Setenil de las Bodegas — streets under the rock

Setenil grew inside the gorge of the Trejo river, and instead of building roofs the villagers used the overhanging tufa. The result is two parallel streets — Cuevas del Sol and Cuevas de la Sombra — where a slab of rock twenty metres across hangs over the terraces and doorways, and the houses are simply facades closing off the cave behind.

Nothing else in Spain looks like it, and the two streets behave completely differently. Cuevas del Sol faces south and gets a band of hard light along its terraces for a few hours; Cuevas de la Sombra, a hundred metres away across the river, is in permanent shade with soft, even light bouncing off the white walls. Between them you have two opposite lighting setups within a two-minute walk.

Above the streets, a stepped lane climbs to the old Moorish keep and the church, and from the mirador at the top the village reads as a crack in the rock with roofs jammed into it.

It is a small village that receives a lot of day visitors: weekends and holidays are busy, and the streets are narrow enough that a queue of people is unavoidable in the middle of the day. Early morning is the only reliable quiet time. Parking is outside the centre and the lanes are very tight.