The Place an Hour From Granada Where People Have Lived Underground for Centuries - and Wouldn't Trade It for Anything

Less than an hour from Granada, in a land that looks as if it was lifted from another planet, people have lived underground for centuries - and wouldn't trade that home for anything. The area around Guadix is the heart of the largest inhabited cave complex in Europe: over 15,000 inhabited caves, more than 2,000 of them in Guadix itself.

The landscape formed millions of years ago, when this was the bottom of an ancient sea. Trapped among mountains and filled with sediment over five million years, the ground was then carved out by rivers - creating a dramatic land in grey, reddish, and ochre tones, with gorges and ridges like something from another world. The first documented cave dwellings appeared toward the end of the 10th century, after the collapse of the Caliphate of Córdoba, with defensive levels built using techniques brought by Berber tribes from the Atlas.

What makes these homes more than a tourist attraction today is simple physics. The clay keeps an interior temperature of 18 to 20 degrees year-round - cool in summer, warm in winter, with no electricity bill. The caves are earthquake-resistant, ecologically sustainable, and cheaper than an ordinary house. At „Las Cuevas de Cabila" in Benalúa, you sleep among hand-carved walls, with built-in stone furniture, a fireplace, and a view toward the Sierra Nevada.

The surroundings are just as incredible as the accommodation. The „End of the World" viewpoints near Beas and Marchal, „Cárcavas de Marchal" with its petrified landscape, Guadix with its cathedral where Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque overlap, an 11th-century alcazaba, and the remains of a Roman amphitheater. And in the Gorafe desert, „Los Coloraos" guards over 200 dolmens - the largest concentration in Europe.

The gastronomy tells the same story of a hard but generous land: almonds and peaches, butter cheeses, cheese, wood-fired bread, roast kid goat, and „Tintilla de Granada" wines from vineyards at 1,300 meters of altitude. Emilio, a native of this region, says what no tourist brochure can: „Whoever tries to live in a cave won't trade it for anything." Maybe because underground, far from the noise, you finally listen to the silence.