Alora, Spain - The train chugs steadily out of Malaga station, its rhythmic clatter carrying it inland towards the mountains of the Guadalhorce Valley, where whitewashed villages cling to hillsides.
Beyond the window, pomegranate trees grow close to the tracks. Palms and cypress trees stand alongside young orange saplings planted in neat rows and, farther out, olive groves whose leaves shimmer between green and silver in the breeze. Above the rugged mountains, small white clouds float across an immense blue sky, like pieces of popcorn.
Over the train's rattle, an announcement in Spanish comes through the speakers: “The next station is Aljaima.”
The name derives from the Arabic al-khaima , meaning “the tent”, a small echo of another language, another time.
And then Alora, where the town rises around a rocky hill crowned by the remains of an old fortress. Some etymologists suggest the town's ancient name may derive from the Arabic a l-lawra , loosely translated as "the light".
A large black pick-up truck rumbles into the station car park and stops. Henrietta Szovati, a British-Hungarian Muslim, steps out, having driven down from the mountains to collect provisions.
Dressed in a loose blue shirt and cream trousers, she offers a warm embrace. Silver earrings dangle beside her face, and a sea-blue scarf is wrapped around her hair like a turban. A pair of red-framed spectacles rests on top.
She apologises for the truck’s state. Dust has settled on the dashboard, and bits of dried grass have found their way inside. “It is a working vehicle,” she says, more accustomed to hauling things across farmland than ferrying visitors from railway stations.
For the past two years, she and her husband, Ajmal Masroor, a therapist and imam, have been transforming an old farmhouse and its surrounding land into the House of Andalus. The project aims to bring people closer to southern Spain's Islamic history and the natural world.
Nearly 400 olive trees dot the 14 hectares (35 acres). She wants to plant more and make it a thousand-tree olive grove, she says with a smile, glancing out of the truck's open window.
The road winds higher into the mountains. Wildfires, Henrietta says, swept through parts of the surrounding region at the height of summer, and the landscape still bears the season's harshness. Reddish-brown earth gives way to patches of parched scrub and exposed rock, while slabs of silvery-grey stone jut sharply from the slopes.
"That's slate," Henrietta explains, pointing through the windscreen. The Spanish word is pizarra , she adds, the same name as the neighbouring town.
Oranges flourish here, as do figs and avocados. And mangoes that are better than those from South Asia, Henrietta emphatically declares.
As we drive further into the mountains, Henrietta gestures towards a neighbouring property. “That's my neighbour, Juan Garcia.”
Henrietta buys lemons, avocados and honey from him. Sometimes he comes over to help with the olives. It's this sense of community and neighbourliness she found harder to come by in Britain, where she has lived since 2001, marrying Ajmal a year later.
"I feel like an outsider there. I'm still not ‘one of us’ after more than 20 years."
As a Muslim and as a European, she says, Spain feels familiar in a way no other place does. Hungary was never an option, she adds, describing its government as “racist and right-wing”. And in Britain, she says, being Muslim can feel unavoidably political, her faith viewed through headlines and public arguments about Islam.
In the mountains above Alora, she feels her neighbours meet her first as Henrietta: the woman who lives up the track and joins in village life.
Yet Spain is not immune to the political currents sweeping across Europe. The far-right Vox party has made opposition to immigration and what it calls the "Islamisation" of Spain central to its campaigning, raising questions about how secure that sense of belonging might be.
With a sigh, Henrietta acknowledges that being Muslim can be difficult anywhere in the world today. But she prefers to focus on what she can build, rather than on political circumstances beyond her control. "Circumstances change, but community, connections and faith don’t," she says.
For her, that means building relationships with neighbours, even when they hold different beliefs. A sense of community, she argues, is forged through everyday encounters rather than political rhetoric.
On a visit to Juan Garcia’s home, his 79-year-old mother, Maria, is curious about the scarf wrapped around Henrietta's hair.
The women are standing in Maria's living room, its shutters drawn against the afternoon sun. A portrait of Jesus hangs on the wall.
Henrietta explains that she is Muslim and that covering her hair is part of her faith, a way to feel closer to God. Maria is Catholic. The conversation turns to the Virgin Mary, who also covered her hair.
But Maria insists all that matters is being a good person. If you cannot be good, none of the outward signs of faith means very much.
There is no awkwardness between them, no need to defend or explain their beliefs. The conversation moves on.
It is such ordinary encounters that have made Andalucia feel like home, Henrietta says. But her connection to this part of Spain runs deeper than the friendships she is making. It also stems from a deep respect for a history that stretches back more than 1,000 years.
For British Muslim travel writer and historian Tharik Hussain, author of Muslim Europe, the fascination is understandable. Al-Andalus was the medieval Muslim-ruled territory of modern-day Spain and Portugal. Its heartland lay in the south, in what is now Andalucia, home to cities such as Cordoba, Seville and Granada, where surviving monuments still evoke a period when Muslims helped shape European civilisation.
Its eventual loss, he says, has given it an almost “Atlantis-like aura” in the Muslim imagination, a longing reflected in Muslim literature over the centuries, from the 17th-century historian al-Maqqari to the 20th-century poet Allama Iqbal.
For nearly eight centuries, Muslim dynasties ruled parts of the Iberian Peninsula, leaving behind palaces and fortresses with horseshoe arches, intricate zellij tilework, carved yeseria plasterwork, and curling Arabic calligraphy. Their legacy endured in irrigation channels known as acequias (from the Arabic al-saqiya ), scholarship, language and traditions that continued to shape Spain long after the fall of Granada in 1492.
Britons have long headed to Andalucia in search of a place in the sun. But among those putting down roots here are Muslims drawn by something more: The chance to reconnect with a history in which Islam was part of Europe, and to build lives where their faith feels less like a defining difference.
Yet the Andalucia they are entering is not a vanished kingdom waiting to be rediscovered; it is modern Spain, with its own economic pressures, social divisions, and complicated relationship with the past.
What happens when the dream of al-Andalus meets the realities of living here?
The truck turns off the road onto a narrow dirt track, climbing towards a whitewashed farmhouse tucked into the hillside; this is the House of Andalus.
Henrietta and Ajmal bought their whitewashed farmhouse in 2024 after seven years of searching.
It was never intended as a holiday home. They always meant the House of Andalus to be a place to put down roots and invite others in.
But realising that dream meant stretching their finances to the limit. The couple poured much of their savings into the project, then turned to friends and family for loans.
It's early afternoon, and Henrietta leads the way in. The thick stone walls keep the rooms cool in the early autumn sun. Rugs from the local market soften its rustic simplicity, while references to Andalucia's Islamic past give the rooms a sense of place.
But the bookshelves offer perhaps the clearest glimpse into Henrietta's world: Copies of the Quran sit alongside histories of Islam and Spain, novels, and travelogues. There are Dickens and Hardy, V S Naipaul and William Dalrymple, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. A Spanish dictionary is tucked among them.
Then there are the books that seem to speak more directly to the life she has chosen: Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence, and M Scott Peck's The Road Less Travelled.
On a side table sits a particularly treasured volume: A first edition of Washington Irving's writings on the Alhambra, sent by a former guest who discovered it in a rare-book shop in Inverness and sent it as a thank you for their time in Alora.
“Lunch is ready,” calls Shama Rahman from the terrace. The resident chef has prepared seared tuna steaks topped with a vegetable relish, baked sweet potatoes and a fresh garden salad. Everything is sourced locally and now served on blue crockery Henrietta found in a second-hand shop in a neighbouring village.
There is a loaf of warm bread and olive oil pressed from the trees on the property. Henrietta pours some into a shallow dish, tears off a piece of bread and drags it through the golden oil.
A breeze catches the paper napkins and lifts them off the table, and Henrietta reaches to catch one. Over a slow lunch, she explains what she and her husband hope to create here. They have already begun hosting art and couples' retreats, the latter drawing on Ajmal's work as a therapist.
They plan to build a Quranic garden, dotted throughout with plants mentioned in the holy book. The olive trees were already growing when they arrived, but the couple has since planted pomegranates, figs and mangoes, and plans to add ginger, cucumbers and grapes. Educational programmes exploring the region's Islamic heritage are also in the works, alongside a library that is already taking shape.
But while Islam is at the heart of their vision, Henrietta is eager to emphasise that the doors are open to Muslims and non-Muslims alike. She speaks of “hanifs”, a term the couple uses for those who are “culturally curious and spiritually aligned”, regardless of religious background, reflecting the spirit of coexistence they associate with al-Andalus.
The idea for the House of Andalus, however, began years earlier, with a question from her five-year-old son.
The family packed their car and set off one weekend for a chestnut festival in a village near the town of Ronda. As they drove through the mountains, her son noticed something that made his mother look at the landscape differently.
“Mama, why is there something to do with Islam everywhere we go?” he asked. He’d noticed footprints of Islamic rule in the remains of castles, like the one he was then pointing to, in the zeliji tiles they would spot, and in the names of places.
Henrietta had known about al-Andalus, but now she began seeing traces of it everywhere.
She began wondering how to make that history more accessible, especially to those who had grown up in Europe and had been taught to think of Islam as something that belonged elsewhere.
But she wanted to do more than tell them about al-Andalus. Henrietta wanted to create somewhere they could encounter that history for themselves, where the landscape, food, architecture and traditions of the region might help them see Islam as part of Europe's own story. The House of Andalus became her answer.
And the desire to find a place for Islam within Europe's history extends far beyond Henrietta's family.
Hussain, the author, explains that the surviving traces of al-Andalus offer European Muslims something often missing from conventional accounts of the continent's past: Evidence that their faith is not simply a recent arrival.
“For European Muslims especially, that can help root their identities in a European history from which they have often been excluded,” he says.
But he cautions against making al-Andalus the beginning and end of Europe's Muslim story. Muslim communities have existed elsewhere on the continent for centuries, and remain part of its living cultural landscape, he says.
The following morning, sunlight spills over the jagged mountains as the town wakes to an unusually busy Saturday.
Cars have been stopped from entering Alora centre. Thousands of people are making their way uphill, following the steep cobbled streets towards the Plaza Baja de la Despedia. Some have come from neighbouring villages. Others have travelled much further.
It is the first Saturday of October, and Alora is celebrating Dia de las Sopas Perotas, an annual festival devoted to a dish that has sustained generations of agricultural workers in this corner of Andalucia.
The smell reaches the square before the food comes into view: Garlic frying in olive oil, ripe tomatoes, peppers, yesterday’s bread, and fresh mint carried on the warm air.
Spanish guitars compete with the crowd's rising chatter. Beneath the midday sun, cooks stand under a gazebo and tend to enormous vats of sopa perota as steam rises from the pots.
The soup arrives in a disposable plastic bowl, thick and steaming. The bread has absorbed the vegetable broth and olive oil, breaking into soft, irregular pieces, almost like clumps of couscous. It is rich, savoury and surprisingly filling.
Earlier at Maria Garcia’s house, she explained just how to make it.
Dressed in a cobalt-blue sleeveless dress, a mischievous glint in her eye, she says she’ll agree to a photograph, on one condition. She must see it first; she wants to be sure she looks pretty.
At her kitchen table, with the afternoon light falling across her face, Maria talks about the soup as though she were describing an old friend: Dependable, but still capable of causing trouble if not treated properly.
She was 11 or 12 when her mother first began teaching her to make it. Her grandmother had taught her mother, and Maria, in turn, passed the recipe on to her daughter, who now lives in the city.
In those days, people harvested the wheat by hand. "It wasn't that long ago," she says, recalling workers going into the fields with sickles, cutting the wheat and gathering it into great piles.
She gestures as she describes pulling chickpeas from the earth, her hand closing around an imaginary plant and tugging it upwards.
No great machines moved across the fields then. People worked together, and meals had to stretch far enough to feed whoever was helping with the harvest.
Each worker might receive a quarter of a loaf of bread, she recalls, roughly the size of two hands.
For sopa perota, the bread had to be at least three days old. Not the soft, factory-made loaves sold in supermarkets, Maria insists, but the sturdy sourdough traditionally baked in the village. Otherwise, it would disintegrate.
She starts by explaining the bread. "You twist it," she says. ”Don't pull it off, otherwise it will just melt into the soup. The trick is in the twist."
She explains that she places the pieces in a large bowl while the vegetables cook separately. In the old days, people balanced frying pans over three enormous stones, with a fire beneath them.
"You need to calculate measurements with your eyes," Maria says.
Once the vegetables have softened, pour the liquid over the bread. Then comes another rule: Leave it alone. Don't stir. Only when it is ready to eat should everything be mixed.
The bread must be soft enough to yield in the mouth, she says, but not so saturated that it loses its texture.
Could something so thoroughly Spanish have roots in the centuries when Muslims ruled this part of the peninsula?
She shakes her head. "No, never." Nobody has ever suggested such a thing to her.
"It was really well-respected soup, because it was so delicious and nutritious," she says. "It didn't ever matter who made it first, or where it came from."
But Alora's town council points to a possible connection to the region's Muslim past, noting that dishes made with crumbled bread were common then.