From the big city of Granada, we drive along the Sierra Nevada massif with picturesque views. The view of the high, snow-covered mountain peaks already from Granada is breathtaking. By the way, this is one of the most famous skiing destinations in Spain. Kind of surreal, our destination is a desert and we are driving there with views of snowy mountains.
On our way to the desert of Tabernas we drive once on the left side parallel to the Sierra Nevada along and experience so impressively the length of the mountains. The desert of Tabernas must have some sights to offer. We are curious what we will discover.

Desierto de Tabernas

The desert consists of very sparsely vegetated, smaller hills. In between there are former river courses, which make for rugged, washed-out canyons between the hills. The whole landscape is dusty, stony, and appropriately drenched in shades of gray and brown. To our surprise, we find a remote overnight campsite right next to the desert. The desert is a nature reserve and accordingly we are not allowed to spend the night directly in the desert.
The remoteness. Quietness and loneliness please us so well that we directly spend two nights without moving much from the place in the desert of Tabernas.

The Desierto de Tabernas is one of the warmest and driest regions in Europe!
And we notice this very well even at the beginning of April, the temperatures are around 30 degrees during the day, around 22 at night and that with very dry air. Our hygrometer rarely shows more than 10% humidity.

Smaller exploration tours on foot lead us to dried-up river courses. The desolation of the landscape is even more obvious at these river courses. There is almost nothing here except sand, rocks and small bushes. Ok, an exception is the road where we had found our place for the night. Here trees were planted at the roadside to protect the travelers and the road surface a little from the scorching heat of the sun.

In the desert there are also old film sets. Some famous big movies with desert scenes would be shot here. Somehow, we don’t really like these attractions. They are usually quite expensive and if we may believe the comments in online forums, rather in poor condition. We decide against a visit to the film sets. Maybe this is because we are not really Western movie lovers? The desert impressed us anyways. Even though we had rather imagined a sand desert than a scree desert.

Surroundings of the Tabernas desert

On our way into the desert and during the onward journey we pass some very small villages. In this region there seems to be only little going on. The living conditions especially in the middle of the summer are probably rather hostile. Despite the great dryness of this region, we soon pass orange plantations. Agriculture has penetrated into the most barren areas of Spain. The irrigation is probably a big challenge, but seems to work well according to our impression of the many green orange trees.

With this stopover in one of the most barren regions of Spain we continue our journey. Soon we are approaching the Mediterranean coast again and can drive along the sea towards the north. We are looking forward to it!