Sierra Nevada

From Granada's Alhambra the snow line hangs in the sky all winter: the Sierra Nevada carries mainland Spain's entire collection of three-thousand-metre summits outside the Pyrenees — more than twenty of them, crowned by Mulhacén at 3,479 metres, named for the penultimate Nasrid sultan said to be buried on top. This is Europe's southernmost high mountain range, close enough to Africa to see the Rif on clear days, and its glaciers are recent ghosts: the Corral del Veleta cirque held the continent's southernmost ice into the twentieth century, and its buried permafrost is still monitored as it dies. What the ice left is a rolling, almost Tibetan high plateau of schist — gentler than its altitude suggests in summer, seriously Alpine in winter — pocked with some fifty glacial tarns.

The altitude plus the latitude built a botanical ark. Cut off on their sky island, the borreguiles — the spring-fed alpine meadows above 2,700 metres — hold one of Europe's densest concentrations of endemic plants, some eighty species found nowhere else, from the star-of-the-snows plantain to the Sierra Nevada violet; the range was a biosphere reserve thirteen years before the 1999 national park existed, and botanists have made pilgrimages here since Boissier's day. The fauna's flagship is blunter: the Iberian ibex is everywhere above the treeline, unbothered, posing on crags at arm's length.

The southern flank is the humanized masterpiece. The Alpujarra's white villages — Capileira, Bubión, Trevélez at 1,480 metres curing its hams in mountain air — hang in the ravines below the summits, and around them still runs the acequia network: irrigation channels the Moors engineered a millennium ago, deliberately leaky so that snowmelt "sown" into the slopes resurfaces in springs all summer. The careo system is now studied as ancient water-banking against the droughts of the century ahead, and walking an acequia's contour line through chestnut and poplar is the range's gentlest superb day. The GR-240 "Sulayr" — the Moors' name for the range, "mountain of the sun" — circles the whole massif in nineteen stages.

What's worth knowing before you go

Granada is the base; buses climb to the Pradollano ski resort and, in summer, the park's shuttle runs from the Hoya de la Mora and from Capileira toward the high trailheads — the summit road over the Veleta, once Europe's highest, has been closed to private cars above 2,500 metres for decades, which is why the high plateau stays quiet. Mulhacén from the Poqueira side, with a night at the Refugio Poqueira, is the standard and safest route; July to September is the walking window, and the range's storms and winter winds are grimly underestimated at these latitudes. The Alpujarra, by contrast, is a year-round destination and best in blossom (March) or chestnut October.

The connoisseur's hour is dawn on Mulhacén's summit in late July — Africa's coast one way, the Alhambra a courtyard-sized glitter the other, and ibex silhouettes on the Veleta ridge — earned by the 4 a.m. start from Poqueira that the shuttle-bus walkers can't make.