Driving Over Lemons

The memoir recounts how Chris Stewart, a former itinerant sheep-shearer who lived in a tied cottage (housing provided as part of his employment) in Sussex, England, bought a remote mountain farm in the Alpujarras, the foothills of the Sierra Nevada south of Granada, Spain, and built a new life there with his wife, Ana. A special anniversary edition adds a chapter reflecting on life at the farm 25 years later.

The story begins with Stewart searching for property alongside Georgina, a confident young Englishwoman who had spent a decade in the Alpujarras brokering sales between local farmers and foreign buyers. Frustrated by houses too close to town, they visited La Herradura, a horseshoe-shaped farm by the river, but Georgina warned of ownership complications. In the riverbed they encountered Pedro Romero, a huge, red-faced man on horseback, who owned El Valero, the farm across the river. The next morning they waded across to inspect a cluster of houses, stables, and goat pens spread across a steep rock, with a hosepipe dribbling into a rusty oil drum as the sole water supply. Georgina negotiated the purchase over ham and brown wine while Stewart dozed, then pressed a wad of peseta notes into his hand to slap into Romero's palm as a deposit. For just under five million pesetas, roughly 25,000 pounds, Stewart became the owner of a farm with no road, no running water, a poisonous spring, and non-functioning solar electricity.

When he phoned Ana, she bombarded him with practical questions he could barely answer. His anxiety deepened when he realized the valley's geography made it a natural reservoir site, and Romero casually confirmed a dam was planned. Stewart panicked until Georgina, his nearest neighbor Domingo (a short, powerfully built farmer at the north end of the valley), and the mayor of Órgiva all assured him the project had been abandoned decades earlier because the surrounding rock was too porous. Stewart collected Ana from the airport and drove her into the valley at sunset. She received the farm with cautious approval, though they spent an hour and a half lost in brambles before reaching it in the dark.

Back in England, they spent nine months winding down their former lives. Stewart returned alone in August to learn the farm from Romero. They settled into a routine of collecting figs for the pigs, cutting maize, and eating papas a lo pobre (potatoes fried with onion, garlic, and peppers) three times a day. Stewart met Bernardo and Isabel, a Dutch couple farming across the valley, who revealed that Romero had been desperate to sell and considered the purchase price a windfall. Domingo emerged as an indispensable ally, cutting eucalyptus beams for a future bridge, finding a bulldozer operator to build a road, and guiding Stewart through rural life with blunt authority and quiet generosity.

In autumn, Stewart and Ana loaded a Land Rover with their possessions and drove south with Ana's black labrador, Beaune. Their first act at El Valero was to brew tea in a bent pot over a twig fire, served in scrubbed tuna-fish tins, a concoction so vile they celebrated the anniversary each year by trying to surpass it. Living alongside Romero proved strained. Ana, who developed warm relationships with the Melero family (Domingo's parents and extended kin), avoided Romero. He gradually removed his belongings and departed. Within days, neighbors revealed that Romero had been boasting in town about manipulating "this stupid foreigner," and Stewart's fond illusions about their friendship collapsed. Ana consoled him, observing he had brought out the best in a man he was too trusting to judge.

With Romero gone, Stewart rigged a rudimentary water system from river-filled tanks, and Domingo helped build a concrete tank at a spring, providing continuous fresh water. Together they searched the Alpujarras for chestnut roofing beams to replace El Valero's rotting ceiling timbers. The house rebuilding began when creatures breeding in the ceiling above their bed spurred action. Domingo demolished a twisted wall, taught Stewart stone masonry by shouting corrections, and within weeks they were halfway competent builders. Construction halted when Domingo's mother, Expira, was rushed to hospital with suspected kidney cancer, but the operation revealed only a kidney stone. Stewart recruited four New Zealanders, and with their help the house was completed in five months, crowned by a Count Rumford fireplace whose first blazing fire moved Stewart almost to tears.

Stewart introduced mechanized sheep-shearing to skeptical mountain shepherds, winning cautious acceptance. He and Ana attended their first matanza, the traditional winter pig-killing, and cleared the farm's overgrown acequia, an ancient irrigation channel carrying snowmelt from the peaks to valley farms. An ambitious foray into poultry-keeping ended in total defeat as foxes, stoats, and snakes destroyed every flock. Their sheep venture fared better: Stewart purchased Segureña sheep and introduced them to El Valero. A wily dealer named El Moreno bought the first lambs after dazzling Stewart with rapid-fire arithmetic, switching between pesetas and duros (five-peseta units) until Stewart could not keep count.

Ana announced she was pregnant. Their daughter Chloé was born at the Hospital of the Immaculate Conception in Granada after a harrowing labor during which Stewart fainted repeatedly; when he finally looked at the baby, a wave of emotion overwhelmed him. Chloé grew up at El Valero with birth and death as everyday experience. Her first word was "Beaune," the family dog's name, and when Beaune died of distemper during one of Stewart's absences, Chloé's first sentence was "Beaune gone." Ana embraced the herbal wisdom of Juliette de Baïracli-Levy's Complete Herbal Handbook for Farm and Stable, using comfrey poultices and garlic drenches to treat both animals and family, a practice that became a governing influence on the household. The memoir also sketches the eccentric community around them, including Rodrigo, a lonely goatherd whose life was transformed by Antonia, a Dutch sculptress who walked with him and modeled his goats in wax.

Stewart's attempt to bypass local dealers by selling lambs at Baza, the largest livestock market in Andalucía, ended in humiliation when the dealers boycotted his pen in retaliation. He found a solution selling to Francisco, a local dealer in Órgiva who praised the quality of field-grazed meat. Chloé's long-deferred christening took place at El Valero, officiated by a retired English vicar Stewart discovered on a botanical expedition. Domingo served as godfather, and about 40 guests gathered beneath an acacia tree.

A cycle of drought and devastating floods tested the limits of their life. After the river dried up for the first time in memory, weeks of winter rain obliterated the bridge and cut off the farm. Domingo devised an aerial cableway he called the "Flying Fox," stringing a wire across the swollen river with pulleys and a canvas seat. The original book closes on a sultry August night. The family bathed by candlelight in the river, and a pale shape resolved into Domingo's flock moving down the moonlit riverbed, with Domingo riding his donkey and Antonia behind him, arms around his waist, head on his shoulder. Stewart and Ana slid into the water and grinned at one another.

In a chapter added 25 years later, Stewart reflects on why they remain at El Valero. Domingo, still his bluntest critic, has been with Antonia for 25 years and now drives a John Deere tractor funded by her successful sculpture career. Chloé, fluent in four languages, has been teaching in Kunming, China. Stewart considers the self-sustaining cycle of sheep, dung, and harvest; the fresh seasonal diet; and the beauty of working outdoors. Half the flock went missing on the high hills for over a week and returned fat and healthy, having thrived on wild mountain grazing. When Chloé visited that summer, she told her parents she had always dreamed of returning to the farm, envisioning herself as an organic gardener, adding that El Valero would be "such a great place to bring up a kid."