Art in La Alpujarra

Christopher Hoare: The Quiet Magician

The romantic is such a forgotten figure, so unmodern, that it is hard to find a surviving specimen of the species. But here, up in the clouds in a corner of Spain, unnoticed by fame and fortune, Christopher Hoare has been making the survival of art and an art of survival his business for the past thirty years.


To find him one has to venture to the Sierra Nevada mountains of Granada, where eagles soar and wild boar bulldoze the scrub, where the Poqueira river thunders in the gorge way below and a small, proud village stands out in the high reaches.

Capileira in the old Moorish kingdom of La Alpujarra is the
second highest village in Spain and one of the most captivating.

 To enter the maze of streets of ancient dwellings, built topsy-turvy down the slopes of the ravine, is to wander into
a dream.
                         

In his book  "The Most Beautiful Villages of Spain," Hugh Palmer singles out Capileira for the enchanting Berber architecture of its labyrinthine streets, set spectacularly high and alone against the often snowy backdrop of the Sierra.

Christopher Hoare and his American wife, Jackie, came to La Alpujarra in 1976. It was easy enough to get by on precious little, and little was what they had: and so they stayed. This was decades before the Andalusian mountain area was discovered by people fleeing England, “driving over lemons” to holiday or settle in a peaceful, sun-blessed corner of Europe.

The Alpujarra of the 70s was one of Spain’s poorest and most forgotten spots. Mains electricity had only arrived there in 1957 and people got by as they traditionally had, on subsistence farming and livestock. Even today, families grow their own vegetables and make their own wine; they sacrifice pigs fed on scraps and turn them into sausage and ham to last out the year.

Rural tourism in the 1990s brought a boom to an area that now has good facilities to offer to the visitor, yet many houses remain as austere and unadorned as the Hoare home and studio, integrated into a similarly simple lifestyle that they have somehow made sustainable.

Chris and his wife, Jackie, talk here about their early life in a remote corner of Spain, and we consider the art of an unassuming magician.





Life in La Alpujarra

Jackie Hoare: It was 1976. We were living in Yorkshire, in the middle of nowhere down the Pennine Way. We were with a bunch of people doing leather work. A contact doing the same work in Bubión knew of Chris, and that he was learning flamenco guitar, so suggested he come out to work and play flamenco in the land of its birth. I said "yes" because I didn’t want to spend another winter in Yorkshire.

Christopher Hoare: So they invited us to spend the winter in Bubión. When we arrived, of the five people running the workshop, there was nobody there. We had 1,000 pesetas [6 euros]. The Love family put us up. We went to the old Mesón Poqueira [2 km up the road in Capileira, over the road from the not much newer building still serving meals and drinks there today] for a lunch of egg and chips and blew the 1,000 pesetas. After which we started working for the leather workshop. In return, we had everything paid for — but no money. We put in long hours. It was Gurdjieffian, idealistic, New Age, egoistic... But we were well taken care of. We made some quality stuff and went round the bars with our bags, leaving them there and going
back to pick up the sales money.

JH Trevélez was always good.

CH We were also getting orders from Granada. Packing the merchandise into boxes and sending it off on the Alsina bus. Hand-thonged, tooled leather bags. The Alsina brought everything in like a stagecoach. It would dump the mail on the steps of the Teide. We used it for our leather supplies. The Teide had the first black-and-white TV and the men would go in and watch while the women stood outside with the children looking in through the window. In the Alpujarra in the 70s, the streets were still made of clay, earth. There were two or three cars, one was the doctor’s. A newcomer stood out a lot. People would peer out of their window at you. They’d pull their children in off the streets and close the door. It sounds like something out of a story, but it was a bit like that.

JH We learned a lot. We worked hard, played hard, went to all the fiestas.

CH It was a small commune type of a company. We shared meals and a TV together in the same house, watching Tip y Col [a kind of Spanish Morecambe and Wise]. Not that we understood them. After 30 years we still don’t get the jokes.

JH Circumstances meant that we were poor as church mice and we could live here on very little. We appreciate the support that people have given us since we’ve been here. We’re not free beings. We can’t just decide, oh, I’d like to go live there for a while because we don’t have the means.

CH Painting took over for me around 1990, when we had already come to Capileira. I paint what’s around me and I’m very lucky because so much around me is beautiful. But I might pick up an image from the TV or a magazine that’s totally unrelated, but which sparks off an idea. For me La Alpujarra is a place you can still have peace and tranquillity, but everything you need is close to hand. Capileira, especially, is still a community. The mountains are majestic and they show you many faces, I never tire of looking at them. And mountain weather has a flavour no other weather has.

JH People live longer here. I’ve met women 15 years older than me who look younger. For me the alpujarreños are special.

CH I live in La Alpujarra because I like the lifestyle and the people and the place and because I can live here. I use images that I see daily around me. I’d be an artist if I was elsewhere, but I feel quite happy in the mountains. We’re here by circumstance, but if we could leave now, we wouldn’t.




The Artist of La Alpujarra