Big Read: ‘Magically surreal Spain’

Pondering a fork in a narrow dirt trail snaking across the badlands of Gorafe, I tried to reason with Google Maps. There weren’t supposed to be any splits in the track here; in fact, for the last two days, none of the scenery around me seemed real.

I felt like I’d been magically teleported to another continent altogether: the landscape of red and pink rock formations, deep canyons, dry riverbeds, and eroded sandstone giants looked like it belonged somewhere in Arizona, New Mexico, or the Atacama Desert, not in the heart of Europe.

Yet there it was – the vast, otherworldly badlands of the Gorafe Desert, easily the most spectacular corner of Andalusia.

Situated in the Granada province, the Gorafe (also known as Tabernas) Desert lies between the towns of Tabernas, Baza, and Guadix, spanning 110 square miles of sparsely populated, Mars-like wilderness…