The Factory of Light

Shortlisted for the 2004 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award - searching for a house to rent in 1999, Michael Jacobs was offered one in the Andalucian olive-growing community of Frailes. As he shared in each season's events, his own life became increasingly tied up with that of the village. This is his story of how a restless urbanite finally put down roots.

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Searching for a house to rent in the summer of 1999, Michael Jacobs was offered one in the remote olive-growing community of Frailes. This proved to be no ordinary village. Near in distance but far in spirit from the tourist centres of Granada, Cordoba and Seville, this was a place where the modern world enjoyed a strange co-existence with a virgin Andalucia ruled by a dynasty of saintly healers. Costumed villagers bearing huge baskets of local produce arrived to welcome him, and it was not long before he decided to take up more permanent residence as the sole guest of the aptly named Discoteca Oh!, where the household arrangements were reminiscent of Fawlty Towers.;Soon he was taken under the wing of El Sereno, an elderly Romeo whose home-pressed olive oil was believed locally to cure everything from baldness to impotence. And his friendship with the village social worker Merce - a woman who held court in a bar situated inside a cave - led him deeper into a miraculous world evoked for him by the name of a nearby isolated ruin: The Factory of Light.;
As he shared in each season's special events - wine festivals and pilgrimages, pig and goat slaughtering, olive-gathering and mushroom picking - his own life became increasingly tied up with that of a village whose traditions and future were threatened by drought, unemployment, and decreasing population. Miracles were needed to save the place; and miracles began happening. With his dream of inviting a legendary Spanish actress to the village's abandoned Art Deco cinema, the truly unimaginable occurred, and the name of Frailes became known even to Hollywood. This story of how a restless urbanite finally put down roots is funny, moving and magical.