Every autumn, the villagers of Guájar Alto make expeditions to the pine forests to forage for the edible fungi which spring up after the first rains of the season.The most common to be found here are boletes, with brownish caps and vivid yellow flesh. People say they are pleasant to eat, but only when they’re young. The boletus family is very large, and many varieties are edible. Also fairly common in our forests are aniseed toadstools - so called because of their strong, aniseed flavour. They have a delicate green colour and although most people would probably find their taste too strong, the Spanish have a great liking for aniseed, so gather these toadstools eagerly. Much harder to find are saffron milk caps, which have vivid orange gills and ooze carrot-coloured liquid. They’re highly prized, and their size is impressive. Mushrooms are plentiful, so it doesn’t take long for people to fill their baskets. When they return home, everything they’ve collected is inspected, fried, and shared around in a ‘fungus fiesta’.
When searching for fungi, there is always the danger that inedible or poisonous specimens might be mistaken for edible varieties, but here in Guájar Alto, where the people have been fungus collecting for generations, they are surprisingly knowledgeable. Once, when I went on a village expedition with other villagers, they were most concerned when I kept pouncing upon colourful russulas, with caps as purple as aubergines and white stems flushed with rose, which were definitely not edible, I knew. I had to explain several times that my intention was to draw and paint them, not eat them. To me, fungi are just as beautiful as flowers and I love particularly their wide range of delicate colours, which lend themselves so perfectly to the medium of watercolour.
Watercolour is a difficult medium which takes years to master. The aim is to retain the transparency of the pigments and allow the luminosity of the paper to show through. To do this, the student has to learn how to manipulate the water and one of the most common mistakes made by beginners is to allow the water to become dirty. Cleanliness is essential when using this medium and the water has to be changed frequently; it is imposssible to obtain transparent colours if you are working with a grey sludge. Equally important is to work with a limited palette and avoid using black, which doesn’t occur in nature; it is better to use ultramarine blue mixed with burnt umber. I always mix my own greys, using raw sienna, alizarin crimson and ultramarine blue, and you can obtain a wide range of greens by mixing yellows with blues. Another advantage of the limited palette is the resulting colour harmony, something which beginners often find hard to achieve.
One of the many pleasures of living in this area is that there is always colour, whatever the time of year. Autumn brings the flowering of the tree heathers which cascade down the mountainsides in shades of pink, purple and white, complemented so prettily by the blue of the rosemary bushes, also in flower. At this time of year, all the colours of nature are enhanced by the brilliance of the light. The sky is intensely blue in the mornings, and the Sierra Nevada, with its new covering of snow, looks stunning when you glimpse it peeping above the mountains of Guájar Alto, dazzlingly white.
The night sky, viewed from the mountains where there is much less light pollution, is spectacular, and people who come up from the coast to visit us are always impressed by its beauty. Jupiter has dominated the heavens for several months, and if you have good binoculars or a telescope, you can see all four of its largest moons. The Milky Way is a glorious sight in the clear, autumn nights, and the sky is so black, that even with the naked eye, you can pick out the different colours of our closest stars; Vega, for instance, in the constellation of Lyra, is distinctly blue. Whenever I stand on my terrace stargazing, I nearly always see a shooting star (meteor) or two and recently I was lucky enough to see a fireball. It was very bright, and moved across the sky more slowly and gracefully than a meteor. It was one of the many remarkable things I’ve seen since coming to live in Guájar Alto.
