Andén 13, Estación de Autobuses de Cáceres. 13.29.
That last post was a bit lacklustre. I can’t be at the top of my game all the time, but I’ll admit it is hard to write convincingly about my favourite topic – nature – when the rain kept me indoors for most of the day. I got out for a bit during the evening to have dinner at Mesón Troya, one of the restaurants in the square (usually a place to avoid in larger towns, but not so here), but beyond my short sortie beyond the castle walls, I didn’t get very far yesterday. Instead, I contented myself with watching the stars from the hilltop and counting the towns and villages twinkling in the darkness of the great plains beyond: Monroy, Santa Marta de Magasca, Madroñera, and the brilliant glow of faraway Cáceres.
Morning summoned a slow sunrise into a cloudless sky. If I had brought walking clothes, I would have set out across the llanos on foot – but Chelsea boots, a smart winter coat and bootcut Levi’s jeans don’t exactly make for the most comfortable long-distance fare, so I erred on the side of caution and took a stroll into the berrocal – the rocky hill country south of Trujillo.
Idly, I set my sights on a restored 17th century bridge some five kilometres or so from town, but I was quite happy to wander aimlessly if the path presented any interesting forks.
My working life is so full of tasks that require forethought and planning that it’s nothing short of liberation itself to have that kind of absolute freedom that I crave: the freedom to do or not do, to turn back or to push on, to take this road or that, without any thought as to the consequences (beyond the need to get back in time for the bus). A freedom that becomes maddening when it’s taken away from me, like it was in Jordan, all those years ago. It’s a hardwired philosophy that I’ve become increasingly aware of as I’ve grown older, bleeding into my views on speech, movement and identity – and massively at odds with most of my generation.
Perhaps it’s an inherited desire for freedom from my Spanish side: I do have family ties to Andalucía, a region that once made a surprisingly successful bid for anarchy, and my great-grandparents quite literally put their lives on the line to make a stand for freedom of thought under Franco’s fascist regime.
Or perhaps that’s just wishful thinking. Either way, it’s hard to deny just how important that sense of total freedom is to me. Maybe I’m more like the Americans than I thought.
I didn’t make it as far as the bridge. The full day of rain from the day before had done more than dampen the sandy soil and form puddles and pools in the road. It had also swollen the Arroyo Bajohondo to the size of a small river. It didn’t look particularly bajo or hondo, but I didn’t trust the stability of the soil underfoot and didn’t fancy making way to Mérida with soaking jeans up to my knees for the sake of a tiny bridge, so I turned about and returned the way I had come.
Without a car at my disposal, I couldn’t make it out onto the plains, home to Trujillo’s more emblematic species (bustards, sandgrouse and stone curlews), but the berrocal was teeming with wonders of its own. Hoopoes, shrikes and stonechats watched my coming and going from the rungs of rusting farming stations, while woodlarks and skylarks ran this way and that along the stone walls that marked the boundaries of cattle stalls along the way. A flock of Iberian magpies kept me company on the way back, their jaunty black caps almost shining in the sunlight, and I nearly missed a lonely lapwing sitting in one of the fields – a curiously English sight in far-flung Extremadura – before it took off on powerful, bouncing wingbeats.
Speaking of powerful wingbeats, I was practically clipped on my way down to the arroyo by three hulking shapes that flew overhead. I clocked one as a griffon – there are few silhouettes I know better – but I had a feeling the other two might have been black vultures – something about their colossal size and the heaviness of their beaks. They seemed to have disappeared by the time I turned the corner in pursuit, which is hard to imagine for creatures with a wingspan of around 270cm.
A change in perspective always helps, however. I found all three on my way back, sunning themselves on a granite boulder not too far from where I’d first seen them. I suppose I’d have had my back to them on the way down. And what an impressive sight they are! Please forgive the photo-of-a-photo until I get home and can replace the image below with the real one from my camera, which always outperforms my phone when it comes to anything that requires distance.
Even with the full day of rain, I’ve scarcely had a moment out here where I’ve felt lost or alone. Spain works an incredibly potent magic upon me, whether it comes in the form of the music of its native language, pan con aceite y tomate, the immense blue skies of Castilla or the spectacular sight of its vultures, forever and always my favourite sight in the whole world.
I conveyed this jokingly to an old lady from Villafranca on the bus. She gripped my arm with a talon that the vultures might have envied and told me in no uncertain terms to “búscate un trabajo aquí”. It does feel like the universe is trying to help me to set things right and come back. But I have to get it right. I need this to work this time. So – fingers crossed.
If I could spend the rest of my life in the passing shadow of the vultures, I’d die a happy man. BB x
Albergue de Peregrinos de Payares, Pajares. 19.30.
Shortly after one o’clock this afternoon, I crossed over into Asturias and crossed off the penultimate Spanish region on my list. After a flying visit to Tenerife earlier this year and a long march across Aragón at the start of the Camino, now only Murcia remains. Which is tremendously ironic, as my family are technically Murcian, since the borders of Spain’s autonomous communities were only redrawn in their present form in 1983, with both Albacete and Villarrobledo falling within the formerly extensive region of Murcia. But alas! It remains on my list as the very last region for me to visit. At least I won’t be short on options.
The other pilgrims were all up at 5am this morning, but I still managed to beat them out of the door and was on the road by 5.20. I still had the crazy idea of combining two days into one – crazy, not on account of the distance (38km is child’s play at this point) but the elevation, which was considerable. It was pretty chilly, so I kept my fleece on for the first couple of hours while I finished I, Claudius.
The young folks of Pola de Gordón were starting to head for home after a Saturday night out on the town (read: village) as I walked in around 7am, though there was still music playing in the town bar, Los Gatos Negros. The Dane overtook me as I was fixing the straps on my bag, but I passed him later on (I have a vicious pace when I get going) and did not see him again.
I have managed to acquire two more books: Spanish translations of the Hungarian author Laszlo Passuth’s Tlaloc Weeps over Mexico, bound in red leather. They were fading away in a book bank at the side of the road and, as I have been looking for this book for a while, I rescued them. I have now acquired six books since starting the Camino and jettisoned the one I came out with. They don’t add too much weight to my backpack, but they’re not as easy to fold away like my clothes… still. This leopard’s spots don’t change so easily, I suppose.
Before reaching Buiza, there’s a spooky silhouette on one of the rocky spurs that juts out of the mountains. We are very definitely in wolf country, and the Lobo de Buiza – a metal sculpture that watched the road into the mountains – would be very easy to mistake for the real thing if you didn’t know to look for it. It’s certainly big enough: my lasting memory of the wild wolves I saw in Poland this Christmas was their size, which little can prepare you for when you see one in the flesh (a true wolf can be taller at the shoulder than a mastiff).
Sadly, I didn’t see any wolves today, though I think I saw one of their tracks. Wolf and dog prints are very similar, but their gait is totally different: a dog walks with its front and hind legs splayed out in two lines, while a wolf trots in single file, like a fox. I did see a fox in the half-dark of the forest, shortly before daybreak.
Wolves aren’t the only large predators that dwell in this rugged corner of the peninsula. Somiedo Natural Park lies 50km to the west, beyond the formidable peaks of the Babia and Luna Mountains, and it is famous for being the final refuge of the Cantabrian Brown Bear. They were once widespread in Spain but can now only be found in the Cordillera Cantábrica, though recent sightings beyond Somiedo seem to suggest that they are starting to creep back into the fringes of their former range – and Pajares in right on their doorstep.
Thirty years ago, this Iberian offshoot of the European Brown Bear was on the verge of extinction, hunted without mercy by the Spanish (and the Romans before them). I remember visiting my friend Kate in Cabezón de la Sal and having dinner in a bar full of dead bears: mounted heads on the walls and black-and-white photographs of groups of hunters standing proudly about the carcass of a slain bear, as though the murder of such a beautiful creature were something to celebrate.
With both bears and wolves about, I was on full alert and so I nearly jumped out of my skin halfway up the mountain when something very large suddenly appeared on my left, crashing through the undergrowth. It was, of course, a cow, but it still gave me a fright. It’s a good thing its English was about as good as the local Asturians, so the torrent of expletives went right over its head.
The climb from Buiza was formidable, but it was only Round One. By day’s end, I think I had climbed and descended no fewer than nine separate ridges, tackling most of the San Salvador’s cumulative 3000m elevation in one day. Little wonder my feet were complaining by the end of the walk! I’d have been done for if not for the valiant effort of Pinta and Niña, my two trusty walking sticks. How the pilgrims of old attempted this path in a time before clean water and blister plasters is beyond me. Faith truly is a powerful thing.
If only it were powerful enough to open the doors of the churches along the way, which have all been locked up since I left León!
The scenery here is a world away from the meditative plains of the Meseta. It feels like I’ve stepped into a completely different country, and yet the Meseta is only a day’s walk to the south. The mighty cliffs of the Cordillera Cantábrica were always visible in the distance from the Camino Francés, but now I’m cutting a path straight through them, I can really appreciate their majesty. My soul will always belong to the stone pines and salt flats of Doñana, but my heart soars whenever I am in the mountains. It is an elixir like few others.
I had some fun counting contrails and trying to guess where the planes where going. Sometimes I’d look up and see a raptor in the blue: usually a kestrel, which are abundant up here, and sometimes a griffon, soaring silently through the ether; and just once, it was a hen harrier, wheeling about and beating its long wings like a child’s kite come to life.
After a rough descent into cow country and its attendant muddy tracks (I had more than my fair share of that in France), the Camino hits the road and climbs up to Puerto de Pajares – climbs being the perfect word, as the farmers have put up a fence across the road, so I had to vault it where the barbed wire was at its least intrusive. The former parador which perches upon the ridge is little more than an empty shell, and its stripped foyer is rather eerie, but the cafeteria is still in action, no doubt kept alive by the fact that its terrace commands a spectacular view of the mountains of Asturias beyond. Access to the terrace is strictly limited to paying customers, which is a master stroke as without it I should be surprised if the café would survive at all.
The photos don’t quite do the view justice. This must be one of the best views of all of the Camino routes, including sunset from Finisterre and sunrise from O Cebreiro. My presence at the café drew no small amount of interest: as popular as the route seems to be right now, I don’t imagine they get many foreign pilgrims passing through, especially as young as me.
The descent from Puerto de Pajares was the toughest yet, compounded by the fact that it was now gone half past one and I had been climbing mountains for nearly seven hours. The sun was also fierce and I have now officially run out of sun lotion, so my right arm got burned on the way down. I’m currently rocking the classic “Camino tan” that consists of very brown calves and right arm, due to the constant north and westward trajectory of the Camino.
I reached Pajares at around 2.45pm, without being eaten by any bears (as one of my students thought might happen to me), and practically fell into bed – after climbing into the only top bunk remaining. The room I’m in is full of Catalans in their late 40s, most of whom have an odd habit of talking to themselves. Not whispering, talking. I was woken up twice from my nap by their charlitas. The hush and stealth of the Camino Francés seems a long way away.
I won’t be doing another two days in one tomorrow, as I’m already technically doing so by bypassing Mieres the day after, so hopefully it will be an easier day. A belt of clouds have rolled in this evening, so I should probably prepare for rain – rain, and an earlier arrival time, just in case. Pola de Lena looks a bit more “happening” than Pajares, and it does have a supermarket, so I should be able to resupply before the final push to Oviedo. Here’s hoping! BB x
Tomorrow marks the end of one Camino and the beginning of another. And not a moment too soon. I fear my social battery is at maximum capacity. I got the jitters after showing up late to the dinner the others had arranged at the Royal Tandoori, to find a crowd of fourteen.
Maybe it was the sudden shift from the intimate setting of my haircut the hour before to a busy table of English and Americans holding court over an Indian meal; or maybe it was the location of my Siege Perilous as the final invitee, squashed into the corner; or the fact that they’d started without me.
Whatever it was, I know now that my decision to leave the Camino Francés is a wise one. It’s a little shameful to admit, but I could use a break. I’m not proud of the fact that these social settings continue to throw me every so often, but I am getting better at hitting the escape button before it escalates.
On the walk into León this morning, Talia asked me a question that has genuinely had me thinking all day. I think it was something like this:
When did you decide not to pursue a career in biology?
At first it seemed a pretty straightforward question. My grades in Biology were never all that great, the competition at my school was just too much and it never occurred to me even once to study Biology (or Natural Sciences) at university.
But with a little context, I can see why she asked me that out of the blue – and I’m frankly amazed how much I’ve suppressed what is nothing less than a core memory that might once have changed the course of my life.
Audrey was using an app to identify some of the birds we’d seen since leaving Mansilla de las Mulas – I think it was Seek. I pointed out a few things I could hear: serins in the branches of a nearby tree, a booted eagle circling in a field, the bee-eaters we’d heard the day before.
I guess it was that quickfire succession of names that prompted Talia’s question. My answer was fairly improvised, but I think it checks out.
When did I decide not to pursue a career in biology? When I realised that it was never going to be about zoology – not under the British education system, anyway. That, and my mathematical ability was (and is), quite frankly, dismal.
I have various interests. I’m a musician. A linguist. A writer, an occasional poet and a Hispanist. A mimic. A Catholic. But before all of these things, I am a naturalist. Before I found my fluency in Spanish and French, I could already understand the calls of every bird in the British Isles and could tell you what most of them meant: warning, alarm, hunger and mating calls. It was, I suppose, the first language I ever learned.
I was just as obsessive with my childhood interest in dinosaurs: I had to know them all. Where they were found, why they were called what they were called. It wasn’t enough to know the famous ones, like the T-Rex and velociraptors – I had to dig deeper. One such precocious example that comes to mind was my decision to bring along a Eustreptospondylus drawing to Show and Tell at primary school. Doubtless an elephant would have sufficed, but why would I ever have settled for something as basic as that?
I still have discarded exercise books that my parents gave me where I logged all the species mentioned in wildlife documentaries. I always put down the title and locations covered, and I sometimes wrote the date, too. Others I used as scrapbooks, taping in feathers and sketching footprints and writing about when and where I found them.
You’d have thought that these might have been the early indicators of a scientist. Certainly, I wanted nothing more than to be a palaeontologist when I was a kid (which can be gently excused by the fact that the BBC’s peerless Walking with Dinosaurs documentary series came out just in time to capitalise on my five-year-old dinosaur obsession.
When I was a little older, I genuinely considered a career in conservation. I entertained the idea of a degree in Ornithology, or something similar, to allow me to put my fiendishly good memory for birds and their calls to use.
And then, suddenly, that dream died.
It was probably the maths that killed it. All the natural science degrees I explored required a basic level of mathematical competence and at the time I was struggling to scrape even a passing grade at GCSE. Chemistry, too – a lot of Zoology degrees suggested chemistry as an A Level, and chemistry was far too mathematical for me. Without maths, my conservation aspirations were dead in the water. That was that.
But there was another factor that pushed an old dream out of the nest: the slow decay of a child’s interest as the subject closest to his heart never even materialised in the subject that should have concerned it most intimately.
My memories of Biology center on two things: plant cells and sourdough bread. I was so excited when food chains and food webs came up, until I realised that, within the British curriculum, that was the one and only time that animals would be mentioned. Everything else was so cold, so clinical. Palisade walls and mytochondria. Genomes and inheritance, though usually in plants. The fact that I knew the names of every animal and bird in the British Isles (and most of Europe, for that matter) gave me no advantage whatsoever.
My school was a specialist science school. Our Biology department was doing really exciting things with MS research, and it was one of my Biology teachers who was instrumental in sending me out to Uganda on my first ever teaching post. But somewhere along the way, my aspirations as a conservationist were slowly choked by the strangling vines of the British science curriculum. Zoology, palaeontology, anthropology, ornithology and even primatology were all areas I was desperate to explore, but as the years went by and Biology concerned itself less and less with the natural world and more and more with the minutiae of bacteria and cell structure, the less I cared for it.
It must have been around then that I first entertained the idea of becoming a teacher – once I realised I would never be good enough at two of my weakest subjects to survive to the point when Biology became Zoology. Fifteen years old and already carrying the shards of a shattered dream.
One way or another, I think I realised early on that there was little that a Zoology degree could teach me that I truly desired. I didn’t need to pursue a career in science to justify my greatest love. Knowing the names of every animal and bird gave me a sort of spiritual connection with each and every one of them – no scientific research could work a greater magic than that. Still, it’s interesting to think where my life could have gone if I’d really committed to that path.
Instead, here I am, gone thirty, walking the Camino with a head that twists so quickly when I see the silhouette of a kite or vulture that it’s a miracle I haven’t twisted my neck yet.
It’s hard to say what my experience would be like if I walked all the way to the end of the road with these wonderful people. I will never know, because I have made my choice. And I know it is the right choice. It will take me up into the mountains and back into the natural world, where I am and have always been at my happiest.
Here’s to that – to good health and happiness, and a significantly harder road ahead! BB x
Albergue Municipal de Peregrinos, Frómista. 19.59.
Well, you’ve got to hand it to the good people of Castrojeriz. They may not sleep much, but they sure know how to party.
The Garlic Festival kicked off at around 7pm. While the others ordered pizza, I went without supper (with the free sopa de ajo in mind), which turned out to be a mistake. They finally started serving at 9.40pm, and queuing for half an hour, I reached the serving station only to find that you had to bring your own bowl. Turns out the identical brown bowls the townsfolk were all carrying can be found in every home in Castrojeriz and beyond. It would have been nice to know before getting in line – you know, like a sign or something – but then, Spain has never been overly fond of letting non-locals in on its secrets. So I was dismissed with an apologetic ‘ay, pobre’ by one of the volunteers and went to bed on an empty stomach.
I had about an hour’s sleep until the Orquesta Dakar started playing just after midnight. They didn’t stop until ten past two in the morning, after which they were followed by a DJ until half past four. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the music, as it was absolutely my taste – Suavemente, Las manos pa’ arriba, Bailando, Madre Tierra, Mentirosa, El Tiburón and, randomly, You’re the One that I Want, to name just a few – but it did mean sleep was impossible. Then there was the family of locals who stopped beneath our window and, for whatever reason, decided to start howling and barking like dogs for a couple of minutes sometime between two and four (clearly all that garlic had no effect on the local werewolf population). I must have passed out somewhere around four, and was up again by five.
Thank goodness today was a shorter day!
There wasn’t much call for shooting off early on some monstrously long hike on no sleep (which I’ve been known to do when sleep-deprived), so I stuck around and had the fried breakfast buffet I’d paid for. We tackled the Alto de Mostelares and were up and over by half past seven. It was an easier climb of it than it would have been under the midday sun, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I should have pressed on yesterday and made for the Ermita de San Nicolas for a more spiritual (and restful) stop.
Descending from the hill, I found a manic speed in my feet and took off at a vicious pace. I didn’t need to, really, considering I had left far too late in the morning for another mad rush to Carrión, but for some reason I wanted to go it alone this morning.
It did mean for a bit more wildlife observation than I’ve managed for a while. There were a few silhouetted harriers up on the high Sierra de Mostelares, and a couple of rabbits and red deer grazing in the fields beyond. I was accompanied all the way by small families of stonechats and huge flocks of serins, twittering merrily from the stands of trees by the road.
This morning I had a close encounter with a zitting cisticola, a characterful little bird with a name that pretty much tells you all you need to know to identify it. They’re usually heard and not seen, measuring around 10cm from beak to tail and zitting high in the air and out of sight, but this one was quite happy to watch me go by, and didn’t flinch when I stopped to take a photo.
I considered staying in Boadilla del Camino, but just like two years ago, I arrived around 10, about three hours before the albergue was due to open. So I waited for the others, had a drink and carried on.
From Boadilla, the Camino follows the Canal de Castilla, a strange 18th century project that irrigates the northern reaches of Castilla y León. I saw just the one family coming the other way and no pilgrims, but I did have a brief encounter with a magical creature of the steppe: a flock of great bustards, one of Europe’s largest, rarest and most impressive birds. I’ve only ever seen them in the distance from trains or buses, but they’re always unmistakeable in flight: enormous, swan-like things with mottled feathers and pure white wings. It made my heart soar a little in this strange and man-made part of the Camino.
Well, I’m here in Frómista, which I bypassed last time. You know what? It’s not so bad. The albergue municipal is decent and the company is highly entertaining. I guess I gave it the cold shoulder last time in my hurry to press on and meet the crowd. I’m glad I stayed over. BB x
One of the best things about the Camino – at least, for somebody who does not particularly enjoy sticking to a strict plan – is its absolute freedom. You can aim for a particular destination at the end of the morning, but if you overshoot, or find a place you like along the way, you can always change your plan. And – it goes without saying – there is no “true” Camino. There never has been. There is simply your route to Santiago, wherever that may lead you.
Today, I decided to take a major detour through the Foz de Lumbier, deviating from the “official” Camino by some six kilometres, in search of one of the most striking landscapes to be seen on all of the routes to Santiago de Compostela.
Google Maps suggested the detour would take around eight hours, so I set out early, leaving Sangüesa’s albergue at around 5.15am (5.20, technically, as I left my sticks behind and had to double-back to get them). The Camino turns off about half a kilometre north of Sangüesa, just before the Smurfit industrial complex, but I pushed on along the road towards Liédana. There was quite a bit of traffic at first, but it was mostly workers going to the factory: after leaving the complex behind, I hardly saw anyone on the road.
There were a few scattered yellow arrows west of Liédana, indicating that this must once have been one of the many Camino routes, if not perhaps one of the more commonly known alternatives. I had timed my arrival at La Foz for sunrise, knowing that any earlier would have been far too cold and dark and any later would risk a merciless march along the roads later on. Plus, in the first hour after dawn, it’s always possible you’ll find something unexpected, as the animals of the night make their final rounds before retreating into the dark places where they hide during the day.
I had not counted on the wind. A fierce north wind was blowing this morning, almost strong enough to knock the sunglasses off the top of my head, and easily powerful enough to make it impossible to listen to the audiobook I had on (Robert Harris’ Conclave – a little late to the party, I know).
La Foz de Lumbier is one of two major canyons that can be found in the Sierra de Leyre, formed by the southwest passage of two rivers, the Irati and the Salazar. The other, La Foz de Arbaiun, is even grander still, but stands some twelve kilometres to the east of Lumbier, putting it well out of reach of even this overambitious pilgrim for today.
The north wind was still howling down the canyon when I arrived, which made the tunnel access all the spookier: the only way in and out of the canyon is via two long tunnels cut into the cliffs, neither of which are lit. The southern tunnel curves around to the right, pitching you into total darkness for half a minute or so.
Once inside, a gravel track known as a Via Verde (a converted railway line) leads you along the gorge. Had I arrived later in the day, perhaps, I might have seen some of the canyon’s famous Egyptian Vultures: bizarre, chicken-faced creatures with white plumage and diamond-shaped tales that migrate to Spain from their winter quarters in Africa each year. However, they were nowhere to be seen this morning, presumably sitting on their nests deep in the many caves within the cliffs.
The gorge’s other resident vultures, however, were everywhere.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that my passage through the canyon was being very closely watched, as though hundreds of eyes were following me along the river. My guess wasn’t far off the mark: once my eyes adapted to the twilight of the canyon, I realised that many of the bushes atop the canyon walls were in fact a great host of griffons, staring down at me with bobbing movements of their snakelike necks.
Every so often one or two of them would spread their monstrously huge wings and take off into the morning, before returning, feet dangling, to land on some other outcrop downriver, before turning their hulking shapes to see how much progress I had made.
I make no secret of my love for vultures. They are far and away my favourite animals on this planet, and especially griffons. I have never recovered from seeing one for the first time during that first trip to Spain: never accustomed to anything larger than a herring full, I was spellbound by the sheer size of the beasts, with their hulking shape, their silent circling flight and the long, trailing fingers on the end of each wing. That obsession only intensified when I came face to face with them during a solitary climb up the misty mountain of El Gastor, where I spent an incredible hour watching the giants appear suddenly out of the mist at eye level, merely feet away from my perch at the edge of the mountain.
So perhaps you’ll understand why I was so quick to slap an extra six kilometres onto today’s 27km hike, if only to spend some time in the presence of these magnificent creatures. They truly take my breath away.
But Lumbier had more than just vultures to sling at me. Just before leaving the gorge, I noticed something moving in the water below. It might have been the wind, which had been making shapes across the surface of the river all morning, but this was moving slowly against the current. Something long, snake-like, with a white-whiskered face: an otter. Talk about a stroke of luck! Just like the lynx I encountered in Doñana earlier this year, this was a first: I have never seen an otter in the wild before, or at least, one that I could call with any degree of certainty. iPhone cameras are good, but they can’t zoom and they’re not brilliant at moving objects in low light, but if you look closely you can just about tell what you’re looking at!
Really, I ought to have hung around at the other side of the tunnel to see if it reappeared, but I wasn’t entirely sure how long it would take me to get back to the Camino, so I played it safe and left the otter to his morning swim. I certainly couldn’t have done an awful lot better with my phone camera even if it did return. I’ll just have to come back someday with the rest of my kit.
Instead, I skirted the town of Lumbier and made my way back to the Camino. This was easier said than done: the “official” route meanders through the turbine-topped hills on the other side of the roaring A-21. Getting back to it was no easy feat, so I followed the old concrete road to Jaca for about 8km.
Normally, road stretches along the Camino can be quite hairy, with grim or even challenging looks from drivers. A spate of pilgrim deaths on the “original” Camino, now overlaid with concrete highways, led to the move toward the current network of tracks and footpaths. However, thanks to the A-21, which runs parallel, there was hardly anyone on the road at all, which made for a very peaceful (if monotonous) walk.
The sun was well on its way to its throne in the Castilian sky by now, and with it, the vultures of La Foz de Lumbier came drifting out on the thermals, as though to see me off.
I had a veritable fleet of raptors to keep me company today. As well as the vultures, a few kestrels, buzzards and booted eagles were circling the hills around Izco, along with the usual red and black kites. Today added two new encounters to the mix: a pair of short-toed eagles – exceptional snake-hunters – and a young hen harrier, my first (and hopefully not last) of the Camino. I have an especial fondness for harriers, especially the ghostly grey males, whose long, tapering wings and bouncy flight always conjure up images of the endless meseta in my head.
The cattle-crowded foothills of the French Pyrenees seem like an age ago. We are now very much in crop country. It hasn’t had much of an impact on the flies, which are everywhere this summer (I suspect the two months of rain Spain had this spring has caused their numbers to explode this year), but it does make for considerably easier terrain.
Contrary to what the guidebooks say, Monreal does have a working bar/restaurante. The hospitalera should know – it’s her husband who runs it! So I will grab a pizza there tonight, before the last long march of the Camino Aragonés tomorrow toward Puente La Reina and the start of the next stage of my journey: the busier Camino Francés. At least, I hope it will be busier! There’s no guarantee in July, but it should at least have more than one pilgrim in the albergue from night to night! BB x
Picture this, if you can. Call upon all of your senses.
First, sound. Wind, cool and dry, blowing in the branches of the pine trees above, their branches coated in trailing clumps of lichen. A blackcap singing an enchanting solo in the forest, and an endless percussion of cicadas, assailing the ear with their rasping ostinato from every side. You can’t see them. But they’re there. Hundreds of them.
Next, smell. The fresh scent of pine bark, mingling with the dusty trace of crumbling masonry. The occasional coolness of water blowing in off the lake. Mingling with taste, a hint of fried fish from the bar, which closed up shop half an hour ago.
Touch, then. The feel of carved wood, nearly two centuries old. The trace of numbers in stone, chiselled in many hundreds of years before even that. The uneven cobbles of a road long since neglected, and the powdery feel of the houses that line it, within which a thousand plants have weaved a citadel of their own.
Finally, sight. Picture an entire village abandoned a hundred years ago. See the stone balconies, carved with Roman triumph, presiding over an empty world. A church, with fragments of brilliant blue still visible in the decaying fresco above the spot where the slate once stood, stripped bare and opened to the heavens. A lonely watchtower, manned now by thirsty crows, their beaks agape in the heat of the afternoon.
This is my stop for tonight: the abandoned village of Ruesta, one of the last stops before leaving Aragón.
I left on time this morning, shortly before six, sent on my way by Lulu and Nicole with a packed sandwich, an orange and a boiled egg. It felt like being sent off to school. Some hospitaleros really do push the boat out to make you feel at home during your brief stay!
I missed the sign in the darkness and so headed north for a kilometre before joining the road and returning to my westward trajectory. It added about fifteen minutes to my time, but it did give me an unrestricted view of the morning.
Camino sunrises are something of a tradition on the way to Santiago, but I am going to miss these Aragonese mornings. There’s something about the mountains that makes them that much more mystical. Maybe it’s the way the light turns each row of hills a different shade of blue, always fading toward the base.
I spent a considerable part of the morning chasing quails. They’re almost impossible to see with the naked eye, standing at around 16cm tall (that’s just over half a ruler) and seldom taking flight when alarmed, preferring to sit tight and rely on their cryptic camouflage to avoid detection. They were all over the place, though – I must have counted at least forty individuals calling from different spots along the Camino in the hour or two after sunrise. They can throw their voices around 150 metres, which can make them very hard to locate, especially when there are four or five in the same field calling at once. I flushed one completely by accident at the side of the road and it took off into one of the vast wheat fields on sharp, whirring wings.
England must have sounded like this, a long time ago. There are places you can go in the UK and hear quails, which do migrate that far (some make it all the way to Scotland), but not on the same scale as you can here in Spain.
Along with the quails, I saw a grey partridge – a rarity in Spain, confined to the north – and goodness knows how many corn buntings, but I think it’s the foxes that stood out the most. There must be plenty in the area, as I saw three within a rather short space of time, including one sprinting across a field near Martés.
A major feature of today’s walk were the badlands de yeso: strange, wrinkled mounds of gypsum, a distinctive feature of Aragón, Navarra and Almería. This is the kind of terrain that contains fossils like the shell I found yesterday: a prehistoric stockpile of marine life, buried deep beneath the soft grey hills. They’re really quite striking, and since there are no Caminos that pass through the Bardenas Reales to the southwest (one of the strangest lunar landscapes you can find in Europe), the Camino Aragonés does at least provide an introduction.
I stopped for water shortly after a brief exploration of Artieda and its gypsum hills (to the great confusion of a local who thought I’d lost the Camino). Here, at my feet of all places, I found one of the ventriloquists: not a quail, but a cicada. They usually conceal themselves high up in the trees, where their voices carry and their mottled bodies blend perfectly into the bark. This one was clearly an amateur, however, as the motion of its churring was trembling the blade of grass in its legs, making it stand out like a sore thumb.
Not to be outdone, my final hour was a butterfly parade, with a scarce swallowtail taking centre stage. I have fond memories of this little creature as it’s one of the ten animals I recorded on my first trip to Spain as an eleven-year-old. Contrary to the famous adage popularised by Muhammad Ali, most butterflies don’t “float”, having a rather manic and jerky flight. Swallowtails, however, are on the larger side, and they do float, or at least seem to, fanning their wings out midflight to glide on the air. They’re skittish, like most butterflies, so it’s hard to get close, but their size, acrobatics and striking colours make them a delight to watch.
Which brings me to Ruesta. There’s really all sorts on the Camino, and Ruesta is very much one of the sorts. Abandoned in 1959 after a lengthy decline – largely because of the construction of the nearby Yesa reservoir, which flooded most of the agricultural land the village depended on – the village has largely fallen into a slow state of disrepair.
Ruesta’s church had some spectacular frescos, which were carefully transferred to Jaca’s Diocesan museum to prevent them from being lost forever. I imagine the place might once have looked not too dissimilar to Artieda, a hilltop town not too far from here. From some angles, you can still just about imagine life as usual: children running down the street to school, the bakery in full swing, old locals gathered at a street corner to gossip…
Ruesta has two functioning buildings: a casa de cultura (of all things) and an albergue, complete with a lively bar/restaurante. The secret to Ruesta’s survival is its acquisition by the CGT, the Confederación General del Trabajo, one of Spain’s larger trade unions. There are plenty of clues for those who don’t recognise the red-and-black flag: the raised fist, the quotes and dates graffitied across the walls and the plethora of signage in Catalan, Galician and Basque (the CGT, being anarcho-syndicalist in its outlook, has strong ties to the local separatist movements).
To their credit, they’ve done a wonderful job. The regional government won’t step in to rebuild Ruesta, as it’s just one of over two hundred abandoned towns in Aragón, so the syndicate has stepped in. They’ve carved out a fully-functioning community in the heart of the old village and are carefully coexisting with the place, without feeling the need to develop or bulldoze what doesn’t serve. The result is a very unique staging post of the Camino de Santiago. There’s not many places along the profitable pilgrim road that have been allowed to fall apart, and yet at the same time been so carefully curated.
I wonder how the future will see us? The creatures of the past left their traces in the rocks by chance. We’ve been deliberately stamping our seal on the earth for thousands of years. Will they marvel at tyre tracks in the mud and put them in museums? Will they weave fantastical stories around the objects they find, like discarded vapes and perfume bottles? What will we make of it all, a thousand years from now?
The Camino gives you a lot of time to think. Six hour walks through the countryside, every day for six weeks… It’s a test of resilience, if not of your sanity. Thank goodness I’m perfectly happy with my own company! BB x
Eighteen years ago, some family friends came out to visit us and spend a walking holiday in the sierras of southern Andalucía. That’s when I first saw the Rock.
Since then, it has loomed large over so much of my work. It was a talking point in my Year 13 Extended Project Qualification on the Islamic Legacy in Spain. It served as an illustration on the front of my final dissertation on Pedro de Corral and the Spanish founding myth at Durham University. It’s been a subject for discussion in goodness knows how many A Level, IB and GCSE classes I’ve taught over the years, and it’s going to feature once again in the talk I’m delivering next week to the local Hispanic society on Spain’s Islamic History.
The Rock. Calpe. Tariq’s Mountain. One of the two pillars of Hercules. The key to the Mediterranean. Gibraltar has gone by many names over the centuries, indicating its enormous cultural footprint. So it’s easy to see why the Spanish get so cut up about the fact that this relatively small peninsula belongs, not to either of the countries that can see it – Spain and Morocco – but to the United Kingdom, an opportunistic seafaring nation that snapped up the city in 1704 during the War of the Spanish Succession. It was Spain – or rather the Spanish crown – that officially ceded the peninsula to Great Britain. It has been a decision they have regretted ever since.
Modern-day Gibraltar is a very strange place. You cross a staggeringly short airstrip and enter a completely different world – like a jigsaw piece from a different puzzle that fits, but looks totally out of place. It’s as though somebody has taken a slice of an English county town and dropped it incongruously on the Spanish coast. Not even the tourist-infested Costa del Sol matches its otherworldly vibe.
Red postboxes. English traffic signage. Curry, gin and Cadbury’s. Pubs bearing the faces of Lord Nelson and Queen Victoria. Even the layout of the high street is unmistakably English. If Spain truly wants Gibraltar back, it will have some serious landscaping to do.
As I recall, we were short of time on my last visit here. The bus from Málaga made the trip down the coast in record time, so I had all of six hours to explore – almost all of which I spent walking. My phone seems to think I’d clocked twenty-one kilometres by the end of it… which, given my roundabout route through town, to Europa Point and up and down the Rock, is probably not too far from the truth.
Hidden away at Europa Point is a symbol of the British subversion of the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht: the Jews’ Gate Cemetery, where many of its former rabbis are buried, and the Ibrahim al-Ibrahim Mosque, one of the largest in a non-Muslim country. Tucked away here on the south side of the rock, they’re not immediately obvious from the Spanish side, and while the mosque may be a recent addition (built in 1997), it’s thought that the cemetery was put there to conceal the presence of Gibraltar’s Jewish population from prying Spanish eyes. The Treaty of Utrecht was quite clear on the matter:
Her Britannic Majesty, at the request of the Catholic King, does consent and agree, that no leave shall be given under any pretence whatsoever, either to Jews or Moors, to reside or have their dwellings in the said town of Gibraltar.
Great Britain, unsurprisingly, largely ignored this clause of the Treaty, and Gibraltar has been a haven for a small enclave of Jews ever since. Lately, it seems a Muslim population has also returned to the Rock – large enough to warrant a sizeable mosque funded by the Saudis – fuelling some dissent from the Spanish side.
As you start to climb the rock at Jews’ Gate, the view across the Strait to the South becomes even more spectacular. What makes it all the more special to me is that I know those mountains very well, albeit from the other side, having climbed a few of them myself when I lived in Tetouan. I could just about see Ghorghez in the far distance, as well as the peninsula of Ceuta, but Jebel Musa is the most recognisable, being the most likely candidate for the southernmost of the Pillars of Hercules, the twin mountains that stand like sentinels at the mouth of the Mediterranean.
There’s an awful lot of lore here. The legend has it that the Greek hero Heracles split the original mountain in two in order to clear a passage to his tenth labour, the capture of the cattle of Geryon. While he was here, at the edge of the known world, he supposedly founded a city that would later become Seville. That’s why the Greek hero features so prominently in Spanish folklore – and on the Andalusian flag, for that matter. The legendary pillars themselves are on the Spanish cost of arms, emblazoned with the mantra ‘plus ultra’ or “further beyond” – the defiant Spanish response to an older inscription left on the rocks by the civilisations of old, non plus ultra, warning of the emptiness beyond: an emptiness that Christopher Columbus famously disproved in 1492.
Nowadays, both of the pillars bear the names of the two Muslim commanders who led the invasion of Spain: Musa bin Nusayr, the governor of Ceuta, and his subordinate, Tariq bin Ziyad. Though Tariq was executed on Musa’s orders for his hasty invasion (it’s not every day a raid turns into a regicide), it’s his name that has gone in history as Jebel Tariq – gradually mangled into Gibraltar.
Being so close to Africa, Gibraltar is a natural (and phenomenal) place to observe the annual migration of birds traveling to and from their breeding grounds in spring and autumn. It’s especially good in spring, as the birds ride the thermals on the Moroccan coast and soar across the Strait with hardly a wingbeat, gradually descending and sometimes arriving on the European side at eye level.
My camera was a dead weight as it had run out of power shortly after arriving in Gibraltar, and I’d plum forgotten to bring the charger (which I could have used here, since Gibraltar uses English sockets). All the same, I could observe some of the migrating birds with the naked eye. I clocked around thirty black kites as I climbed the Rock, along with a number of honey buzzards and black storks. I thought I heard some bee-eaters, but they turned out to be an audio recording hidden in the bushes at the park’s entrance. How odd!
Let’s be honest, though – I came here to see the monkeys!
The Barbary macaque is the only species of monkey that you can find in the wild in Europe. The fossil record shows that they were once found across Europe during the Ice Age, but they can now only be found in the Rif Mountains of Morocco – and here in Gibraltar. It’s almost certain that these aren’t the last survivors of the European population, but rather a group brought over by the Moors (and later restocked on the orders of Winston Churchill himself). Nevertheless, they’re as much at home here as they are in the cedar forests of the Atlas Mountains across the Strait. Perhaps more so, since there are so many hapless tourists just asking to have their lunch stolen.
There’s plenty of food left out for the macaques every day, but there’s a further incentive for keeping your snacks under a close watch: it’s illegal to feed the monkeys, punishable by a fine of up to £4,000. That won’t stop them from trying to snatch what you’ve got, edible or otherwise, but it’s best to avoid any cases of mistaken identity by keeping your food and drink out of sight.
This one by the Skywalk was scoffing something that definitely wasn’t official monkey food. I wonder what they make of M&Ms? Do you suppose they taste any better to a monkey’s palate?
It’s a bizarre experience, walking around the Rock and seeing wild monkeys wandering about the place, like some African safari. The long lines of white tourist taxis crawling along the Queen’s Road and stopping for their passengers to take photos only add to the experience. Not that the macaques seem to mind overmuch – the youngsters are quite happy to play undisturbed.
Alonso del Portillo, the first Spaniard to include Gibraltar in his chronicles, referred to the macaques as the “true owners” of the Rock, occupying its eastern face since “time immemorial”. Even so, I wonder if their not so inhuman brains ever stretch as far as thoughts of that land on the other side of the sea, where the rest of their kin can be found? They certainly seem to spend a lot of time looking out that way.
I’ve always been a keen naturalist, but my especial love for primates goes back to my time in Uganda, where I had the privilege of seeing mountain gorillas up close. That seems a more logical place to start, since it probably doesn’t stretch back as far as my last visit to Gibraltar, when one of the macaques welcomed me to the Rock by shitting down the back of my hoodie as I left the cable car.
No cable car this time – and no shit either. Cause and effect! (And also a financial dodge, as the cable car costs an extortionate 19€…)
The only downside to not taking the cable car was the climb back down the Rock. I took the steps down the Charles V wall, a 16th century fortification against the Barbary pirates who once plagued these waters. They’re bloody steep, they can only be walked down (or up) in single file, and there’s the added hazard that the macaques use them as well – and they don’t like to be cornered.
Fortunately, by the time I came down, it was well past noon and most of the macaques were dozing off the midday sun. These two barely batted an eyelid as I carefully stepped over them. I hope the tourists I passed at the bottom coming down were as considerate.
A local legend has it that Gibraltar will only fall when the monkeys go – much like the English legend about the ravens and the Tower of London. And just like the ravens, the government has stepped in to prevent that superstition from coming to pass in times of crisis. Winston Churchill had their numbers bolstered during the Second World War when their numbers dwindled to just seven individuals – no doubt relying on his friendly relations with the infamous Thami El Glaoui, the self-styled Lord of the Atlas Mountains.
El Glaoui was a wily tribal chieftain and the son of a slave who, through a number of deft political manoeuvrings, came to rule much of modern Morocco. He is said to have counted Winston Churchill as one of his close friends. I wonder what he really thought of the eccentric British bulldog? Or of his decision to resupply the apes to keep a British legend alive? In Morocco, these beautiful creatures are often caught and forced to perform in market squares for the amusement of tourists. At least here in Gibraltar they don’t have to wear humiliating dresses or chains and can claim the Rock as their home.
Unsurprisingly, it’s getting late. That took a long time to write. I should get some sleep, but the Guardia Civil are processing tonight and I’d love to see that before the Legion arrives tomorrow. And that really should be a special way to end my adventures. What a journey it’s been! BB x
Everything always looks better in the light of a new day. It also always feels better after a decent night’s sleep, which – bar a brief episode where the street sweeper went by at 4am this morning and woke everyone up – I most definitely had. With my inner city blues no longer making me want to holler quite like they did the day before, I set out into Málaga in search of somewhere green and quiet.
The street sweepers were still at work as I wandered across the old town, scouring the slabs outside the cathedral. There’s two reasons for this: one, to remove the wax from the dripping candles of the processions, and two, to remove the gum spat out by the thousands of spectators (especially the younger ones – almost every other guy and girl was chewing something last night).
I see a fair amount of gum-chewing as a teacher, but nowhere near as much as I do here. Spanish kids seem to be hooked on the stuff.
Gibralfaro is the antidote to the crowded streets of Málaga. An island of green in the busy seafront city, it allows for a rapid escape from the noise. Stick to the nature trails and you’ll leave even the rest of the foreigners behind. It might seem hard to believe, but there are corners of Gibralfaro where you can sit and imagine what this place was like a hundred years ago, before the coast was swallowed up by the leviathan of modern day tourism.
I came here looking for chameleons, primarily. They’re one of a number of strange African animals that can be found in Spain, alongside the genet, the mongoose, the Barbary macaque and the crested coot – all but the last of them introduced by the Moors, in all likelihood, though there is fossil evidence to indicate that some inhabited the Iberian peninsula in ancient times.
Looking for chameleons was something of a personal quest when I was a boy. They’re notoriously hard to spot, being both small in size and famously good at camouflaging themselves to blend into their surroundings, but that only made it more exciting. My parents took me on at least two abortive attempts along the coast of Cádiz, once to Barbate and once again to some other location whose name escapes me. Even with the knowledge that they have a preference for white broom bushes (perhaps on account of the insects they attract), they always managed to elude me.
It wasn’t until my last few days left in Spain, when my brief but life-changing year in Andalucía came to an end, that I finally struck gold. Hiding within the branches of a broom bush near the cliffs of Barbate, and not much longer than the span of my hand, was a chameleon. I had done it – I could leave Spain in peace.
It was, looking back, the first of the ‘great quests’ that I have set for myself. Finding a chameleon was the fulfilment of a boy’s dream just as finding my Spanish family was the accomplishment of an older, wiser wish.
Most of my ‘great quests’ have centred on Spain. I suspect that they will continue to do so as long as my heart beats in time with the magnetic pulse of this beautiful country.
Well, I didn’t find any chameleons this time. They’re quite numerous in the Axarquía, the verdant sierras that stretch east along the coast from Málaga, but while there are supposedly a few to be found on Gibralfaro, I didn’t see any. Still, it was a fun way to kill some time and step back into the shoes of a younger version of me whose passion for Spain was only just beginning to burn.
I did have a couple of encounters with the mountain’s red squirrels, though. Like most of the mammals that inhabit the Iberian peninsula, their fur is streaked with darker colours to better match the terrain around them. The only obvious shades of red can be seen in their fingers and toes.
The invasive American grey squirrels that have driven our native reds almost to extinction in the United Kingdom are not to be found here in Spain, so the reds are a lot less fearful than they are back home. They do, however, seem to possess the same fiery temperament that is often associated with humans of their colouring, and are quick to sound the alarm when they sense a threat.
One species that has invaded Spain in the last century – almost as obviously as the tourists – is the monk parakeet. This South American species fulfils the same niche as the Asian ring-necked parakeet in the south of England, albeit with a much wider range: monk parakeets can be found in larger cities from Barcelona and Valencia all the way along the Mediterranean coast to Málaga and Cádiz, and even as far inland as Madrid.
They’re impossible to miss by even the briefest visitor to Spain’s cities, not least of all on account of the racket they make as they fly around the parks and gardens in search of fallen fruit, dried or otherwise. They made such an impact on the Spanish cityscape that the Japanese developers of the most recent Pokémon games, Scarlet and Violet, modelled an aggressive parrot-like Pokémon on them: Squawkabilly, whose appearance (and Pokédex description, for that matter) matches them exactly.
It was supposed to rain today, but it didn’t come down until late. Rain isn’t unheard of in Semana Santa. In fact it’s quite common, common enough for every hermandad to have a backup plan. And several backup plans were required this afternoon, as the heavens opened to a brief but torrential downpour.
I stayed inside for the worst of it, following the rescue attempts live on TV, and then set out to find a space in the brief respite provided by the rains – and, morbidly, perhaps, to see what damage had been done.
There’s usually the odd outpouring of grief from the spectators during the processions, sometimes in the form of a beautiful and spontaneous saeta (the traditional songs sung to the pasos, which requires the procession to come to an immediate halt), but there were a lot more tear-stained faces than usual. For some Catholics in Spain, this is the high point of the Christian calendar: publicly demonstrating their faith summa cum laude with their friends and family in the hermandad. When the conditions are just too poor, some pasos will be rained off entirely.
I counted at least five nazarenas in floods of tears being consoled by their families after dressing their best, only to be soaked to the skin and unable to continue their procession.
I’ve often wondered if the reason the Andalusians take Semana Santa to heart so much more than the other regions of Spain is that they once had far more to prove: being the region of Spain held longest by the Muslims, theirs was the shakiest of Christian bloodlines, and thus it must have behoved them to make twice as much of a show of being good Christians than their co-religionists in the north. It would go some way to explaining the unrestrained force of duende in the hearts of many an Andaluz costalero.
It’s just a theory, but I think it might have some grounding in truth.
Despite the threat in the clouds, the rain never returned. Jesus and Mary were taken out of the protective plastic coverings that had been hastily applied, the ornate candle-holders were emptied of all the water they had accumulated and those processions that had already made a start have now jumped the gun to make good for lost time. They will go on late into the morning, with the latest finishing around half past four. The crowds will be with them all throughout the night, but I need some sleep. Tomorrow brings another grand adventure – the last of this grand tour. I hope my legs are in good shape! BB x
The long-promised rains have arrived. Buckets of it. It began with a sudden gust of wind in the palm trees and a ripple over the lagoon, turning the mirrored surface of the water into a sea of silvery sand dunes. Some of the locals wandering in the square turned to the west and pulled their jackets about them. The savvier ones pointed and moved toward the shelter of the church. Then the darkening sky turned a pale grey, and the trees beyond the road disappeared behind an advancing sheet of rain. Just as the church bell chimed for half past, an almighty drumroll of thunder sounded in response and the heavens opened, and down it came: sheet rain, a wall of water, turning the sandy streets of El Rocío into rivers in a matter of minutes. By the time I made it back to my casa rural I was soaked to the skin – and more alive than I’ve ever been.
Some devotees of La Blanca Paloma – the White Dove, the nickname of the Virgen del Rocío – believe that her sudden appearance in the branches of an olive tree in the marshes of Almonte was a manifestation of the divine. More sceptical minds might be persuaded that the image was simply one of many hidden away from the conquering Moors and scattered across the countryside, forgotten until their chance discovery by bewildered countryfolk. Whatever you choose to believe, the Virgen del Rocío exerts a powerful influence over the town and its surroundings, bringing more than a million pilgrims to her shrine every year.
One legend has it that the townsfolk prayed for her intercession during the Napoleonic invasion, hearing that a raiding force of French soldiers was heading for the town. For whatever reason, they never made it as far as El Rocío, turning back at Pilas, just shy of thirty kilometres away. Maybe it was the unforgiving terrain of the marshes – or maybe it was the watchful power of the Virgen. Who knows? The fact remains that the village of El Rocío was untouched by both the Napoleonic War and the Civil War in the following century, a conflict which tore almost every town in Spain apart. It’s easy to see how many have come to believe that some great force watches over these marshes, shielding them from harm.
It hasn’t been able to protect them from everything. While it’s incredible to see Doñana restored to life, it’s important to bear in mind how it got into the state it was in: this time last year, the news were all full of woe, decrying the death of one of Europe’s last great wetlands as its life was slowly sucked out of it. Why, you ask? Climate change may be part of it, but the blame lies almost entirely at the feet of the monstrous theft of the land’s water by the agropiratas.
These mercenary industries have set up shop in the outskirts of Doñana and, over the last two decades, they’ve been draining its aquifers to grow strawberries on an industrial scale. Strawberries are a very water-hungry fruit, and the results have been catastrophic, causing the water supply to cascade, lakes to dry up and the local extinction of a number of species that can be found almost nowhere else, including the white-headed and marbled ducks, the salinete (a fish found only in Doñana) and the eel – formerly abundant and now almost completely eradicated from these marshes.
I could do a lot more for charity’s sake, but there are two causes I will not budge from. I will never visit Malta, on account of their refusal to abide by European laws concerning the protection of migrating birds (they still practise the vile tradition of bird-liming), and I will never buy strawberries from Spain, knowing what damage they are causing here. If only we could go back to a time before globalisation, when people were more patient, and prepared to wait for strawberries to be in season, for a short time each year…
It’s still raining out there. It cleared up for a few hours, and then the storm clouds came back with a vengeance. March 2025 has been one of the wettest months in Spain since records began, putting an end to four years of minimal rainfall. It hasn’t been unprecedented: the flash floods that swept through Valencia in October and claimed 232 lives are still a very recent memory. Even so, taken as a whole, the average rainfall over the last five years is still well below the average. Spain will need more consistent rain if places like Doñana are to survive in the long run.
That, and decisive action from the government on the villainous agropiratas and their strawberry farms.
I wanted to make the most of the park’s rebirth, so I went for a long walk in the pine woods of La Rocina to the south of El Rocío. A boardwalk trails stretches for five kilometres along the side of the river that feeds into the Madre de las Marismas, the lagoon that sits under the eye of the Virgen del Rocío. Like the Raya Real, this place is very dear to me: I used to come here as a boy and look for bee-eaters, hoopoes and scarab beetles in the scrubland at the trail’s northern edge.
My sense of smell – mercifully restored after a debilitating cold had me in its grip at the start of my travels – was assailed on all sides by Spanish lavender and curry plant, and every bush seemed to harbour a nightingale. I even saw one, singing high in the branches of one of the pines – a fairly impressive feat, since these master ventriloquists have the uncanny ability to seek out the most acoustic spots in the forest, whilst also remaining invisible to the naked eye as they perform their vast repertoire. I’ve included a recording I took below – have a listen and you’ll see what I mean.
I spent my last evening in El Rocío enjoying boquerones fritos and an incredible torrija – a Semana Santa speciality – in Restaurante La Canaliega, watching the sun set over the Madre de las Marismas. The town’s drains were working overtime to deal with the rivers that had formed in the streets, but there was still enough water in the main square to form a second lagoon, reflecting the Ermita’s unique shell-shaped doorway.
I would have traveled a thousand miles to see just this view, but the Virgen del Rocío saw fit to show me her rarest treasure of all on the day I arrived. I have come away with a new rosary of hers, so that I can offer my thanks wherever I am, and so that there will be some piece of her influence wherever I go.
I used to get the stuffing knocked proverbially out of me at school for defending my stance on faith, in spite of being a “rational thinker”. I stand by my beliefs to this day: I do think the world is a better place with a little more love and little more mystery. On the one hand, I adore the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake: the ability to look up at the stars and know their names.
But I also think it’s important to value the wisdom of the ancients. I may not be able to see the shape of a lion up there, but somebody must have done once to call a constellation Leo. And though it took me a long time to find Lynx, it’s taken me a lot longer to find the animal in the flesh. This year, Doñana – and whatever mystical force presides over these marshes – saw fit to show me a glimpse. You can call me credulous if you like, but that’s enough to make a man like me believe.
Not for nothing is the lake named the Madre de las Marismas: the Mother of Marshes. Doñana is feminine in every way, from its name to its essence: a provider, a life-giver, faithful, fickle and generous in turn. I have always said that Spain is my greatest love – but it’s probably fair to say that Doñana is that love crystallised into one place.
I have been gone too long. I must return someday. The fight to save these precious marshes goes on. BB x
There’s a place in Austria called Zell am See that’s a magnet for Muslim tourists because it supposedly matches a verse in the Qur’an that describes jannah, the paradise promised to the faithful. I’m not sure that’s strictly true, as I’ve never been able to track down that specific verse (or anything like it, for that matter), but that hasn’t stopped 70,000 tourists from the Gulf from holidaying in Zell am See every year, propagating what was, I am quite sure, a devious but highly effective marketing strategy.
Now, snow-capped mountains mirrored in a clear lake might do it for some people, but for me, if there truly is a Paradise on Earth, it’s where I’m sitting right now: on a grassy verge of the Raya Real, between the stone-pine forests of the Doñana National Park and the silver-bladed fields of Matasgordas.
This is Heaven. It was when I first discovered it when I was only eleven years old, and it has been ever since.
I’m not ashamed to say I nearly wept when I got off the bus and set foot in El Rocío. It’s been nine years since I last came here – almost to the day. This unique little town on the edge of the Madre de las Marismas is probably not at the top of everyone’s list of Spanish must-sees, but it is unshakeably at the top of mine. I believe I described it then as having the smell of a mixture of a stud farm and an aviary, which isn’t far off, but doesn’t quite do it justice.
Ah, but I was writing in retrospect then. Let me tell you what I can see and smell and hear from where I’m sitting. I’ll leave the judgement of its Elysian qualities up to you.
Sight. First, there’s the sunlight. Everywhere. Warm, spring sunlight chasing the iron-grey storm clouds into the west. Huge white clouds rush to take their place, and between them are enormous gaps of blue ether. Every time I look up, there’s a bird of prey up there somewhere: usually a black kite, but sometimes a buzzard or a pair of booted eagles.
The Raya Real – the pilgrim road to Seville – stretches out before me. In a month or so, it will be crowded with rocieros, the men dressed in riding grey and the women in stunning flamenco dresses, singing folk songs as they near their final destination. But now, as it is for most of the year, the only travelers on the road are tourists and locals on horseback, and the odd jogger. And me, sitting in the same spot I have sought out since childhood, under the lightning tree.
Behind me, the wind blows through the fields of Matasgordas. Waves of silver ripple across the grass, dappled here and there by the golden heads of buttercups and dandelions. Holm oaks reach their gnarled and twisted branches skyward, providing little pools of shade on the prairie.
Smell. The warm scent of rain upon the earth, upon sand. The intensity of Spanish lavender, leaving a heady perfume on my finger as I touch its leaves. The clean air of the pinewoods, and the faint sweetness of sap.
There’s the faint scent of water in the air, but no sign of rain clouds – and still it’s there, promising a second bounty. There’s horse manure here and there, but it doesn’t add to the smells the way it does in England. It’s dry and processed and rolled away by the scarabs and other beetles before it has a chance to decay.
Sound. There’s the wind in the stone-pines, of course. It sounds clean and clear, like the distant swell of the Atlantic. But beneath the wind, there’s an orchestra. A rooster is crowing from a farm on the edge of town. The black kites whistle as they wheel overhead, and now and then I can hear the jolly whirrup of a bee-eater – surely two of the most beautiful sounds on Earth. Other birds sing from the heart of the forest: blackbirds, serins, robins and nightingales, cuckoos and hoopoes and treecreepers. Somewhere out in the fields beyond I can just about make out the tiny wet-my-lips whistle of a quail.
Then there’s the jingle of bells as a horse and carriage passes by, taking a local family out for a ride, and the whinnying of a stallion as a couple of proud locals ride on up the Raya Real. The heavily inflected illó shouted from one rider to another.
And then something incredible happens. I’m watching a couple of booted eagles wheeling about overhead and, as I look, one of them bobs its head as though it’s seen something behind me that I haven’t. I turn and look – and I can’t believe my eyes.
Literally feet away from me is a lynx. One of the rarest cats in the world, just walking along the edge of the field, completely unfazed – or unaware – that I’m standing there.
I have come to Doñana for years, ever since I was a boy, and always hoped to see one of these elusive, beautiful creatures, but never expected to do so. They’re incredibly secretive, they live deep within the heart of the national park, and – going off the last count in 2022 – there are only around a hundred or so spread across the 543 square kilometres that make up the Doñana National Park. I didn’t expect to ever see one in the wild – never mind quite so close as this.
If I needed a sign that my beloved Doñana had come back from the dead, that might have been it. But there was something more. Something even more personal still to find.
My lightning tree has come back to life. As a boy I used to sit beneath its scant shade and look for snakes and geckos in the cracks in its dead branches. Its gnarled silhouette was always a beacon, a recognisable wayfinder along the Raya Real. Now, a younger shoot of the tree has grown within its ancient cradle and blossomed into new life once again.
I was so sad on my last visit to Doñana when the lakes had dried up and the only sound was the wind – it really left an impression on me, and I was so afraid to return.
Just seeing how much new life there is in the place is enough to fill this man’s heart right up to the top and overflow. I’m giddy. This place has a magic that works on me like nothing, nobody and nowhere else on the planet.
It’s brought my lightning tree back to life. And, in a way, it’s brought me back to life as well.
I don’t need to seek Paradise in the Alpine lakes of Austria, or even in the pages of some holy text. I have found it here in the marshes of Almonte. I’m usually a little skeptical about the various Marian apparitions in locations up and down the country, but I’ll make an exception for La Virgen del Rocío. If I were an incarnation of rebirth and new life looking to relocate, this is exactly where I’d choose to appear. BB x
The Book of Barnabas 