SACRED SIERRA
A Year on a Spanish Mountain
‘Webster has the endearing writer's knack of making us laugh and weep along with him... Written in the sympathetic tradition of Chris Stewart's best-selling Driving Over Lemons, but is even better.’
Sunday Telegraph
‘Webster is a clever, hugely readable interpreter of Spain. He is also irrepressible: his work is a master class in involvement... This deserves to be - and undoubtedly will be - one of the most successful books about Spain this year.’
Julian Evans, The Independent
Jason Webster had lived in Spain for 15 years when he and his partner Salud, a flamenco dancer, tired of their city life and decided to buy a crumbling farmhouse clinging to the side of a steep valley in the eastern province of Castellón. He knew nothing about farming - he didn't even know what an almond tree looked like, or that he owned over 100 of them - but with help from local farmers and a twelfth-century book on gardening he set about recreating his dream.
Sacred Sierra tells the story of their first year on the mountain, and how they cleared the land, planted and harvested olives, nurtured precious, expensive truffles, all while surviving gale force winds and scorching summer fires. While toying with the timeless, he also retells ancient legends and as the year passed, finds himself increasingly in tune with the ancient, mystical life of the sierra, a place that will haunt your imagination and raise your spirits.