Guadix: living in a cave, an hour from Granada

Ask anyone who has been to Guadix what they remember and they rarely start with the cathedral. They talk about the rooms dug into the hillside, the chimneys poking out of the slope, and how cool it felt inside on a hot afternoon. It is a short trip inland from Granada, and it is the day out we suggest to anyone who wants to see a different kind of home.

Two thousand homes dug into the hill

The Barrio de las Cuevas sits in the highest part of the town, a few steps from the church of Nuestra Señora de Gracia. There are about two thousand cave houses here, many of them still lived in, in a town of a little under twenty thousand people. Walk through in the late afternoon and it feels like a neighbourhood first and a sight second, which is how it should be.

Why the rooms stay at 18 to 20 degrees

The caves hold a steady 18 to 20 °C all year. The reason is the ground. Earth wrapped around a room changes slowly, so the swing from scorching midday to cool night never reaches inside. In August that means a cool refuge. In winter the rooms feel milder than you might expect, though you will still want a heater and a good chimney.

The ground does the work that thick walls do elsewhere.

The cathedral and the Alcazaba

The Cathedral of the Incarnation was built over an earlier church that served as a mosque in the Islamic period. Work on it ran through the 16th to the 18th centuries, so its styles are mixed, and its front is Baroque. Go in for the stone and the quiet, then step out into the square.

The Alcazaba is the older fortress on the hill above the old town. Historians still argue about which dynasty raised its walls, so we will leave that debate to them. Climb up for the view, which is the reason most people make the walk in the first place.

The cave museum

The Centro de Interpretación Cuevas de Guadix is set in a former cave house on Plaza Padre Poveda, a few metres from the church. One family lived in it from 1928 until 1980, and the museum tells that story through the rooms themselves. The visit is short, around half an hour, and it is the best first stop because it explains what you will see in the streets afterwards.

The badlands of the Geopark

Granada's UNESCO Global Geopark was designated on 10 July 2020. It covers 4,722 km² and 47 municipalities. Its signature landscape is the badlands, gullies and canyons up to 250 metres deep, between roughly 550 and 900 metres above sea level. Go and see the Badlands de Gorafe and the Don Diego viewpoint, where the cave houses suddenly make sense: people have been digging homes into this soft ground for centuries. Put the two together and the drive stops being a transfer and becomes the day.

Sleeping in a cave

Some places to stay in the district are cave houses, and they make a good change from a hotel room. Ask the owner about heating, ventilation and damp before you book. A cave can feel cool and calm in summer and still turn clammy in the wetter months, and a good host will be happy to talk you through how they keep it dry.

Buying a cave house: what to check

Buyers often ask us about caves, and the questions tend to fall into three groups. The first is legal status: is the cave registered as a dwelling, and does the register match what you see on the ground? The second is damp and air, including where the water comes from, how the rooms are ventilated and whether the chimney draws. The third is change, because an extension is a planning question before it is a building one.

Use a Spanish lawyer to check the property register and the planning position, and a surveyor who has seen cave houses before, not only a general inspector. The process is the same as any purchase here, so our guide to buying costs in Spain walks through the stages.

Guadix works best as a day out from the coast or from Granada. For the rest of the trip, read about the Alhambra and the city and the Alpujarras, and if you are still deciding where to base yourself, the coast guide sets out the towns.