Spain

Destination Peru

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Terminal 4S. 6.08.

“Nobody speaks English in this fucking airport,” says the miserable Brit sitting behind me over the phone. “You’d think in one of the busiest airports in the word they might have someone who can speak English.”

With that kind of attitude, it’s hardly surprising that flights to the UK are sequestered away in Madrid’s cut-off Terminal 4S, together with all the other non-European destinations: Bogotá, San Juan, Dallas and Chicago…

I know I can be a bit of a snob when it comes to Spanish, but it always gives me a knot in my stomach when I hear one of my countrymen speaking like that, as though the rest of the world should simply kowtow to the supremacy of the English and their language. That mindset should have perished with the Empire, long ago, but sadly it’s all too common – and probably on the rise, with the number of students studying languages continuing to plummet in the UK.

For the record, English is absolutely everywhere in Barajas. Most of the signage is in English first and Spanish second. You’d have to try pretty hard to be genuinely cut off from the English language out here these days. Sometimes I think the Spaniards just enjoy playing the “no hablo inglés” card when they encounter a grumpy fellow like the man behind me. It keeps us on our toes – and it’s one way to get back at us for the slap in the face that was Brexit.

12.192 feet above the Atlantic, Southwest of Corvo & Flores. 11.55.

They dimmed the lights in the cabin about two hours ago, shortly after serving breakfast. Most of the passengers are wrapped up in their blankets and fast asleep. I don’t know how much I have slept in that time, but I’d wager it’s not much – more like wakeful dozing. I don’t usually go to bed before one or two in the morning, so despite the five AM start I’m probably operating on a good deal more sleep than usual. I moved my trip to Paracas to Wednesday, which should give me time to get a good night’s sleep and acclimatise once I reach Lima.

There’s a nice father and daughter from La Rioja sitting next to me, off to visit a relative in Guatemala. Since we’ve established friendly relations, hopefully they’ll let me take a photo out of the window when we pass over the Caribbean in a few hours’ time. I’ve got the aisle seat, which is fine for legroom, but bad luck for both sleep and views.

I haven’t got my head around the boarding procedure for Avianca. I was in Group F out of A-G, so I assumed I’d be one of the last on, but they let F-G on before D-E. Unremarkable, maybe, but I’m in Group D on the next flight, so I hope that doesn’t mean I’m right at the back of the line. I guess it depends on how the Colombians order their alphabet.

The folks up in business class are all tucked away in their cabins. I could never justify paying that much to fly – and probably fail to sleep anyway – but it must be pretty snug.

43.000 feet above the Caribbean Sea. 16.10.

The lights have come back. I wonder if that means they’re serving lunch? They’ve got Superman on the film listing, but my earphones are of the lightning port variety, so I can’t get them to work. I’ve spent a couple of hours catching clips from those watching films around me. By the way they’re all watching with the subtitles on, I can’t help but wonder if they’re all in the same boat.

We flew over the Caribbean about an hour ago. I saw one island among the clouds through the tinted windows of the cabin while waiting for the bathroom to become available, but I’m not sure which one. Nassau, perhaps? The route map on the tele screen only gives its capital as St. Maarten, but my knowledge of Caribbean geography isn’t exactly watertight. It’s a first taste of how unfamiliar the world around me is about to be.

The wind is starting to pick up. The reefs and atolls of Aruba have appeared on the horizon, the vanguard of a mighty continent. Beyond that lies Venezuela. The enormity of South America is about to open up beneath me.

Aeropuerto Internacional El Dorado, Bogotá, Colombia. 12.28 (19.28 GMT+1).

¡Bienvenidos a Colombia! The weather forecast says thundery showers with a gentle breeze but the sun is shining brightly out there. I’m hoping that’s a sign of things to come.

El Dorado reminds me a lot of Dallas International, in that almost everybody here seems to be going somewhere else. The queue for passport control to leave the airport was barely in the double figures while the line for connecting flights stretched on down half the hallway. I was sorely tempted to strike out and explore Bogotá, but for once in my life I’ve erred on the side of caution. For one thing, I’m tired, and I’d definitely need my wits about me out there. For another, I haven’t planned this leg of the journey at all, so I really would be going it blind. Most importantly, my next flight boards at 4pm, so while I have around four hours to wait, that’s not really enough to risk a potentially unsafe pitstop on Colombian soil.

Some other time, Colombia. Let’s not derail this South American adventure before it’s even started.

The airport WiFi in Bogotá leaves much to be desired. It’s not free like Madrid, and after only a couple of prompts my phone won’t even take me to the airport website anymore, so I’ve resorted to data – I needed to get online to finalise my pick-up from Lima tonight. The hostel are sending a car for me. I’m normally averse to that sort of thing, but I’d rather play it safe in a place I don’t know.

At least to start with.

Puerta A6, Aeropuerto Internacional El Dorado, Bogotá, Colombia. 14.20.

Still a couple of hours to go until my connecting flight departs for Lima. When I’m done writing I’ll decamp to a charging station to give my phone some extra juice – I’ll need it to contact my driver once I land.

I’ll do some reading to while away the time. I’ve brought a book with me but it’s a bit florid. I find myself skipping entire pages just to advance the plot. I bought it years ago because the setup sounded exactly like my cup of tea (19th century intercultural romance set in a distant corner of the British Empire) but it’s a bit of a slow burn. It’s been a while since a book really grabbed me. I ought to make that my mission out here. I’ve downloaded the audiobook of Michelle Paver’s latest, Rainforest, if not for the valid thematic link to this adventure then because her books always strike gold.

Some observations of Colombia, you ask? Hm. It seems to be a land of strange trees and clouded mountains; of sleepy travellers and softly-spoken staff; of real coffee, fake boobs and handsome aquiline noses. A place where people haven’t forgotten the joy of having children. Where Dallas was a concrete desert, Bogotá at least has the decency to keep their largest transit hub a tree-lined haven. I bought some travel-sized toothpaste and a couple of snacks and the bill came back in Colombian pesos, though the till used the dollar symbol. Thank heavens my bank statement gave the true cost in pounds, or I might have just paid 45.000$ for a 22ml tube of Colgate Triple Action…

There’s not that much to see on the wildlife front from the departures lounge. I clocked a couple of foreign-looking swallows flitting about outside and I’m almost certain I saw the silhouettes of three black vultures wheeling about over the residential district to the east, but other than that, the only obvious denizens of the runway are the cattle egrets that seem to follow the groundskeepers about like stray dogs. I’ll just have to wait a little longer for the party to really begin.

Somewhere over the Cordillera de Sumapaz, Colombia. 18.27.

A lonely light twinkles in the darkening world below: a single, blinking star in a forest as dark as the night. It is the only sign of civilisation for miles around. And then the light, the forest and all the earth beneath it are swallowed up by the clouds. The sprawl of Bogotá is a distant memory.

I paid 20$ for less than ten minutes’ worth of a view from the window, but I consider it money well spent. Like that first waterfall I saw in Ethiopia as we came down out of the clouds all those years ago, it is a sight I will not forget. The last homely house in Colombia. The Rivendell of the Rainforest.

A few stragglers from Madrid have made it onto the plane. The stately Peruvian gentleman with the cane who was the first onto the plane at both Madrid and Bogotá. A barmy looking gentleman in a puffer jacket and a wide-brimmed hat festooned with badges and his wife with the wine-red hair. No sign of the white man with the dreadlocks down to his waist – I suspect he has gone into Bogotá in search of an ayahuasca shaman. I suppose we all have our reasons for traveling this far. On reflection, are mine any less barmy?

A family of three were late and so the plane was held up by about twenty minutes. In that time I managed to finish Romesh Gunesekera’s Prisoners of Paradise (I don’t like leaving a job half done). It picked up in the second half, but I found myself skipping pages again toward the end. I wasn’t sure whether it was trying to be a Malabar Pride and Prejudice or a gritty historical account of colonial prejudice. Either way, I found the heroine jarring.

Time and again, one finds the narrative of the enemies to lovers trope in romance fiction.

Yuck.

I don’t think I’ve ever understood why romance that evolves out of people being fickle and mean to each other is so highly prized. Maybe it’s a condition peculiar to Western women. Give me the sincere and generous passion of the Latin any day.

I suspect that’s why I put The Far Pavilions on such a pedestal – it manages to stage a believable passionate romance that is neither coy nor mawkish. It’s certainly proved a very tough act to follow.

Hostal Pariwana, Miraflores, Lima, Peru. 21.36.

Te estamos vigilando.

Lima. The scenery has shifted dramatically. Between Jorge Chávez International Airport and downtown Lima sits Callao, a sprawling conurbation which must be crossed to enter the city, If you needed reminding that Peru isn’t all high-end tourist offerings after weeks of preparation and booking in advance, Callao provides an immediate antidote.

Enormous posters line the edge of the runway, advertising Ayacucho, Amazonas and Machu Picchu in brash, gaudy colours; across the street, row upon row of squat houses in varying states of completion, and all of them very much lived in. Wide dusty streets with pitfalls and potholes. Fried chicken shops every minute or so. Election posters promising a safer Callao, plastered in duplicate over every flat surface. Police tape – peligro, no pasar. Dollar stores everywhere – a mere talon of the claw of the American overlord. Graffiti on the walls: el mundo apesta (the world stinks).

And then, suddenly, Callao falls away and there it is. The Ocean. The mighty Pacific. I saw it from the plane, but this is something else. It’s too dark to appreciate it in all of its majesty, but I had a hint of its bounty by the sheer number of fishing ships out in the bay. They looked more like an armada readying for war.

Miraflores feels like a completely different city. Callao felt like the South America I’ve been reading about in history books. Miraflores is more like the one you find in Nat Geo Traveller or a copy of Lonely Planet. American twenty-somethings discussing the TSA, pipe dreams of owning their own airplanes and the relationships that other travellers have struck up along the way.

It’s ten past eleven here in Lima, but it’s ten past six in Madrid. Give or take a couple of hours’ sleep on the plane from Bogotá, I have been awake for almost twenty five hours. I had better turn in or tomorrow really will be a washout! BB x

Pit Stop

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Hostal Alonso, Madrid. 20.56.

Of all the days to have for a twenty-four hour pitstop in Spain, I had to pick the one where the temperature dropped a full ten degrees. My light fleece couldn’t handle the Arctic chill of 11°C (a good warning for Peru). Tomorrow it’ll be back up to 24°C here – but this time tomorrow I’ll be far away, waiting for my connecting flight in Bogotá. I still can’t quite get my head around that.

After an exquisite dinner of rabo de toro at Las Brasas del Vulcano last night (easily one of the best if not the best that I have ever eaten), I managed a relatively early start this morning to catch the first bus to Toledo. I think I had it in my head that I’d see all sorts of wildlife along its riverbanks, but it was very windy today, and I had also promised myself I’d do Palm Sunday Mass – a much-needed blessing to give me luck in the weeks to come – so it wasn’t as busy on the nature front as I had imagined. All the same, I saw what I came all the way to see: a night-heron.

Seems a little foolhardy, no? After all, night-herons are one of the very few Old World species that you can also find on the other side of the Atlantic. However, night-herons have a special place in my heart because I can date my career as a birdwatcher to the day I first saw one of these handsome fellas in Córdoba in 2005, on the day Pope John Paul II died.

The last time I visited Toledo was in 2013, when I was backpacking across Spain on a budget of 200€. I was eighteen, my Spanish was passable and I was already dangerously underweight, on account of not really considering food and drink a necessary expense. Fortunately, I have grown up a lot since then, and learned that, of all things, food is the last thing that should be omitted from the budget.

On that mad adventure, I have a particularly distinct memory of treating myself to a sopa castellana – my first meal out in a week – and feeling like my whole body had been healed at a stroke. As such, to my mind, that simple peasant dish remains the sultan of soups. If it is on the menu, I will have nothing else.

I treated myself to an upmarket lunch as a Spanish sendoff at Restaurante Palencia y Lara – and what an incredible find it was! I can’t decide which of their sopa castellana, cordero lechal or tarta de queso was the standout.

Sopa castellana isn’t an extremely complicated dish. It only really consists of bread, egg, stock and a good few cloves of garlic. But it is a restorative like none other.

I will be traveling around a lot during Semana Santa, so while I will be in a country that also celebrates Easter properly – even if it is on the other side of the world – I will probably miss a lot of the festivities. That’s one of the reasons I insisted on seeing Toledo’s Domingo de Ramos procession, celebrated from its Catedral Primada de Santa María.

It’s been a while since the time I celebrated Palm Sunday in Rome with Pope Francis, so I’d forgotten how long the reading is (they relate the entire Passion). All in, the ceremony lasted just shy of two hours. But I have come away with a sprig of an olive branch, and I hope it will bring me luck on my travels around the Americas. I’d have brought my lucky vulture feather, but I’m a bit too attached to that to chance losing it along the way.

Toledo was stunning in the sunshine. I’m glad I came here for a pit stop, even if only for a day. It’s nice to be somewhere familiar and nostalgic before pitching myself headfirst into a world that is totally alien.

T minus ten hours. I’ve decided not to chance the first Metro of the day and booked an Uber for peace of mind. Once I make it to Barajas, I can relax a bit.

After that… well. It’s in God’s hands, I guess. See you on the other side! BB x

Collared

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Metro 9, Dirección Nuevos Ministerios, Madrid. 20.47

Landfall. After a speedy and somewhat sleepless flight on Ryanair’s ridiculously good value £20 flight from Bristol, I’m back in Madrid. I fired off a couple of job applications to schools here after my last visit in December, but I’ve heard nothing. I suppose that would be disheartening if I weren’t perfectly comfortable at my current school. Besides, I could harbour no ill feeling toward Madrid. As capital cities go, she is both homely and stately.

The new European security protocols have started to take effect at Barajas. Separated from the Europeans – God’s chosen – by a luminous pink arrow and two security guards, I was shepherded into a large room with an array of digital fingerprint kiosks, where the COVID passes were checked years ago. Many of the machines were already out of order. I saw two cease to function after the same passenger tried to use them. Not for the first time, I found myself contemplating a new circle of Hell for the cabal that convinced an entire nation that being European wasn’t in our best interests.

As though on cue, perhaps, I was sent a visual reminder of one thing we Brits do generally take more seriously than our European counterparts. There weren’t many seats on the train, but one that was free was next to a couple of Frenchwomen. One of them was holding on tight to the leash of a muzzled dog, which was clearly in distress: it was evidently struggling to breathe with a heavy black face mask secured across its mouth, and it kept pawing frantically at it with its head to the ground in a desperate attempt to dislodge the thing every time its owner relaxed her grip on the leash.

She didn’t seem to have noticed. She seemed more engrossed in her conversation. She had a ring on every finger on both hands and they clicked when she gesticulated or tightened her grip on the leash. Even some of her nails had rings. Hell, I like a girl who isn’t afraid to go all out with the jewellery, but even that was a bit much.

The dog’s collar wasn’t much better: a proddy, pokey, cage-like device that was causing the poor thing almost as much discomfort as its muzzle, by the way the creature kept trying to scratch at it with its hind leg.

It was painful to watch. I changed carriages on the connecting train to get away from it.

In England, some busybody would have taken her to task. But this is Spain – we’re getting a lot better, but we’re still a long way off the land of the RSPCA.

The trains are – predictably – packed for Toledo tomorrow, so I’ve booked a bus instead. It means an early start, but that’s no bad thing. I’ve quite a few of them coming my way in Peru, so I’d better get used to them. BB x

Five Hundred

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

When I set out for Peru next week, the number of bird species I will have seen in my lifetime will be a clean five hundred. I’d like to say I’m not usually the record-keeping sort, but that would be pretty unbelievable. The fact that I’ve kept this blog going for the best part of eleven years says otherwise. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with list-keeping, but it does border on the nerdier, birder side of birdwatching, and there is a lingering part of me that still raises a wary eyebrow at the prospect of becoming an anorak. However, since Peru is generally considered one of the world’s finest destinations for birdwatching, I thought I’d cave in for a change, do a little spring cleaning and get my affairs in order before I go. And that means working out just how many birds I have seen over the last thirty-two years or so. It took me a few days to collate the various lists I have held onto over the years, and longer still to whittle down some of the more fanciful additions that may or may not have been added in haste, leaving me with a perfectly square total of five hundred species exactly. It’s a start.

I have been very lucky. I haven’t been as committed to my old hobby as others my age, but even so, my travels have afforded me encounters with a number of species I might otherwise never have seen: pygmy cormorants in the silent marshes around Torcello, Berthelot’s pipits in the Teide caldera and Rwenzori double-collared sunbirds in the clouded hills of Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable Forest. I thought I’d share a few of my favourite encounters below.

Griffon Vulture

Vultures are far and away my favourite creatures on the planet and I make no secret of that. Cinerous, Egyptian, Palm Nut, White-backed, Hooded or Griffon – I’m not fussy. Something about their enormity, the way their wingtips spread wide like fingers, the silence with which they rule the skies… It’s spellbinding. They’re easily the fondest memory I have of my year in Spain when, aged eleven, I traded herring gulls for griffons for a year. I think I can be excused for being occasionally distracted in class when a tawny giant with a nearly three-metre wingspan happened to be passing by the window. I still get the shivers when I see that silhouette, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed for an even greater shadow in the sky when I go in search of an Andean condor in Peru’s Colca Canyon.

Nightjar

Something of a late discovery for me and inseparable from the Camino de Santiago, where it is the nocturnal yin to the diurnal yang of the stonechat – since both species seemed to follow me all the way from the French Pyrenees to Santiago. Nightjars can be found in the UK, but I’ve never seen them, despite searching the forests and heathlands where they are said to breed. On the Camino, however, one is so often up before the break of dawn that it’s virtually impossible not to run into these cryptic creatures at some point. Their endless churring sound must be very strange indeed to those who aren’t aware of its maker, sounding more like a giant cricket or a miniature UFO than a bird. Reports from Manu NP indicate that there may be nightjars to be found along the Madre de Dios river – I shall be keeping my eyes open.

Abyssinian Roller

I could have put any number of the more than two hundred and fifty species of bird I saw in Uganda on this post, but this one takes the top spot because of our story. Having never had any luck with European rollers in Spain, I was amazed to learn on the very first day of my stay in Uganda that there was a particularly handsome Abyssinian roller in the neighbourhood. But I’ll be damned if I thought photographing it might be a cinch – the bird gave me the run-around for most of my three-month stay, fearless and indifferent to my presence when I didn’t have my camera to hand and skittish in the extreme when I came prepared, as though it were camera-shy. In the end an act of God intervened on my behalf: an explosion of winged ants in the neighbour’s garden brought every winged insectivore within a hundred miles to the yard. With more than forty kites to worry about, plus a host of other raptors including shikras, lizard buzzards, grey kestrels and falcons, the roller had his mind on other things and I was able to get in a good shot or two. Sometimes it’s hard-fought encounters like that one that make a photo more compelling than all the editing in the world.

European Bee-Eater

Much like the roller, the bee-eater is an explosion of colour in avian form – at least, to a British birdwatcher’s eye, since most of our native birds are rather drab by comparison. They’re incredibly captivating creatures to watch as they flit through the air like oversized moths, but it’s their call that I love the most: a cheery whirrup that heralds the spring in Spain just like the merry twitter of the swallow in Britain. The sound alone makes me feel warmer – it takes me back to the sands of El Rocio and the dusty scrubland between the Madre de las Marismas and the Palacio del Acebron. One day, it may be warm enough for bee-eaters to colonise the UK. They have bred here with occasional success in the last few years, but it remains to be seen whether they will follow the example of the egrets and move in for good. A part of me hopes they don’t – they are far too tied to my image of Spain as a special paradise. Some things you should have to travel to behold, to see with your own eyes. That’s what I think.

Purple Swamphen

What list would be complete without one of my all-time favourites – the bird that probably kickstarted my obsession with Spanish birds? The purple swamphen is unmistakeable: a moorhen on steroids, with bigger feet, a bigger face-shield and a bigger attitude. I saw them first in El Acebuche, but since then I have found them in several other places: the rice paddies of the Brazo del Este, Uganda’s White Nile river and under the Roman Bridge in Merida. Like griffons, they lose nothing with each successive encounter, and I confess that my eyes are always on swivel-stalks whenever I’m crossing the bridge in Merida in the hope of catching one of them in the reeds below.

Red and Black Kites

WordPress won’t let me upload the images I have of the hoopoe, Iberian magpie and Montagu’s harrier, which would bring the total to ten, so I will have to finish with another old favourite: the kite. Specifically, it’s black kites that have always held sway in my heart, due to their association with the Elysian stone-pine forests of the Raya Real, but since red kites have pretty much exploded in number in the UK in my own lifetime, they’ve earned a spot in this list too. Despite nearly twenty years of active pursuit, I have yet to take a decent photograph of a black kite (in my defence, I have often been without my camera when the right moment presented itself). Had I brought my DSLR with me on the Camino last summer, I would have had the opportunity of a lifetime when I stumbled – quite by chance – upon a feeding frenzy for the local kite population in a rugby field a day’s march from the Spanish frontier. But, I didn’t, so I just took a few photos on my phone and watched the spectacle.

Kites are something of a bait-and-switch story for me. Since their whistling call was used in the BBC’s Land of the Tiger whenever vultures were on screen, I came to associate that sound with those kings of the sky. It wasn’t until I was much older that I realised that vultures are pretty much silent (when they’re not squabbling over a carcass, that is), but by then the spell had already been cast. I would travel all the way to the Raya Real just to hear that sound. Of course, I’d go for more than that: the music-box melodies of a nightingale, the flute-song of a golden oriole, the oop-oop-oop of a hoopoe, the beak-clacking serenade of a stork and the descending whistle of a woodlark. But even if all those voices should fall silent, leaving nothing but the trill of a kite, I’d still make that journey. That’s how precious a single sound can be.

T minus one week. It’s getting closer! BB x

Egret

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Little Egret (Egretta garzetta) – River Tone. 22/2/26

On my afternoon wander along the Tone yesterday I came across an egret fishing on the concrete steps of a flow measuring station. I’m so used to the snowy white shapes of these beautiful birds in and around the rivers and fields of the English countryside that it’s sometimes hard to remember a time when these were a very rare sight indeed.

When I was not yet ten, the presence of an egret in the area was something my family or friends found newsworthy. That’s not exactly surprising. Compared to our native (and undeniably stately) grey herons, they do have an exotic look about them. Maybe it’s the silky plumes (or aigrettes) of their breeding plumage, or maybe it’s the smart yellow galoshes they seem to wear on their feet. The speed of their colonisation of the British Isles gave the Roman Empire a run for its money: by the time I was fifteen, they were already such a feature of the Kentish wetlands and saltmarshes that they had somewhat lost their star appeal, if not their lustre. They no longer triggered a rare bird alert on twitchers’ pagers up and down the country, and their names no longer appeared in bold capital letters on the “Recent Sightings” blackboards at nature reserves.

But first, some myth-busting. It’s not as though the egret is an exotic immigrant to our shores. Far from it. Various species of egrets could be found in the British Isles throughout history, before a combination of over-hunting and the insatiable demand for egret feathers wiped them out. Such was the obsession for aigrettes – which once bedecked the headwear of noble lords and ladies alike – that the little egret and its cousin, the great white egret, were driven out of much of Western Europe as well, seeking sanctuary along the sheltered shores of the Mediterranean. It wasn’t until a pioneering group of Englishwomen came together in 1889 to form the Society for the Protection of Birds (the forerunner to the cherished RSPB) that the egret’s fortunes began to change, first by petitioning powerful high-society types to eschew feathers from their wardrobe, then lobbying the government to ban them outright. It clearly caught on, because the Americans set up a similar initiative of their own over in Oregon, where the native great and snowy egrets were suffering a similar fate. Gradually, with aigrette feathers off the market, the birds began to reappear in the fields and fenlands they had once called home. It would be another hundred years before they attempted to recolonise the British Isles, but once they did, they came back in droves.

I bought a magazine once in the late 2000s that predicted the arrival of the rest of Europe’s heron and egret species in the UK as global warming made these cold islands more favourable to birds more at home in southern Europe. It wasn’t wrong. Since then, both the cattle and great white egret have secured a foothold in Britain, with all three species present in the Avalon Marshes over in the Somerset Levels. If it weren’t for the fact that I work six days out of seven – and Sunday trains and buses are awful in this part of the world – I’d be over there like a shot. Somehow, I fear the open wilds of the Avalon Marshes will have to wait until I have wheels, because after a few sums, it would actually work out cheaper for me to fly to Europe and back than to spend a night or two in Glastonbury in order to visit the Levels. Mad how that works.

Not that I’d say not to being back in Europe, of course – though I am still waiting for my temporary ban to lift, as I hit the ninety day limit last year and would very much like to go back to my grandfather’s country without having to pay a fine. I always try to keep an open mind, but sometimes, Brexit, I really do wish you hadn’t screwed up my life quite so much.

Anyway. These papers won’t mark themselves. Just thought I’d muse a little on something uplifting before getting back to the grind. BB x

Cattle Egret (Ardea ibis) – Dehesa de Abajo, Spain. 26/4/10

City of Memories

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Hostal La Banda, Calle Dos de Mayo. Sevilla. 15.20.

The Americans have taken over. They’re sitting at a table behind me discussing the local culture of Sevilla that interests them so, like baseball, 7-Eleven and Jello shots. One of them asks the receptionist for a board game and they set to a game of Cards Against Humanity.

Outside, the rain comes down. When it comes to the weather, Luck has not necessarily been on my side during this holiday. Fortunately, I’ve been to all of these places before and seen the main sights before, so my heart isn’t bleeding over a few rain clouds. It’s actually quite relaxing, not having to dash off to this or that bit of sightseeing. It feels like living out here again. That was, I believe, the general idea.

Sevilla and I go way back. I’m not 100% certain, but I think came here for the first time in the summer of 2005, shortly after my parents bought the house in Olvera (that we still haven’t managed to sell off, twenty years on). I don’t remember much from that first visit beyond a flying visit to the Alcázar under a blazing sun, the noise and smell of the horses in the Plaza del Triunfo and a little blue notebook with a plastic cover where I kept a record of the animals I saw in my new country: black kites, bee-eaters, lesser kestrels and the city’s ubiquitous monk parakeets (which have only increased in number).

Since then, it has been the backdrop to a number of different episodes of my life.

Through my secondary school years, I made the odd pilgrimage to Doñana National Park with my mother. That was when Sevilla really started to become a fixture in my life. After Gatwick, it’s probably the airport I’ve used the most. Mum and I always had the same ritual upon arrival: before anything else could be achieved, we had to grab a zumo natural or café solo from one of the airport cafés. We never stayed in the city, but it was our regular conduit to and from the sanctuary town of El Rocío.

It was also where we learned of the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in 2010, as we had no WiFi at our campsite in El Rocío, and this was before the advent of mobile data. You’d have thought there might have been something on TV, but all we saw on the night of the eruption which grounded all flights across Europe was a brief noticiero questioning whether Spaniards actually pay attention to STOP signs, given that they’re written in English – a question I still ask myself today, as I wander around Sevilla.

When I moved to Spain for my first British Council placement in 2015 – when this blog began – it was Sevilla to which I came, suitcase in hand, to sit beneath the shade of a fig tree on the east bank of the Guadalquivir and think about the future.

I came back to Sevilla again and again when I got back in touch with my former classmates from Olvera, particularly a childhood sweetheart (who led me up the garden path for several months before throwing up a wall during a memorably awkward visit to Madrid). Every visit to the pueblo required just under an hour’s commute across the city centre between Plaza de Armas and Prado de San Sebastián. By the third or fourth visit, I’d got the route down to twenty-five minutes, though I did once make the trip in under ten when I was in danger of missing the last bus home.

It was around then, during those frenzied trips between Sevilla’s bus stations, that I really fell in love with the Plazuela de Doña Elvira, sitting as it does in the labyrinthine heart of the old city. I’ve made a point of stopping by ever since.

Halfway through that year, I took a friend to the city to show her the majesty of Semana Santa. My experience of Spain’s Easter celebrations had previously been confined to Olvera, which was a highly unfair place to start – on everywhere else. Olvera’s penitentes, demonstrating a strength bordering on the Herculean, have to navigate the monstrously steep gradients of the town’s roads, constantly ducking and rising to avoid the low-hanging wires – all while carrying several tonnes of sacred wood and several hundred tapering candles within a precarious silk canopy. Caídas (falls) are not unheard of in Semana Santa, but I never saw the olvereños break so much as a sweat for their endeavour.

After that, I might be forgiven for having exceptionally high standards for Semana Santa. Sevilla met them. We were walled in by three simultaneous processions, but a friendly Guardia unintentionally gave us front row seats to the greatest show in town when he shoved us unceremoniously with his baton out of the road and in front of the lines that had been growing along the side of the street all morning. Málaga and La Mena may have raised my expectations even higher, but I’d like to go back and see Sevilla in its Easter glory again sometime.

By my mid-twenties, I could be pretty confident in saying that I knew few cities in the world better than Sevilla – including almost every city in my home country (with the possible exception of Canterbury). I do believe that I really could navigate this city blindfolded, if I had to. That was why I decided to take my second girlfriend there, less than a month after we started dating. I hoped that sharing the city with her would be like sharing my heart – since it had found its way in there a long time ago.

I took her to all my favourite places. Bar El Postiguillo. La Plazuela de Doña Elvira. La Plaza del Cabildo. El Real Alcázar and El Herbolario. She smiled sweetly and played the part of my muse around the city, but I don’t know if she felt the same way about the place as I did.

Later, when things started to fall apart, she told me I’d “missed the boat” for teaching her Spanish. It was the confirmation I’d long suspected that I was never going to be able to share my undying love for this country with her, and the chief reason why I broke things off with her in the end. A heart divided cannot love.

I have no desire to return to America after the intensity of last summer’s heartbreak. Sevilla, however, is immune. My heart could break a thousand times within its scented streets and still I would return.

In the last few years, I’ve led a couple of school trips here, too, playing the part of historian, quartermaster and tour guide. In this last capacity, Sevilla has sealed its place in my head as much as my heart, as I had to swot up on so much local history that I might as well have put on a red jacket and joined the city’s legion of guías turísticos.

And here I am again, as 2025 draws to a close. It’s been about twenty years since I first came here, and that’s around two thirds of my life. I don’t doubt I’ll be back again soon, drawn by some invisible magnetism to her cobbled streets, her orange-scented courtyards and the irresistible joy of her people and their merry accent.

The local hostalero gave me the highest possible praise last night. My accent, while occasionally inflected with English, is unmistakably andaluz. Coming from an Andalusian, that is praise indeed – I usually get told I sound sureño by northerners, but no de aquí by the southerners themselves, pointing to the east when I am in Cádiz and west when I am in Almería. That’s twice this year I’ve managed to blend in.

It’s about time I moved here. The stars are aligning. I only need the opportunity. BB x

Eulalia

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Hotel Rambla Emérita, Mérida. 20.16.

It’s been raining all day again. I was out late with Tasha last night catching up on old times – neither of us could really believe that it’s been nearly eight years since I left – so I didn’t begrudge the downpour for a long and cosy morning in bed. You don’t have to be busy every day of the holidays, even when you’re abroad.

Luckily, I was all over Mérida yesterday with my conjunto histórico ticket, granting access to all the city’s Roman ruins, so the only thing I missed out on was the Alcazaba, which I might visit tomorrow with Tasha and her boyfriend Antonio, if he’s up and about. I don’t think I’ve seen the Alcazaba before – one tends to focus on Mérida’s Roman history rather than its Moorish past, and there are older and more impressive alcazabas (the Spanish rendering of the Arabic qasbah) in Andalucía: Sevilla, Córdoba and Granada, to name just the obvious ones.

Mérida isn’t unique in having a Roman amphitheatre either. There’s a pretty spectacular one (albeit less often seen) in Santiponce that I’ve often seen from the bus on the way in from the north. But there are a few more unique treasures to be found in Extremadura’s administrative capital, and I thought I’d tell you about one such gem below.

Let’s start with the lady of Mérida – because every Spanish city has its special lady. This one is Santa Eulalia.

Eulalia of Mérida stands tall above the other Christian saints of Spain, which is especially impressive as she only lived to around twelve years of age. A Roman Christian, she and her family were forbidden to worship God under the Persecution of Diocletian. Incensed, and unable to keep her faith to herself, Eulalia fled out of exile to the city of Emerita Augusta, where she openly challenged the local governor, Dacian, insulting the pagan gods whom she was commanded to worship. After a few desperate attempts to reason with her, Dacian had the girl beaten, tortured and burnt at the stake. According to legend, Eulalia is said to have mocked her tormentors until her dying breath, which came out in the form of a dove.

Eulalia was once a great deal more powerful than she is today. Before the rise of the cult of Santiago, it was Santa Eulalia de Mérida in whom the Christian soldiers placed their trust as they made war on the Muslims occupying the lands their ancestors had once held; and it was to her tomb in Mérida that thousands of pilgrims travelled during the Middle Ages, before Santiago Matamoros muscled her out of the picture.

At least one of my Protestant Christian friends has remarked at some point about the thin line between the Catholic Church’s veneration of saints and idol worship. Surely – they have reminded me – it is God and by proxy his son, Jesus Christ, to whom prayers should be made, not the pantheon of mortals who claim to be able to intercede on my behalf?

I can see the argument as plain as day. There are shops up and down this country selling nothing but saint souvenirs: votive candles, icons and fridge magnets, scented rosaries and car ornaments. I have a few myself – a family rosary from Villarrobledo and a more personal one from La Virgen del Rocío, which these days is on my person more often than not.

However, I don’t think it’s as simple as that. How frightfully urbane, to assume that the only true relationship with God is a detached and decidedly modern Western take on prayer. How tremendously big of us to assume that we can comprehend a force that it is, by its eternal nature, beyond our understanding. Community is a powerful agent – it seems only right that the spiritual world, Christian or no, has a network of pomps to streamline the neural network that binds us all together. On Earth as it is in Heaven, as they say.

Spain has a long history of wandering saints. Santiago journeyed beyond death to Galicia, sparking the most famous pilgrimage in Christendom. Guadalupe travelled from her mountain home to México to become one the most venerated Marian cults in the world. Eulalia was dug up and reinterred in Oviedo, where she became a figurehead of the Reconquista (I genuinely had no idea I was standing before her final resting place this summer). Teresa of Ávila’s body parts have travelled all over, most famously her Incorruptible Hand, which used to grace Francisco Franco’s desk.

Tomorrow, I make for Sevilla. Journey’s coming to an end. I’d better make sure I’m fully packed. BB x

The Seven Chairs

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Hotel Rambla Emérita, Mérida. 20.30.

The starlings have finished their shift for the night and turned in their timecards. The yappy dog has taken over the night shift and is busy barking at every car that goes past. What the appeal may be in such scrappy scamps I cannot guess. If I worked in a profession that allowed me the time to have a dog, I’d want one that looked like… well, a dog, I guess. A wolf, moreover. Like a sheepdog, a collie or a wolfhound.

I’m thinking out loud. But that, I guess, is what blogging is for. Anyway. Here’s my account of Mérida, capital city of Extremadura, former heart of the Roman province of Lusitania, and the seat of the king in my novels.

As you leave the bus station on the south bank of the Guadiana River, you’ll notice almost right away a cryptic row of sculptures on the riverbank. At first glance, they seem to spell out a word, but a closer look reveals that they aren’t letters at all, but rather figurative depictions of thrones (if they were letters, I suppose they might spell out “CEIOHAD”, which – besides looking more like Irish than Spanish – is about as easy to understand as the Muqattāt of the Qur’an).

They are the work of local sculptor Rufino Mesa, native son of Valle de Santa Ana, and they pay homage to one of Mérida’s most cherished legends: that of the Seven Chairs that once stood outside the city.

According to legend, these enormous block of stone were the seats of seven Muslim princes (or kings, depending on the teller), who sat upon these ancient thrones to discuss matters of state. Given the fractious nature of the various Berber tribes who occupied the Iberian peninsula during the period of the Muslim conquest and the ensuing Taifa period when Al-Andalus splintered into a network of warring states, it’s perfectly possible that such a drama might have played out at least once here.

Until the start of the 20th century, these seven chairs were still a visible feature of the city, sitting in a field a short distance from the edge of town: a strange but not entirely ignored feature of the city. The ring of stone had seen use as a bullring in the 18th century, and the story of the seven kings had evolved into legends of buried treasure, though no major excavation took place until the archaeological endeavours of Maximiliano Macías and José Ramón Mélida in 1910.

At the time, the site looked very different to how it does today:

Digging deep, Macías and Mélida uncovered the roots of the seven chairs, revealing an enormous Roman theatre that had lain hidden beneath the earth for around fifteen hundred years. Its remains had long since been scavenged by the Visigoths and their Muslim successors for use in other constructions – such as the Grand Mosque of Córdoba, where there can be little doubt that many of its original pillars may be found – but the greater part of the foundations remained preserved beneath the earth.

It’s not quite as well-preserved as the Roman complex at Jerash, but then, Mérida sits on the bank of a great river – the Guadiana – and has been the site of battles both ancient and modern since the Teatro Romano was first built, and has therefore been a frontline city for much of its existence.

The modern reconstruction is an impressive feat, but more impressively still, it has been partially restored as a working theatre, hosting the Festival del Teatro Romano every summer. I’ve yet to see the festival with my own eyes, so it remains a bucket list item.

I spent nearly two hours wandering around the remains of the Theatre and Amphitheatre. I’ve been here before, of course – twice, at least, as I seem to recall a brief visit with IES Meléndez Valdés – but this place loses nothing in the rediscovery.

I caught myself touching one of the ancient slabs of stone and wondering what it would be like to be hurled backwards in time to the moment it was first laid there. I’m sure I’m not the first to have had that thought and I know I won’t be the last. The plethora of books both fiction and non-fiction on the Romans are proof of our ongoing fascination with the Roman Empire – even if it does come at the detriment of our interest in any of the other periods that followed (seriously, I’ve been to several bookshops now and I can’t find even one book on Mérida’s history between the fall of Rome and the Civil War).

I’ve more stories to relate, but I think I’ll split them up – Mérida has more than one story to tell. As the Córdoban scholar Mohammed Ar-Razi once put it:

No hay hombre en el mundo que cumplidamente puede contar las maravillas de Mérida.

So I won’t try to do so in a single blog post – or several. Instead, like the Visigoths, the Muslims and nearly a hundred generations of Spaniards before me, I’ll take what I can and use its bricks and mortar as the foundations for my own stories. BB x

The Sun Returns

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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! Hulking great things, even if they were some way off.

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

Washout

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Palacio Santa Marta, Trujillo. 19.04.

It turns out the rain in Spain does indeed fall mainly on the plain. And when it does, it does so with a Biblical vengeance. I made it to my hotel in Trujillo with just seconds to spare when the heavens opened. Any hopes I might have harboured of exploring the city’s surrounding countryside were swiftly washed away, as the rain came down all afternoon, all through the night and long into the following morning.

This would be a real downer if I’d had plans. But my itinerary is an open book and I’m always happy to improvise – it is my preferred method of travel. So I enjoyed a late morning, a proper breakfast and the blissful quiet of one of Spain’s most beautiful (if isolated) towns.

Trujillo sits atop a small granite ridge in a boulder-strewn corner of the Llanos de Cáceres, a vast and featureless steppe that stretches between the Sierra de San Pedro in the west and the Ibor Mountains to the east. There’s nothing like it in Western Europe. You’d have to go as far as the Puzsta in eastern Hungary to find anything close to its vastness. Lichen-covered granite boulders rise out of the earth like giant’s teeth and the odd tree stands alone in the fields, but beyond that, it’s like staring into the infinite.

Little wonder, then, that Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro – both native sons of this part of the world – set their sights on nothing less than the horizon – they’d had no choice but to do so since the day they were born.

Extremadura can be a desolate place in winter. It can be pretty desolate in summer, too, but there is a virgin beauty in its isolation. By avoiding the grasping arms of the hordes of tourists who have strangled much that remained of Old Spain into submission, Extremadura has managed to hold on to the embers of an ancient fire which exists only in the memory of those living among the tower blocks of the southern coast.

Perhaps that’s why it’s often considered one of the main contenders for the Birdwatching Capital of Europe, since so many rare and otherwise elusive species still flock here in droves, taking advantage of our absence to go about their lives as their ancestors have done since before we came to this land.

You can see some of that without even leaving the motorway. Every winter, more than 75,000 common cranes travel from their breeding grounds in Northern Europe to this remote corner of the Iberian peninsula. They spend the colder months in the shade of the dehesas, feeding on acorns. They’re a rather common sight if you look beneath the trees, and at over a metre in height, they’re hard to miss.

When I first came to Trujillo in the spring of 2016, I promptly fell in love with the place. It wouldn’t be the first remote corner of Spain that’s stolen my heart – El Rocío and Hornachos are up there – and it won’t be the last. It’s found its way into my saga as the elected home of my hero, partly out of practicality and partly out of a sense of wish fulfilment on my part. Half of me wishes I’d been brave enough to flat out ask to be sent here for my second British Council placement back in 2017. It would have been a lottery, of course, but what would it have been like to live here, I wonder? Trujillo is a lot smaller than Villafranca de los Barros – and a lot more out of the way – but infinitely more scenic.

I managed a short reccie to the north of town, before the skies turned dark once again and I had to admit defeat and return to the hotel. The cobbled streets running down from the hilltop had become rivers in their own right. It wasn’t yet siesta time, but nobody else was out and about. And with good reason!

From my vantage point on the second floor of the hotel, I can see out across the plaza and the rest of town. There isn’t all that much to see, with the rain clouds obscuring most of the world from view, but when the sun is shining, you can see straight across to the pyramidal Sierra de Santa Cruz – and the town at its feet, curiously named Santa Cruz de la Sierra (I’m not altogether sure which came first).

If the weather had been kinder I’d have set out at first light and tried to reach the old Moorish settlement at its summit… but then, I haven’t exactly come dressed for a hike. Perhaps it’s for the best that I have had a day to take it easy in Trujillo.

Tomorrow is a new day. 0% chance of rain. I don’t need to rush off anywhere, so I might go for a stroll after breakfast and try to soak up the countryside while I’m here. BB x