Cuevas del Campo: cave dwellings by the Negratin reservoir

In the high, arid country of north-eastern Granada, in the region known as the Altiplano, Cuevas del Campo is a village where many people still live, as its name suggests, in houses dug into the earth. Set in a near-desert landscape of bare hills below the mountain of Jabalcon, it became an independent municipality only in 1981, having previously belonged to neighbouring Zujar.

A village of cave houses

The most distinctive feature of the village is its large quarter of cave dwellings, carved into the soft clay and still inhabited, many now offering rural accommodation. The first of these caves may date from the 16th century, dug by Moriscos who returned secretly after the failed uprising of 1568 and the expulsions that followed, when the land was resettled by colonists from Castile and Galicia.

The Negratin and the Altiplano

Just outside the village spreads the Negratin reservoir, one of the largest in Andalusia, where visitors come for canoeing and other water sports and where the only inland nudist beach in Granada can be found. The surrounding badlands, part of the Granada Geopark, lie between the natural parks of the Sierra de Baza and Cazorla.

How to get there

Cuevas del Campo is about 130 kilometres north-east of the city of Granada, reached by the A-92 motorway towards Baza.