Sacromonte

Music and Poverty

Grant Katz

July 17, 2024

Belle and I had been on our feet for hours. Steep slopes of cobbled stone had only led us to more of the same, until we landed upon a plaza overlooking the main of the city, and the golden Moorish palace in the trees beyond. Granada was small, so small that I had planned only one day for us there. As such, I wanted to take in as much of it as I could. 

The sun was slowly making its red descent, and tourists had begun to gather in the plaza to witness its fall. This viewpoint, in Spanish known as the Mirador de San Nicolás, was a famed gathering place for those wishing to look from above upon the grand Alhambra palace, and see how the sun made it shimmer as it set. It was beautiful, like everyone said. Over a sea of cypress trees that cascaded down a tall cliffside, the 13th century Islamic fortress stood proud, strong yet regal in its architecture. Behind it the Sierra Leone mountain range lined the cloud-streaked sky, each peak capped with white summer snow.

We had just come from that very palace, where we attended a three-hour tour of its ornate halls and lush flower gardens. Not a soul lived in its chambers any longer, neither prince nor pauper, except for those with means enough to rent the guest homes that offered themselves on the palace perimeters. It was all tour groups there, their eyes consuming as if it were a museum the winding paths where sultans had once roamed, and royal children played, and Spanish soldiers invaded. Our guide recommended we make the climb to the Mirador, and others must have been told the same, as a cacophony of English voices greeted us as we made our way to the outlooking parapet of the square. Peddlers, exhausted after a day in the sun, were either selling off their last wares or packing up for the following morning. A few Spaniards in straw fedoras beat on their guitars for audiences of picture-taking travelers. I, knowing I was too early for the sunset, resisted the urge to stay and find a spot before the rest of the crowds arrived. After a quick look at the view before us, and knowing we’d return later, we went down a side street to another recommended Granada sight, the cliffside neighborhood of Sacromonte.

As we went along, the well-cobbled stone we had been treading on, along with the clean and well-funded apartment homes beside us, began to subside for something more decayed. Everything maintained and ordered made way for what our tour guide had called the Gypsy Quarter, the two formal streets and undeveloped hilltop known officially as Sacromonte. Sparse and unmaintained, the obvious lack of security in the quarter frightened Belle, and I became more apprehensive of what we had come onto. Instead of commercial-Granada’s happy faces at perfume-store desks, here were dilapidated coves from which dark and suspicious eyes looked out upon us. Grown men in tattered clothes shambled into sight from corners covered with overgrowth. Gloomy children sat holding plastic wrappers in the dirt. At the entrance to a pawn shop an old woman begged in broken English for our patronage. It was unclean and improper, not the Spain out of travel brochures where we had been vacationing until then.

This ghetto is old. Its origin and colloquial name derive from its first and continued inhabitants, the Roma, who migrated to the southern Spanish City in the late 15th century. The Roma, poor as they were, built their homes not of wood or of stone but out of the very land they had found themselves on. Strewn across their steep domain are thousands of caves dug into the earth of the hillside, some of them penetrating deep enough into the surface to host whole families. Amazingly, many people still eat, sleep, and breathe in these caves today, living their entire lives out of holes in the ground, as if they were still in prehistoric times. Some of the more industrious of these cave-dwellers have converted their homes into restaurants or bars, inviting tourists for exotic experiences underground, but many live simply, poverty-stricken and unaffiliated with the rest of the world. We climbed up dingy wooden staircases past these caves, their exteriors roughly-hewn and whitewashed as per government mandates, and as we rose we caught glimpses of the dark worlds inside. We saw meals being cooked, children at play, a dog being trained. We saw a man cleaning mud off his boots, a woman gathering dirtied clothes, a couple sat under a woven blanket. We saw life in all of its unadulterated simplicity, on the very precipice of a major modern travel destination.

Sacromonte, if it is known for anything besides its caves, is famous for its music. Twirling ladies in red and black, propelled by the rhythm of their tapping heels, perform every evening for those in search of authentic flamenco, and hearing the distant percussion of the dance, I hurried us toward it. In a dimly lit cave, its walls hung with vibrant tapestries and ornamental, gold-lacquered plates, two long rows of chairs parted to make a walkway for the dancers. We sat down, and just as we did, an austere older woman, her features dark as the cave itself, noiselessly approached the center of the walkway. She stood still and poised, and the tassels falling from her skirts by some magic stayed the same way, but all at once, as a short man with a small guitar began to play, the tassels sprung up, and the woman’s limbs burst into life with the music. It was wild, yet it was controlled. She moved as fluid as a shadow does, obstructed by nothing and aided by the air. At a point it began to seem as if the music did not come at all from the guitar, nor the singing man, but from the very movement of her body. At her final stomp, and subsequent resuming of her strict posture, I could almost hear the previous three minutes echoing between the cave walls. Sacromonte, as tradition has it, is the birthplace of flamenco dance, what has become one of the icons of Spanish heritage, but it still lives in the caves of the Roma.

Belle and I left the cave, and the sun had set without us. I was sure, though, that its fall had been just as beautiful of a sight from this cliff as it had been from the plaza, and that it must have shone with equal warmth on the modern life of the city, and on the well-kempt walls of the tourist-filled fortress, and on the people who lived their lives away from the world’s eyes in Sacromonte.