This small town of the Granada’s Alpujarra is located in the South-western slope of Sierra Nevada. It is located to more than one thousand meters of altitude, which allows it to enjoy fresh waters, beautiful corners and excellent landscapes. The architecture is the characteristic of the Alpujarras, with white houses of flat roofs that blend perfectly with the orography of the region.
Cáñar has two authentic natural monuments: the place of Puentepalo, beautiful pine forest that wraps the birth of the Chico river, over 1,700 meters of altitude, and the Cave of Sortes, that takes its name from an old town already disappeared. Near the grotto there is also the Fountain of Poyo Dios, in whose surroundings Federico Garcia Lorca heard the popular song that would give origin to his famous poem of “The unfaithful wife”: “and I that took her to the river/thinking that she was young,/but she had husband”.
It is bizarre the way in which this town celebrates the festivity of the Saints Innocents. Each 28th of December the celebration of “las mozuelas” takes place mozuelas, an old tradition in which the unmarried men offer a serenade to the unmarried women.
The origins of Cáñar go back to the first years of the Muslim occupation of the Iberian Peninsula. From this time (VIII to the XI centuries) it dates the attached farmhouse of El Fex and the canals and drains of irrigation system. In the middle of the XIV century, with the administrative division of the Alpujarra, Cáñar was included within the Taha de Órgiva. In 1492, with the conquest of Granada, it falls into the hands of the Catholic Kings. It was then when the population started being under a big pressure that became unbearable, and in 1568 a rich landowner of the area, Hernando de Válor, who took the name of Abén Humeya, revolted against Felipe II. The revolt ended at a general revolt between the Moorish of all the Granada kingdom. In its district, in the farmhouse of El Fex, Abén Farag, one of the lieutenants of Abén Humeya, was taken prisoner and him, in revenge, destroyed the village totally.
The internal discrepancies between the own Moorish, that in 1569 killed Abén Humeya, allowed that Juan of Austria ended the rise sooner. The Moorish would be definitively expelled in 1609 and Cáñar was repopulated with settlers coming from other kingdoms of Spain. Barja, an anejo of Cáñar, was destroyed by the floods of 1816 and it disappeared.
The most elaborated recipes in the kitchens of Cáñar are the white garlic, the soup of almonds, the Spanish stew, the cigüelos stew (kidney beans), the migas, the gypsy pot and the cabbage stew.
© Patronato Provincial de Turismo de Granada I Diputación de Granada
