Cartajima

The village that maps forgot

Cartajima sits at 846 metres above sea level, halfway between Ronda and the Mediterranean, yet it appears on so few road signs that drivers often overshoot the turning. The MA-525 wriggles south from the A-397 for twelve kilometres of corkscrew bends until the tarmac narrows and the valley floor drops away. Suddenly the village materialises: a stack of white cubes clinging to a limestone ridge, with only chestnut trees and circling griffon vultures for company.

Two hundred and thirty-two residents remain. Their nearest supermarket is a forty-minute drive, their nearest doctor appears once a week, and the only place to buy bread is the bar that unlocks its doors when the owner feels like it. This is not the Costa del Sol. It is, depending on your mood, either the middle of nowhere or the centre of everything that matters.

Walking through copper and charcoal

The Genal Valley folds and refolds itself like crumpled tissue paper. Cartajima perches on the northern rim, looking across to Pujerra and Igualeja. A lattice of old mule tracks links the seven white villages, way-marked now but still empty. Spring brings wild orchids and the smell of wet fern; October turns the chestnut woods the colour of old pennies. Los Castaños, the village’s six-room hotel, will lend you walking notes and a packed lunch, then collect you if the gradient beats you. The standard circuit east to Parauta takes three hours, drops 400 metres to the river, and climbs back through terraces abandoned when wheat stopped paying. Boot soles come back dyed ochre; thighs remember the ascent for days.

Evening walks require less commitment. Follow the concrete lane past the last house and the gradient eases onto a firebreak sliced through the forest. Ten minutes brings you to a limestone outcrop where the valley floors itself 500 metres below and eagles ride thermals at eye level. The sun sinks behind Sierra Bermeja and the temperature drops ten degrees in as many minutes. At this altitude, midsummer nights demand a fleece; January can bring a dusting of snow that melts before lunchtime.

What passes for a high street

Cartajima has no plaza mayor, no souvenir stalls, no guided tours. What it does have is a church tower you can use as a compass and a handful of streets so steep they turn into staircases. The Iglesia de San Pedro, begun in the sixteenth century, stands locked except for Saturday evening mass, but the verger will open up if you ask in the bar. Inside, the air smells of beeswax and extinguished candles; a tiny Renaissance retablo glimmers with gold leaf that somebody once risked their life to hide from Napoleonic troops.

Below the church, Calle Real is barely two metres wide. House fronts are lime-washed annually, regulations stipulating the exact shade of white. Look closer and you’ll see charcoal-filled scorch marks where the 1970 chestnut-roasting fire leapt from chimney to chimney, stopped only when the wind changed. Residents will tell you the story without being asked, proud of a disaster averted by luck rather than planning.

The single shop stocks tinned tuna, tinned tomatoes, tinned peaches and little else. Bread arrives from Ronda at noon; if the van breaks down, there isn’t any. Locals have long since learned to keep freezers full and gardens planted with beans, peppers and the tough, dark-leafed cabbage that flavours winter stews. Visitors should follow suit: fill the hire-car boot before leaving the coast.

Food that remembers the woods

Cartajima’s cuisine tastes of altitude and forest. Chestnuts appear in everything from October to March: roasted over open fires and sold in paper cones, stewed with pork shoulder, or mashed into a sweet purée that tastes like Christmas pudding without the brandy butter. The hotel serves a chestnut-flour brownie that has reduced grown cyclists to tears of nostalgia for their Kentish childhoods.

Game appears when the hunting season allows: wild boar stewed with bay leaves and a splash of locally made aguardiente, rabbit braised in honey and thyme. Even the humblest tapa arrives with a back-story – the goat cheese comes from a man who keeps thirty animals in a field you passed on the walk in, the chorizo hangs for six weeks in a cellar that once doubled as a Civil War hideout. Vegetarians survive on gazpacho so thick it counts as salad, and on fried aubergine chips that arrive at the table crackling hot, ready to be drizzled with cane honey.

Drink choices are simpler: red wine from Ronda’s newish bodegas or ice-cold beer served in thin glasses that frost instantly. The village’s one cocktail – a gin and tonic mixed on Los Castaños’ roof terrace – uses local botanicals and measures the gin with a generosity that explains why guests rarely make it past chapter three of their holiday novels.

When the valley parties

August’s feria turns Cartajima into something resembling a real town. Fairground rides occupy the tiny football pitch, a sound system arrives on the back of a tractor, and the population quadruples as emigrants return from Barcelona and Madrid. Music thumps until dawn; teenagers flirt between parked mopeds; grandmothers preside over trestle tables loaded with potato salad and paper plates of jamón. Visitors are handed a glass and adopted on the spot. The next morning, silence returns like a tide and the only evidence is shredded bunting flapping from the chestnut branches.

New Year’s Eve is quieter: everyone squeezes into the plaza, clutching twelve grapes and a bottle of cava. Midnight arrives without fireworks, without countdown clocks, carried instead on church bells and spontaneous hugs. Temperatures hover just above freezing; breath clouds mingle in the lamplight. At five past twelve the village empties again, doors closing against the mountain chill. By one o’clock Cartajima looks as if it has slept for centuries.

Getting there – and knowing when to turn back

You need a car. Public buses stopped running in 2011; the nearest railway station is forty-five kilometres away in Ronda. From Málaga airport, take the A-357 towards Campillos, pick up the A-397 to Ronda, then swing south on the MA-525. The final twelve kilometres are perfectly asphalted but single-track, with passing places carved into the rock. Meet a delivery lorry on the tightest bend and someone has to reverse fifty metres; locals always volunteer the visitor.

Spring and autumn reward the effort: days warm enough to walk, nights cold enough to justify log fires. Summer brings fierce sun tempered by altitude; you can breakfast outside at eight and still need sleeves by nine. Winter is gorgeous but unpredictable – snow can block the road for a day, electricity fails when the wind brings down a pine, and the hotel sometimes closes for a quiet month to repaint and repair.

Cartajima will not suit everyone. Mobile signal vanishes inside stone walls, the church bell chimes every quarter-hour through the night, and the only nightlife is whichever elderly men are arguing over dominoes in the bar. Yet if you measure holiday success by the number of times you check your watch, stay on the coast. If you prefer silence broken only by goat bells and the smell of woodsmoke drifting through chestnut leaves, set the sat-nav for the village that forgot the twenty-first century – and arrive before it remembers.