neighbor over there?

(Chris) Ah, that?

Well, that's not our nearest neighbor.

That's a feat, that would be half an hour's walk, I suppose.

Our nearest neighbor is over that way, and that would be 20 minutes' walk, I suppose.

-You can hear the sheep bells.

-Yeah, so that's the sheep.

Yeah, there they are, down below.

And what they're doing is hoovering up figs, of course.

What sheep like more than anything in the world is figs, and now there are figs dropping from the trees in profusion.

♪ (Richard) Chris's book is subtitled An Optimist in Andalucía, and it's quickly obvious why he had to be an optimist to survive and thrive in the way he did.

Despite apparently merging into the landscape as naturally as a gecko, there remains something quintessentially British about him.

(Chris) Wow, you sort of forget what you've written.

This happened long ago and I'd forgotten it.

Forgotten the whole episode.

But this is the way life was.

"The man who sells the bus tickets in Orgiva lives in Tavlones and his name is Caetano.

I went once with some friends who spoke no Spanish to buy bus tickets.

Caetano was so abominably rude to them and to me that having seen them off on the bus, which left that minute, I stomped back to have it out with the bastard.

I got very arsey with him and raised my voice and threatened to make an official complaint for all the fat lot of good that that would've done.

Caetano held his ground and then explained to me quietly and reasonably that I had misunderstood him.

He hadn't intended to be rude, it was just that he was stone deaf.

I suppose that's understandable in its way.

If you can't find anybody rude enough to do your information and ticket sales, then the next best thing is someone who's stone deaf."

(Richard laughs) Well, God.

(Richard) When he and Ana first moved here, and before discovering he had a gift for writing, Chris earned his living shearing sheep.

Take me back.

How did you come about from being a sheep-shearing southern Spain, farm-owning man, into a writing a book?

What was the impulse to do that?

(Chris) Well, the images and the experiences that we had were so vivid and so striking and just struck so deep that when I came to write about it, and this is something I'd never done before, right?

I sat down and it was just as if the pen were running away with me and all the ideas poured out of my head, and I loved it.

A friend of mine describes, you know, when the writing really gets to you, it's like-- It's as near to flying as you can get.

And it is, in a wonderful way.

Were you surprised that it was such a success?

Yes, I mean, you would be, wouldn't you?

I mean, it was a great success.

And my publishers said to me, "If we sell 4,000 copies, we'll be really, really pleased," and then it started taking off.

-How many books?

-About two million.

That's a lot of books.

-Wow, That's astonishing!

-I mean, unexpectedly.

Yeah, that was unexpected.

We have other famous people, we had, what's his name?

Rick Stein came for lunch once.

-Oh, did he?

-Yeah.

And Rick Stein, he was sort of on tour, I guess, like you are.

And when he got here, he was absolutely exhausted, poor man.

I mean, we couldn't get any sense out of him at all, really.

(Richard) Or was that just the effect you had on him?

(Chris) Actually, maybe I'm kidding myself.

Perhaps it was me.

(Ana) I'll put this in here.

It'll look better.

I should go and get some parsley leaves to pop on this as dressing... (Richard) Chris and his wife Ana live simply here, growing much of their own produce.

(Chris) The parsley is looking good all of a sudden.

(Ana) Well, it's cause the summer heat's gone.

(Richard) They've cooked up a lunch that looks worthy of Rick Stein himself.

The best way.

-The only way.

-Yes.

So, you've cut yourself adrift from England to come and live here 30 years ago.

Fleeing from Thatcher, fleeing from Thatcher's Britain.

About 30 years ago it was, it was 1988, yeah.

Fleeing from Thatcher land to just post-General Franco land.

(Chris) That's right, it was post-Franco Spain, of course.

We came in '88, so it was, what, 12 years afterwards.

It's going to take the country a long time to recover from a dictatorship.

A dictatorship is a horrible thing.

Not to be recommended under any circumstances, because the cruelty and the viciousness of that regime, the way this country has suffered as a consequence, both during and after for many, many years.

So, what was the impulse that brought you to buy this farm here, which is so remote?

-Well, it was cheap.

-Okay.

(Chris) That's the beauty of it and one of the things that's always appealed to us is that nobody else wanted it.

The guy who was selling it to us was desperate to sell.

He'd had enough.

I mean, they had no running water, they had no electricity.

They had nothing.

None of the-- And that didn't put you off?

No, I thought these were selling points.

I thought this was what was so exciting and so beautiful about it.

And, you know, it was grubby and the goats and the cows and the horses all lived in these various rooms around here, so the flies and the ticks...

I remember a white sheet fell off the line that, you know, had been washed, and it fell on the ground.

Annie picked it up, the white sheet was black with ticks.

And you can imagine what it was like.

Terrifying, just lots and lots of ticks.

(ethereal music) ♪ (Richard) In spite of the lack of creature comforts, Chris describes when they first moved here.

He also conjures up a garden of earthly delights.

"A couple of terraces below the house was to be found one of the miracles of El Valero.

A torrent of water that rushed out from a rock and tumbled into a little pool below.

I sat in the pool and poured bucketful after bucketful over my head and body.

Without needing to put shoes or clothes on, I could take just five paces and pick oranges, mandarins, figs or grapes fresh from the trees.

I cooled them in the waterfall and stuffed myself."

♪ And why do you think it is that your books have appealed to people who would never have the courage or the inclination to come and live in a place that had no running water and no internet or no light bulbs, no electricity?

I think that people do really have a fundamental longing for something a little more elemental.

To live in the mountains, to sleep out...

But yours was really elemental.

I mean, the place where we're sitting here now, you said that none of this existed.

(Chris) No.

No, but, you know, there was a roof--it kept the... A house is a place to keep wild beasts out.

Well, you, being born in Africa, would know about this.

We are beset by wild beasts to a certain extent, but they don't make it into the house.

A lot of wild boar.

We like this lifestyle.

I feel that I've been able to grow more as a human being, to experience life much more richly by sort of having been closer to the elements.

And I think you do get closer to the elements when you're not cocooned in the trivia of everyday worries.

You know, the chrome is going on the bathroom tap.

This sort of thing, it doesn't really matter.

And so we've pared things down to... yeah, a fairly earthy minimum, and I think it makes us happy.

(melodic guitar music) ♪ (Richard) While there's no danger of disturbing the neighbors here by playing the drums, these days, Chris prefers his guitar.

♪ Chris is exactly like I hoped he'd be, full of the warmth, humor, and wisdom that pervade his writing.

And for me, his books really enhance understanding of this little-known corner of Andalucía.

It's like visiting an oasis where two people have been brave enough to step away from all the demands of the 21st century and find something very real.

But it's certainly not for the faint-hearted.

(final guitar strum) (upbeat Spanish music) ♪ A hundred years ago, the great American writer Ernest Hemingway was, like Chris, attracted to the romance of Spain.

About 135 miles west of Chris's remote idyll lies the mountain town of Ronda, one of Spain's most spectacular locations.

Hemingway wrote that "this is where you should go if you ever go to Spain on a honeymoon or if you ever bolt with someone."

He also wrote that this is where you should come to see your first bullfight.

Born in 1899, Hemingway was passionate about Spain, calling it the country he loved more than any other except his own.

And his 40-year love affair with this country provided an inspiration and setting for some of his best-known works.

He first visited Spain when he was 24, at the advice of fellow American writer Gertrude Stein, and was instantly captivated by la corrida, or the bullfight.

More than anything, for Hemingway, the quintessence of Spain was found in the bullring.

On the one hand, an incredible zest for life pitted against the inevitability of death.

(somber music) ♪ Published in 1932, Death in the Afternoon is his non-fiction exploration of the subject.

Even though bullfighting was already being criticized for its inevitable blood and brutality, Hemingway regarded it as emblematic of the culture and art of the country.

While he recognized the objections, he took a very personal view of the rights and wrongs.

"So far about morals..." he wrote, "...I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

And judged by these standards, which I do not defend, the bullfight is very normal to me because I feel very fine while it is going on and have a feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality.

And after it is over, I feel very sad, but also very fine."

♪ The bullring here in Ronda is one of the oldest in Spain, and every year they have a huge festival celebrating one of its most dashing matadors of all time, Pedro Romero, who is immortalized in a portrait by Francisco Goya, painted in 1795.

Romero, who reportedly fought over 5,000 bulls, was the partial inspiration for one of the characters in Hemingway's first major novel, The Sun Also Rises.

He was part of a dynasty that tried to emphasize the artistic expression and courage of the bullfighter, rather than the inevitable cruelty to the bulls.

(Spanish guitar music) (cheering crowd) ♪ (wild applause) ♪ This is the equivalent in bullrings of standing Centre Court at Wimbledon.

♪ I want to do my best to understand what lies behind Hemingway's words, but as someone with a visceral revulsion to cruelty of any kind, I find being asked to put myself into the role of a matador especially difficult.

So, keeping well away from any bulls or horses, I've asked local bullfighter Carlos Molina Gil, known as El Moli, to show me a couple of moves.

♪ The feeling of doing this is a combination of being balletic and athletic at the same time.

And I can see in the young bullfighter an incredible finesse and... gentleness in the way that he moves, and yet he is entirely focused on killing a bull.

And my father took me to see a bullfight in 1969 when I was 12 years old, and it left an indelible impression, because seeing the picadors, who are the men on horses with armor around them with big javelin-like instruments and stabbing the bull in the neck to disable it and weaken it.

If you're not brought up in the culture of bullfighting, it is-- seems barbaric and very cruel, but that's the tradition and culture of bullfighting in Spain, so who am I to make a judgment about that?

(mournful music) For Hemingway, the bullring remained the perfect arena to explore the themes of death, bravery, and risk-taking that were so central to his writing.

"Bullfighting," he wrote, "is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter's honor."

Along with bullfighting, the theme of conflict was another area which gave Hemingway the opportunity to explore the Spanish character and way of life.

It's thought that when the civil war broke out in 1936, some 35,000 foreign volunteers joined the fight against fascism.

Some of them were writers, like George Orwell and W.H.

Auden, attracted to what was essentially a war of ideologies rather than one fought over territory.

In 1937, Hemingway accepted an assignment to report on the war for an American newspaper.

♪ He made little attempt in his journalism to disguise his support for the Republican cause, and his experiences provided the material for perhaps his best-known novel, For Whom The Bell Tolls.

♪ The novel vividly describes the ruthlessness of both sides in a struggle which ripped the heart out of the nation.

An incident here, in this spot in Ronda, is said to have inspired Hemingway's description of a brutal massacre, in this case, by the Republicans.

♪ "Pablo had them beaten to death with flails and thrown from the top of the cliff into the river.

And in my life, never do I wish to see such a scene as the flailing to death in the plaza on the top of the cliff above the river."

(distant rush of water) (serene guitar music) ♪ According to this, "Hemingway aspired to write like a matador in Ronda.

Sober, limited repertory, simple, classical, and tragic."

When I look at that statue, I see a man who is bearded and square-jawed, who looks very powerful and masculine, but his writing belies a real poetic soul and care about the world that is at odds with his obvious machismo image.

(lively orchestral music) ♪ Seeing Andalucía through the eyes of Lorca and Hemingway has really deepened my understanding of this area's complex past.

What's fascinating is that its rich traditions and troubled history even permeate the local food, said to be some of the best in Spain.

After the Moors were expelled from Granada in 1492, they fled to the Alpujarras, which remained their last stronghold for a further 70 years.

Their legacy is still very evident in the area's cooking, which continues to inspire food writers.

♪ The village of Mairena, one of the typical pueblos blancos, or white villages, characteristic of this area, lies about 175 miles east of Ronda in the eastern Alpujarras.

British couple David and Emma Illsley moved here 20 years ago to set up a guest house and restaurant and have written a delicious book.

It's called Las Chimeneas: Recipes and Stories from an Alpujarran Village.

♪ "The lure of the Alpujarras," they write, "exerts a semi-legendary pull.

It's a romantic, whimsical place whose name bears with it a whiff of nostalgia and tradition.

In our case, though, the allure wasn't just led by whimsy and definitely not by nostalgia, but rather by the beauty of the landscape and the sheer honesty of the food."

Reading Emma and David's book, you soon realize the key to understanding local cuisine is an appreciation of the mouth-watering produce that grows so abundantly here.

Emma made me an offer I can't refuse: to accompany her on a foraging trip.

So, Scott Fitzgerald said that there are no second acts in life, and yet, you and David, your husband, have done what so many people dream of doing.

You leave one life and start another one in another country.

-Yes.

-So, what drew you here?

Obviously, food.

(Emma) Well, yeah, there's definitely the pull of the Alpujarras, this kind of wild landscape, the outdoor living, and then the longer we've been here, the more we've become really attracted by the kind of way of life and the community, and, yeah, the fact that you can just pick almonds off a tree.

And it's not just almonds.

I mean, everywhere you look.

Here's a pomegranate ready.

It's actually a bit early.

Normally I think of pomegranates as November.

But, look, they just start to crack.

And you have to get it before the birds get them, so you really have to...

So, look, beautiful pomegranate.

Yeah, it's a bit pink.

I would...

It'll probably be nice in a few weeks, but give it a go.

(Richard) Wow, thank you.

(Emma) And then pomegranates are often squeezed for breakfast.

The top thing, three oranges and a pomegranate squeezed, and that's your breakfast juice.

(Richard) Fruit of the gods, absolutely delicious.

(Emma) And, of course, they originally, pomegranates, the almonds, and in fact a lot of things that people think is Spanish, like the oranges, originally, they came across... it's the Moorish influence.

And then that's why the diversity of the food came about, by the Moors bringing it.

And it's very much linked with a sense of community, because here, the watering, we just walked over these channels, which is the old-- it came from the Moors.

But in order for these channels to work, and the watering, the community, the village, has to work.

It's actually called the community of waterers.

We had our turn this morning and then straight after, it's someone else's turn.

It's very much literally the lifeblood of the village, the water.

September is the time for almonds, so they're perfect now.

Really milky, creamy.

In fact, tonight, we're going to cook almond gazpacho.

So, basically, a cold almond soup for dinner tonight.

I'm very greedy.

I hope you've got a lot.

(Emma) Yeah, no, we've got plenty here.

(Richard) After you.

(footsteps crunching) (gentle guitar music) "September," write Emma and David, "the vines, wrinkled with antiquity, run amok along the terrace walls and over trees.

And beneath broad, pale leaves hide unknown pockets of perfect, glistening grapes.

And what you might think is a patch of shade beneath the fig tree is in fact a carpet of fruit.

In small kitchens, the stoves are jingling with glass jars ready to stock the larders with lines of preserves and jams."

♪ What I love is that you, as foreigners living here, albeit now for 20 years and speaking the language fluently, that you have a created a book celebrating the absolute traditional recipes of this corner of Spain.

(Emma) Yeah, 'cause we wanted to preserve the recipes, but more importantly, we wanted to preserve some of the traditions that we'd watched.

You know, talk about the fiestas and the local food that's connected with the fiestas.

(Richard) Do figs feature in the recipe book?

(Emma) Yeah, people dry them.

Most of the traditions here are to do with living well through the winter, so you dry things.

You dry your tomatoes, you dry your peppers, and you dry your figs, and then you have something delicious.

Their favorite thing they do with these is... they're called cohetes.

It means a comet, I don't know why.

But what they do with a dried fig, you place an almond in the middle, but then what we do, which maybe we'll try and do those tonight for part of dinner, couldn't be simpler.

A perfect sweet fig, fresh almond inside, maybe toasted, and then dip it in dark chocolate.

I don't know if there's a gentlemanly or dainty way to eat this fig, but... (growls) (elegant orchestral music) ♪ As you can see, I'm in my element here and couldn't agree more with Emma and David's lyrical description of foraging.

A pursuit that never fails to gladden the spirits.

Delumptiously delicious.

Traipsing along, eyes wide for plunder, there's an instinctive gleefulness and naturalness that is hard to beat.

Somehow it breathes life into the embers of the latent hunter-gatherer that sleeps within.

Well, not so latent, in my case.

-Emma, what is this?

-Ah, lovely.

That's fresh fennel.

-Can I pick some?

-Yeah.

It's not really the season but, look, taste a little bit.

Strong aniseed flavor.

And the women here come and collect it.

It's actually an April dish.

We make a traditional pork and bean and fennel stew for one of our fiestas.

And then it's eaten as a communal meal, often 300 or 400 people at a time.

-This is so good.

-Yeah, yeah.

So the way of life here is all around food, producing food, making food, enjoying food.

-What could be better?

-What could be better?

Lead me to the table, please.

(sprightly orchestral music) ♪ Sole and Conchi, the two cooks whose recipes and way of life feature extensively in Emma and David's book, are sisters-in-law who have spent their lives in this area, cooking the food passed down through generations.

♪ So, what are we having?

(Emma) This is possibly one of the most traditional dishes here.

It's rabbit with sun-dried peppers and lots of garlic.

And the reason it's most traditional is because everybody had rabbits.

Everybody, under their houses, had their stables, and then, apart from your donkey and your pig and your chickens, you're also going to have rabbits.

So, Sole and Conchi would have grown up having eaten rabbit.

Mucho...Come mucho conejo?

-So, Bugs Bunny all their lives?

-Yeah.

And it's the perfect slow food.

It needs to simmer like this for at least an hour so all the flavors of the peppers are all leached out.

And Conchi is busy making patatas a la pobre.

This is super traditional Alpujarran food.

It literally translates as poor man's potatoes.

And it's because you always had that.

And what you do, possibly, is just fry an egg with it, so everybody has eggs, everyone has potatoes, and everyone has loads of olive oil.

(women speak Spanish) So, she...

So she's explaining that mainly after the civil war, when there was real kind of hardship, it was something that everyone had, and so, it's a kind of standard dish.

♪ (speaking Spanish and chuckling) (Richard) David and Emma Illsley have done that thing that so many people dream of doing in the second half of their lives: leaving their home country, everything that they know, and making a complete new life.

So, I am so admiring of them.

They're living a kind of idyll that, you know, I think many people dream of when you're sitting in England and it's pouring rain in the middle of March.

You could be in... Alpusharra...Alpujarra.

Yeah, my Spanish, so I'll never manage it.

Delicios, thank you.

How do I say it, delicious?

-Delicioso.

-Delicioso.

♪ People like David and Emma and Chris Stewart are only among the most recent to succumb to the lure of Spain.

In 1934, the writer Laurie Lee, like Hemingway, began a lifelong love affair with this country.

Lee set out from a small village in Gloucestershire, hungry for experience and keen to escape the narrow confines of English rural life.

His great walk across Spain ended in the seaside port of Almuñécar, which lies about an hour-and-a-half drive south from the hills of the Alpujarras, on what's known as the Costa Tropical.

♪ Lee began his extraordinary journey on foot, leaving Stroud in the southwest of England, and ended up here in Almuñécar.

And his journey is recorded in one of the best-loved travel books in English, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning.

So, "It was 1934, I was 19 years old, still soft at the edges with a confident belief in good fortune.

I carried a small rolled-up tent, a violin in a blanket, a change of clothes, a tin of treacle biscuits, and some cheese.

I was propelled, of course, by the traditional forces that had seen many generations along this road.

By the small, tight valley closing in around, stifling the breath with its mossy mouth.

The cottage walls narrowing like the arms of an iron maiden.

The local girls whispering, 'Marry and settle down.'"

Having grown up in a tiny provincial town in the smallest country in Africa, I absolutely identify with this desire that you have at that age to get out and discover yourself and the world.

No better guide than Laurie Lee.

(Spanish guitar music) As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning is wonderfully evocative and lyrical.

As Lee sets off from Vigo in the north of Spain with just enough Spanish to order a glass of water, he brings to life brilliantly the characters he meets, the changing landscape, and the intense, relentless heat.

"The sun struck upwards, sideways and down, while the wheat went buckling across the fields like a solid sheet of copper.

I kept on walking because there was no shade to hide in and because it seemed to be the only way to agitate the air around me."

(serene music) ♪ At the end of his epic journey, from the Slad Valley, ending up in southern Spain, its completely opposite climate, he took out his trusty violin every night and busked until he could afford to pay for a bed.

And one of the magic elements of being an actor is that you have this privilege of stepping into somebody else's shoes and living their life, however briefly.

So, to be here, where he ended his journey, albeit using a mouth organ, is a great privilege.

(bright harmonica music) ♪ Well, my absence of mouth organ talent has given me two euros for the night.

I think a flea-ridden pillow will be my reward for that.

(sea birds squawking) With little money to live on himself, Lee was only too aware of the poverty he saw around him in Almuñécar.

With a microclimate perfect for growing sugar cane and a thriving fishing industry, the town had once prospered, but like most of Andalucía, the gulf between rich and poor had grown increasingly large.

(water lapping faintly) Although now Almuñécar is a thriving tourist resort, back in the 1930s, Lee described a very different picture.

(gentle music) "Apart from a few merchants, landowners, and officials from Granada, everybody now in the village was poor.

The peasants had only two ways of living and both were loaded against them.

The sugar cane and the offshore fishing.

The strip of gray sand dividing the land from the sea was a frontier between two kinds of poverty.

The sugar canes in the delta, rustling dryly in the wind, were a deception even in harvest time.

The best they could offer was a few weeks' work and, in the meantime, the men stood idle.

But the land was rich compared with the sea, too desperately fished to provide anything but constant reproaches."

♪ It's extraordinary that at the age of 19, he had just incredibly clear perception of what the social milieu was and had great empathy for it.

♪ During Lee's time in Almuñécar, he witnessed a brief moment of revolutionary hope when a socialist government promised a better future for the poor.

But it was short lived and it wasn't long before Franco's tanks rolled in.

Lee's book ends when he's picked up by a British warship on the eve of civil war.

But, like other writers, he returned a year later to join the Republicans in fighting against fascism.

♪ Lee referred to Almuñécar as Castillo in his books to protect its inhabitants.

In recognition, in 1998, the town erected a monument in his honor.

Today, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning is seen here as far more than just an enjoyable travelogue.

(translator) It has been very important, because I think it was the first account of the Republic and the civil war directly from a person who lived through it in Almuñécar.

In this area, there was strong repression.

Near here, there was a place where the thing is, people who were in the resistance against Franco were imprisoned and tortured and subsequently executed by firing squad.

And the people who were interested in knowing what had happened could know what happened in Almuñécar precisely thanks to Laurie Lee.

♪ (Richard) The Almuñécar described in As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning is virtually unrecognizable today.

But Laurie Lee's account is a poignant reminder of this city's turbulent past and was particularly valuable, given that it was published at a time when Spanish authors were still unable to write about the war.

(upbeat music) ♪ It wasn't until Franco's government began to embrace tourism that the fortunes of this area changed.

♪ Nowhere more so than the stretch of coastline to the west of Malaga known as the Costa del Sol.

♪ As cheap package holidays brought the dream of an affordable foreign holiday to more people during the 1960s, sun-starved Brits flocked to the coast in droves.

♪ Of the 300,000 or so British expats living in Spain today, the majority have settled here.

Manicured, pedicured, and landscaped to within an inch of its life, both the environment and the people, and everywhere you go, there are adverts for plastic surgery, aesthetic dentistry, implants.

And when the English author J.G.

Ballard came here in the latter half of the 20th century, he fell in love with Marbella and came regularly with his family, and watched it develop from a collection of tiny fishing villages into what he described as a linear beach city entirely devoted to leisure.

Born in 1930, Ballard had won acclaim with novels like Empire of the Sun, based on his experiences growing up in a Japanese prisoner of war camp near Shanghai.

He'd also gained notoriety with books like Crash!, a shocking blend of violence and eroticism.

J.G.

Ballard's Cocaine Nights was published in 1996, and it's an unconventional thriller set in the fictional town of Estrella Del Mar, very obviously based on Marbella, in which Charles Prentice, a journalist, the lead character, is summonsed here because his brother has been accused of killing several people in a fire.

"I noted the features of this silent world.

The memory-erasing white architecture, the enforced leisure that fossilized the nervous system, the almost Africanized aspect, but a North Africa invented by someone who had never visited the Maghreb.

The apparent absence of any social structure, the timelessness of a world beyond boredom with no past, no future, and a diminishing present.

Perhaps this was what a leisure-dominated future would resemble.

Nothing could ever happen in this affectless realm, where entropic drift calmed the surfaces of a thousand swimming pools and construction noise is ever present in your multi-millionaire domain."

♪ During Ballard's time here, he also witnessed the increasing number of gated communities, vividly describing them as places where people were locking their doors and switching off their nervous systems.

Perhaps as a result of his own experiences in the prisoner of war camp, Ballard seemed to have a recurring fascination with these kinds of communities.

He returned to the subject in many of his novels, highlighting the dangers of an existence cut off from reality, one where the perfect life looks increasingly like a living death.

In Cocaine Nights, the residents of Estrella del Mar solve the problems of terminal boredom by injecting a bit of excitement into their lives in the form of crime.

As their criminal activities grow, they come back to life playing tennis, racing boats, and staging revivals of Harold Pinter plays.

Their ringleader is the local tennis coach, who's on a messianic mission not just to improve topspin and backhands.

♪ He travels from place to place along the coast with his tennis racket and his message of hope, but his vision is as "toxic as snake venom," muses one character.

Crawford is like L-Dopa.

Cataleptic patients wake up and begin to dance.

They laugh, cry, speak, and seem to recover their real selves.

But the dosage must be increased to the point where it will kill.

We know what medicine Crawford prescribes.

This is a social economy based on drug dealing, theft, pornography, and escort services.

"From top to bottom, a condominium of crime."

(spacey music) ♪ Cocaine Nights is a brilliant book to bring if you come on holiday to Marbella.

It's a disturbing, insightful, and gripping thriller that throws a subversive spin on life here.

♪ I can't see myself getting bored here in Marbella.

But if I do, I'll try not to turn to a life of crime to sharpen up my senses.

(waves crashing) Here on the Costa del Sol, there's much to enjoy.

But it can be easy to lose sight of the real Spain.

The duende, the Spain that Lorca captured so brilliantly in his tragically short life.

(lively music) As I've discovered, though, you don't have to go far to find the country that Hemingway and Laurie Lee fell in love with and fought so passionately for, and that contemporary writers like Victoria Hislop and Chris Stewart remain entranced by.

The books that have kept me company on this trip have not only brought to life the experiences of the authors but have also increased my appreciation of the complex history, rich traditions, and unique flavors that define Andalucía.

(Spanish guitar music) (male singer singing in Spanish) ♪ (bright music)