Lakeside Living

LIVING LA VIDA LAGO

Last September marked a decade since I departed the madding and frequently maddening crowds of Marbella and headed to the hills. At the time a new, ahem, ‘lifestyle change’ had left me pondering the wisdom of living in Nueva Andalucía – a place where it is perfectly acceptable to go on a three-day quest in search of the perfect breakfast Burgundy. Trust me on this one. When a friend told me that they knew of a cottage on the banks of the reservoir on the Istán road, I leapt at the chance. Reached by a track down the side of the steep valley, the Casita del Lago sits in splendid isolation, with my nearest neighbour a kilometre away, and only accessed by kayak. Not only that, but the Casita was off grid, powered by a generator and taking its water from a large water deposit tank. I didn’t hesitate.

WORDS GILES BROWN PHOTOGRAPHY KEVIN HORN

Here, I thought to myself, was the place that I could finally write that novel. As the saying goes, ‘Everyone has a book inside them’, and even if mine was more of a cynical graphic novel, I had visions of myself hammering away at the laptop while sitting on the terrace.

Ten years later and I have yet to get past the first page.

Rather than being the tranquil idyll that I envisioned, living at the Casita has kept me busier than my previous apartment in La Campana.

The fun began on my first night. Being away from the coast meant very little light or noise pollution. Which meant that the sound of a frog croaking a mile away sounds as if it is in the kitchen. As dusk fell, I was suddenly aware of all manner of sounds and had no idea what was making them. A heron flying overhead in the darkness let out a loud “Arrrk” that had me scurrying indoors. If you didn’t know, a fox’s bark can sound remarkably like a baby crying, while wild boar merrily crashed through the nearby undergrowth. Most terrifying of all, though, were the mountain goats, who make their way gingerly down the impossible cliff face on the opposite bank to drink. On the way they sometimes dislodge rocks that splash in the water below. ›

I, of course, did not know that and my vivid imagination screamed at me that ‘Lake Thing’ was coming to get me.

Extremely unnerved, I decided that the best thing that I could do was make dinner, shooting furtive glances through the French Windows.

As I was halfway through chopping onions, the dog from the finca at the top of the track, obviously deciding to trot down and check out who the new neighbour was, suddenly appeared out of the gloom.

I screamed, he howled, and I almost cut my finger off. Then there was the effect that the Casita had on my romantic life. I had visions of long legged lovelies lazing on the boats (they came with the house, but more about them later). Kev, my best mate and stalwart photographer for this fine publication soon dispelled me of this notion. “You really think that any woman is going to want to come to a house on its own by a lake, miles from anyone?” he asked. “It looks like the sort of place that a serial killer lives in!”

This theory was put to the test shortly afterwards when I found myself in the fortunate position of driving a rather beautiful woman to mine after she had batted her eyelashes at me and asked if she could stay the night. As we drove up the winding Istán road, however, I noticed that she became a little less chatty, and as I turned off onto the track, she fell completely silent.

Then we came to a bend where the track opens up and she looked down, so see the Casita several hundred feet below, totally isolated with a wood on one side and a lake on the other.

She turned back to me and remarked, “You know, I don’t really know you that well, do I?”

Trying to make a joke of the situation, I replied, “That’s what all the others said,” and grinned.

Bad move. That night she may have set the ‘100m sprint while dialling a taxi’ record for Andalucía as she leapt out. ›

Living in a remote location does not mean that I am alone, however. Although the track is notoriously tough on vehicles, (I have gone through four in ten years and it even causes problems for my current ride, an ‘indestructible’ Toyota Landcruiser), it is officially a public access road. This means that I often find people milling around on the water’s edge. Some come for the views, some for the fishing – mainly Russians who drink heroic quantities of vodka before passing out – and others looking for the chapel, after I mischievously marked my house as a place of worship on Google Maps…

Sunday afternoons are normally the worst as the domingueros decide to take in a little bit of nature after lunch. Although the shrieks of over excited children leaping in the lake or the thumping beat of reggaeton from the car stereos are bad enough, one family beat them all. They decided that nothing would complement the peace and tranquillity of nature more than a mobile karaoke machine, which their five-year-old then sang along to Despacito. Badly and only knowing one verse. All afternoon.

For the above reason Sunday is normally the day that I will take a kayak or one of the boats out. I say one of the boats as, since the original wooden jetty is no more, they have a tendency to drift away as the water level rises. During lockdown both boats, plus the Town Hall’s plastic jetty sailed serenely across the lake. The little flotilla made its way across the reservoir towards the dam, providing a source of amusement for my bored friends gazing out of their windows further downstream. One even flew a drone overhead and put together a short video with Rod Stewart’s Sailing as a backing track. Unfortunately one of them never made it back, so I can only assume that it was ‘lost at lake’, so to speak.

But it isn’t entirely all peaceful when I am out on the water. The fire planes also use the reservoir when they are tackling blazes in the campo. I have to take my baseball cap off to their incredible skills, and they are thoughtful enough to fly over once to allow me to get out of the way before they scoop up water. The way 2022 has been going thus far, it would be the cherry on the icing on the cake for me to be collected by one in a hurry and then dropped from 500 feet over a raging inferno! e