Ohanes

Story and present

Ohanes clings to the southern slopes of the Sierra Nevada, more than 900 metres above the Andarax valley. The village keeps the classic Alpujarra look: white houses with flat roofs and chimneys, strung along narrow, stepped streets that handle the slope as best they can.

Its name travelled far thanks to a grape. The Ohanes grape, born here from a cross between the white Jaén and the Rágol grape, was grown on trellises across the valley and earned the nickname “boat grape” (uva del barco) or “shipping grape”: it could stand weeks at sea without spoiling. From 1835 it left in wooden barrels for ports in Europe and the Americas; at its height, between 1900 and 1914, around 2.5 million barrels were shipped each season. Decline came in the late 1970s, but the terraces and trellises the grape shaped still draw the municipality’s landscape.

At the top of the village, the church of la Purísima Concepción sums up its history: a sixteenth-century Mudéjar building, burned in 1574 during the Morisco uprising and rebuilt in 1593 by Jorge de Baeza. Some five kilometres away, well into the mountains, the sanctuary of the Virgen de Tices (1800-1803) keeps the patron saint of Ohanes.

Devotion to the Virgen de Tices sets the local calendar: on the night of 14-15 August the romería climbs to the sanctuary to bring the Virgin down to the village, and around 8 September Ohanes holds its main festivities in her honour.