With some dismay we found assembled at this outlandish spot quite a small crowd of men, women, and children who, with dogs, pigs, hens, and an occasional donkey, all appeared to inhabit a single smoke-filled room. We were bidden to take seats amidst this company, and watched the attempt to boil an enormous pan of potatoes over a green brushwood fire, while domestic animals (including cattle) passed freely through to the byres beyond. These being on higher ground had created in front a sort of quagmire, which was crossed by a plank-bridge. Rain was falling smartly, and the writer's spirits, be it confessed, sank to zero at the prospect of a week or two in such quarters. Worse situations, however, have had to be faced, and usually yield to resolute treatment. Thus when a separate room--albeit but a dirty potato store--had been assigned to us, trestle-beds and a table set up, the quality of comfort advanced in quite disproportionate degree. Now the Sierra Neváda with its league-long lines of unbroken snow, accentuated by the mystery of the towering Veleta, massive Mulahacen, and the rest, presents an alpine panorama that is absolutely unrivalled in all the Peninsula. But immediately below those transcendent altitudes, in its middle regions the Sierra Neváda is lacking in many of those attributes that charm our eyes--naturalists' eyes. Over vast areas and on broad shoulders of the hills the winter-snows linger so long that plant-life, where not actually extinct, is scant and starved; while these dreary inchoate stretches are strewn broadcast with a debris of shale and schist that resembles nothing so much as one of nature's giant rubbish tips. True, there exists a sporadic brushwood, exiguous, dwarfed, and intermittent; there are scattered trees, ilex and pinaster (_Pinus pinaster_), up to about 7000 feet. But all seems barren by comparison. One's eye hungers for the deep jungles of Moréna, for the dark-green _pinsapos_ of San Cristobal, or the stately granite walls of Grédos. Here all is on a big scale, the biggest in Spain; but size alone does not itself constitute beauty, and the adornments of beauty are lacking. We write of course not as mountaineers, but as naturalists. It boots not to tell of days when rain fell in sheets and an icy _neblina_ swept the hills, shrouding their summits from view. A single ornithological remembrance shall be recorded--the abundance of certain northern-breeding species on the middle heights, especially common wheatears and skylarks. After watching these carefully, we were convinced by their actions (their song, courting, and fluttering flight) that both intended to nest here at 7000 feet, and dissection confirmed that view. Time alone prevented our settling the point; but a month later (say early in June) an ornithologist could easily verify the fact.