In the 18th century, the moors made terraces in the mountainside to make more space for their homes and crops. This practice let them utilize the land more and made it easier to build an irrigation water system to use the water wisely. Since it does not rain much in this region, the inhabitants had a system to recycle the water, letting it run down the mountain to reach all of the crops.
The houses in these villages have a special architecture because there was a lack of building resources, so they use the resources that they could find in their mountain location. The houses the moors built are generally white washed because white paint has properties that reflect the light of the sun, therefore avoiding unbearably hot temperatures from building up inside the small houses. These villages face extreme weather conditions: it gets super-hot in the summer due to the high elevation and lack of rain.
These villages face isolation. They are isolated from Granada because they are set deep in the mountains. There are not any big grocery stores in the villages; therefore the villagers grow a lot of their own food and must make trips out of the village to go to a super market further away. There are no hospitals in these villages; if someone gets sick and needs to go to the emergency room, they have to go all the way down the mountain. This takes time because cars need to go slowly due to the curving road. If the people drive too fast, it is possible that they might fall down the mountain! In addition, the villages do not even have a school.
