Today it's pouring with rain again!  It's hard to believe this area is supposed to be the only officially designated desert in Europe.  Trust us to choose the worst winter for decades to come to Andalusia -  the German lady who runs the panaderia told S that this is the first year since 1914 that Murcia has had snow!
Usually the problem here is too little rain.  When Goytisolo visited, he suffered from the scorching heat and constantly described the arid, dry landscape.  Even today all over the countryside you can see the traditional aljibes, built on the Arabic model first introduced by the Moors when they governed Andalusia.
The aljibe is a container used to store water, either rain water or dew (the night dews on the Cabo de Gata can be very heavy), or water pumped up from deep in the ground.  The aljibe is totally or partially buried underground, covered by a barrel vault or a dome. This one is at Cortijo El Fraile:

 

 And this one can be found in the Valle de Rodalquilar:

The land here is desert thanks to the Agaric people, who we learnt about in the Museo de Almeria, because they deforested the region in order to plant barley. They were foolish in more than one respect, partly in that the deforestation gradually prevented the rainfall and also because they relied totally on barley, growing no other crops, which impoverished the soil even further. While the ruling class imported fruit and vegetables for themselves, it meant the lower classes gradually starved from their inadequate diet. Since the ruling class were totally dependent on the work of the lower classes, they too died out, leaving a barren land that never recovered.
When Goytisolo was travelling through the Cabo de Gata, he saw the slogan written on abandoned buildings, MORE TREES, MORE WATER.  Franco ordered the planting of trees here, but the soil was too poor for them to grow and they all died.

Walking from Nijar down to Cabo de Gata village, Goytisolo talks of himself in the third person (throughout Campos de Nijar, he plays with stylistic form and narrative voice, switching between 1st, 2nd and 3rd person):

        "It's a straight, seemingly endless path ... I am alone in the midst of a sea of clay, and my only compass is the blinding sunlight reverberating off the road.
         "After half an hour the heat is intolerable. The flatlands fry under spiralling mist. Cicadas buzz drowsily. Faltering and withering like plants deprived of light, soaking up the sun, the northern hiker feels oppressed by his journey and starts looking for a patch of shade where he can lie down."

He meets up with an old man selling prickly pears who talks about his hard and poverty-stricken life, and how his sons have all left and the eldest was killed in the army:
      "A moment's silence follows and the old man looks at me with a blank expression. The wind blows up flurries of dust over the plain.
       'It must rain in your country. I always wanted to go to a country where it rains but never did an' now ... I'm too old for such adventurin' ...'
        The words don't slip easily from his lips and he looks around deep in thought.
      'Years and years have gone by without a single drop of rain, an' my wife an' I scattering barley seed like idiots, hoping for a miracle ... one summer nothin' grew at all an' we had to sacrifice our animals. The donkey I bought at the end of the war also died. You can't imagine what it was like ...'
       The plain steams around us. A flock of crows croaks as it flies towards Nijar. The sky is imperturbably blue. The song of the cicadas rises from the ground in mute protest.
      'We live on prickly pears. The land won't grow anythin' else. When we're hungry, we fill our bellies until they're stuffed.' ..." (Translation by Peter Bush).

It seems hard to believe Goytisolo is talking about the same area when it's pouring with rain outside!