Setenil de las Bodegas: Life “Under a Rock”

Scattered across the hills of southern Spain are a number of towns known as the Pueblos Blancos, or White Villages. They are exactly what the name suggests - clusters of whitewashed homes tucked into the mountains of Andalusia, often sitting high above the surrounding countryside.

Many of these villages trace their development back to the Moorish period, when hilltop locations offered obvious defensive advantages. The whitewashed buildings became part of the visual identity of the region, and lime was used not only because it reflected the intense Andalusian sun, but because people believed it helped protect against disease. As it turns out, there was some wisdom in that. Lime does have antibacterial properties.

Today, the White Villages are among the most charming places to wander in southern Spain, and Carla and I were fortunate enough to visit several of them.

But one stood apart from all the others.

Setenil de las Bodegas.

At first glance, Setenil shares the familiar Andalusian look - white houses, narrow streets, hills rising all around. Then you walk a little farther and realize that something very unusual is happening. The houses are underneath the mountain. Not beside it. Not simply built against it. Under it.

Massive slabs of rock extend directly over streets, restaurants, shops, and homes. In some places, the cliff itself forms the roof and back wall of a dwelling, while only the front facade has been constructed in the more conventional sense.

The first time you see it, your brain needs a moment.

Apparently, thousands of years before modern architects began talking about integrating buildings with their environment, someone in Setenil looked at an enormous overhanging rock and thought, That’ll work.

And it did. There are still a few thousand people living in Setenil today, which means they can make a claim few communities on Earth can make with complete accuracy: They really are living under a rock. 😊

But beyond the novelty of it - and it certainly is extraordinary to see - there was something about Setenil that stayed with me for another reason. It seemed to offer a beautifully simple lesson about our relationship with the natural world.

The people who first created these dwellings didn’t begin by asking how they could remove the landscape and replace it with something of their own design. They began with what was already there. The rock wasn’t an obstacle. It became the architecture.

That idea feels increasingly important to me. So much of modern development begins by doing battle with the land. We clear trees, flatten hills, redirect water, scrape away whatever existed before us, and then rebuild the landscape according to whatever vision we have in mind.

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We often seem to approach nature as though it were the problem that architecture has been hired to solve.

Setenil suggests another possibility. What if the land gets a vote? What if we begin with the tree rather than the floor plan? The hillside rather than the driveway? The direction of the sun and wind rather than simply the view from the living room?

Carla spent her career working in architecture and interior design, so traveling with her has made me far more aware of the relationship between the places we build and the environments they inhabit. Some buildings seem to belong to their landscape. Others appear to have landed on it.

Setenil belongs.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that the solution to modern housing is for all of us to begin searching for convenient rock overhangs. Although real-estate advertisements would certainly become more interesting.

But the underlying idea matters. We have become accustomed to thinking that progress means bigger. Bigger houses. Bigger kitchens. Bigger closets. Bigger bathrooms. Entire rooms dedicated to storing things we rarely use.

I’ve been inside homes where the bathroom probably has more square footage than some of the houses in Setenil. And I’m not sure our lives are necessarily richer because of it.

One of the things Carla and I have discovered through simplifying our own lives is that having less doesn’t automatically feel like deprivation. Quite often, the opposite happens. When there’s less to maintain, organize, insure, heat, cool, clean, repair, and worry about, something else opens up. Time. Freedom. Attention.

Setenil reminded me that simplicity and beauty have never been enemies. In fact, they’re often remarkably good friends. There is something elegant about allowing a piece of rock to become part of your home instead of blasting it away. Something intelligent about working with shade rather than relying entirely on machinery to create comfort. Something wonderfully humble about allowing the natural world to determine part of the design.

And humility may be one of the things we need most right now. We speak about climate change in enormous terms, as we should. Governments matter. Energy policy matters. Transportation matters. Industry matters.

But beneath all of that is a much more personal question: How do we imagine our place in the natural world?

If we see nature primarily as something outside of us - a collection of resources to be extracted, cleared, consumed, and rearranged - then environmental destruction becomes much easier to justify. But if we understand ourselves as part of nature rather than separate from it, the relationship changes.

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You tend to treat something differently when you realize you belong to it. I think this is one reason I’m so drawn to places where the natural world remains visible in everyday life. A town beside the sea. A house among trees. A trail running through a neighborhood. A window that opens onto mountains.

Those connections remind us of something modern life makes surprisingly easy to forget. We are animals living on a planet. We need air. Water. Soil. Trees. Rain.

Sunlight. A functioning climate. No amount of technology changes that.

And perhaps one of the great contradictions of modern life is that the more successful we become at separating ourselves physically from nature, the easier it becomes to forget how completely dependent upon it we remain.

Setenil doesn’t allow much separation. The mountain is literally in the house.

There’s something wonderfully honest about that. The people who first made homes beneath those cliffs certainly weren’t trying to create an environmental philosophy for visitors hundreds of years later. They were solving practical problems with the materials and landscape available to them.

But wisdom often begins that way. Use what’s here. Work with the land. Take what you need. Don’t assume everything has to be conquered before it can become useful.

That feels like a pretty good philosophy for architecture. Maybe for life too.

I don’t think we need to romanticize the past or pretend that living beneath a cliff is somehow the answer to the challenges of the modern world. It isn’t. But Setenil reminded me that there is intelligence in restraint. There is beauty in simplicity. And there is something profoundly sane about creating a life that fits more gently into the world around us.

For all our technological sophistication, perhaps progress doesn’t always mean overcoming nature.

Sometimes it means finally learning how to live with it.