wildlife

Camino XIX: White Magic

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Albergue Rosalía, Castrojeriz. 16.44.

I’m back in Castrojeriz, a Castilian hill-fort town some twenty-one kilometres down the road from last night’s stop in Hornillos. I probably could have gone a little further today, but there’s a local festival in town and I wanted to check it out. It’s much too easy to lose track of things on the Camino over a good conversation, and in so doing miss something special.

I mean – it is a garlic festival. So it’s nothing extraordinary. But I happen to love garlic (sopa de ajo is my favourite dish in the whole world) so I feel duty-bound to check this one out.

The hospitaleros at Hornillos left out a proper spread for breakfast, so we ate well today. Even so, we were up and gone by 6.20am, shortly before sunrise – which is getting noticeably later each week. The turbines on the surrounding hills continued to spin in the twilight, their red warning lights blinking like eyes along the blue horizon.

A gentle blanket of cloud shrouded our ascent up to the high meseta west of Hornillos. Apart from a few simple crosses erected along the road, the terrain was featureless, and all the shadows harrier-shaped: I counted at least seven Montagu’s harriers quartering the fields between Hornillos and Hontanas, from the agile ring-tailed youngsters to the ghostly silver shapes of the adult males. Vultures always take the top spot in my animal pantheon, but Montagu’s harriers are absolutely in my top five.

There’s not much a mobile phone can do with these elusive spirits, but you can just about make out the long-tailed shape of one in the photo below.

The sunrises over the meseta are peerless. It’s amazing just how many colours come out of the fields of gold, which pairs better with the sky than the grapes of La Rioja with the local jamón. I can’t imagine walking this route in winter, when the fields are stripped and bare. It must be spiritual then, too, but I would miss the warm hues of the wheat.

To reach Castrojeriz, you have to pass through the ruins of the Monasterio de San Antón. According to my route planner, I had intended to stay here, but it was only ten o’clock, and the day was still very young, so I pressed on – but not before snapping some photos of what is easily one of the most breathtaking buildings along the Camino Francés, with its ruined arches spanning the road to Castrojeriz.

The monks quartered here used to treat those afflicted with Saint Anthony’s Fire, a sickness we now know as ergotism. Advances in agriculture have more or less eliminated the disease, but the source is all around us in the wheat and rye that once carried the sickness. Before the causes were understood, the spasms and hallucinations that sufferers endured were believed to be a form of divine punishment or demonic possession. It’s hard to say whether the monks’ sanctified treatments truly worked, or whether the cutting-out of rye from their diet was what made the Order so effective. Either way, the monks resorted to a Christian form of white magic to keep the locals safe back in the day.

I like to imagine their ministrations might have saved the lives of at least a few pilgrims bound for Santiago over the centuries.

Gust was waylaid by a photographer for about half an hour on the road to Castrojeriz, and I was only spared the same fate by his silent warning to stay away and the timely arrival of two British university students, one of them a Durham undergrad. They stopped a little way along with their group so I couldn’t walk with them for that long, but I hope I can catch up to them again at some point before León.

I rejoined the Americans at Castrojeriz and we grabbed a drink before lunch, partly out of curiosity to see whether Gust could extricate himself from the photographer’s grip. We were more than a little surprised to see a MAGA hat, but nobody dared to engage the man in conversation. If he was a pilgrim, he was traveling very light indeed.

Downtown, the garlic festival was in full flow. A charanga band was marching around town, playing their oompah-like music wherever they went (just like back in Nájera), while old folks huddled around their collection of cloves and groups of kids in matching tee-shirts ran rings around the market stalls.

I suspect the Feria del Ajo is a relatively recent innovation (I’ve seen the number 46° floating around), but I shouldn’t wonder that this kind of harvest festival has been happening here for far longer. There’s a food-tasting event we’re going to check out later, and even a concert by the New York Youth Orchestra at 8pm tomorrow – though we’ll be long gone by then.

Garlic is famous in folklore for its protective characteristics, especially against malevolent spirits like vampires and demons. It’s also mightily medicinal, and has been fighting off disease and bacteria in humans for far longer than it has been used to ward off the undead. Given its life-giving properties, it’s easy to see how the latter superstition came about, in an age when Galen’s law of humours was widely accepted as gospel and any and all imbalances, including light and dark, required correction.

Frankly, I can’t think of any imbalances that couldn’t be corrected by a nice, hot bowl of garlic soup. It really is the very best of restoratives.

Audrey has popped out to explore the town. Alonso is watching a movie and Talia has fallen asleep. I might head out for a wander in a moment too, now that things are starting to open again after the afternoon siesta. Here’s to a little more white magic this evening! BB x

Camino VIII: A Hundred Eyes

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Albergue de Peregrinos, Monreal. 15.10.

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

Camino VI: The Ventriloquist

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Albergue de Ruesta. 16.20.

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

The Mother of the Marshes

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Casa Los Tres Aires, El Rocío. 14.01.

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

Under the Lightning Tree

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

La Raya Real, El Rocío. 17.16.

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 Lost City

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Cerro del Sol, Granada. 12.56pm.

They call it the Cerro del Sol, but the sun is hidden behind a white haze of cloud. It covers the snowy peaks of the Sierra Nevada so indistinctly that it’s hard to see where the snow stops and the clouds begin.

It’s pretty quiet up here. There’s a general soar of traffic on the road up to the skiing station of Pradollano in the Genil valley below, but beyond that – and the occasional rev and growl of some larger engine – it’s just me, the butterflies and the birdsong up here. Mostly fritillaries, coppers and marbled whites, though I did see a beautiful swallowtail float by a moment ago, before I put my cardigan over my head to shield my eyes from the white glare of the sun. It shines brighter than the garden Star-of-Bethlehem at my feet. Such a beautiful flower – I’m not sure why I never noticed them before.

I’ve come up here to write – and to heal. I didn’t sleep well last night. Some wounds, it seems, take a long time to mend. So I’m up in the quiet of the dehesa, in the hills east of Granada, soaking in the best palliative that nature can offer. Herself.

The occasional buzz of a fly. The twitter of a pair of pallid swifts racing by. The summery buzz of a grasshopper and the chuk-chuk-chukar of a partridge somewhere in the scrub far below.

A couple of Sardinian warblers are engaged in a territorial dispute in the broom bushes below, rattling off their warnings like Gatling guns. And always and everywhere, I can hear the song of blackbirds – an ever-present symbol of Granada.

This is the Dehesa del Generalife. I suspect the Moorish sultan of old must have come hunting here with his retinue in the days of al-Andalus, as these hills are teeming with small game: wood pigeons, partridge and rabbits (I didn’t see the latter, but this is absolutely their kind of terrain). What a sight that must have been: the Moorish sultan and his hawks, looking up at the snowy peaks of the Sierra Nevada and across the Vega of Granada.

It’s far too easy to see why this place bewitched the Romantics and scores of travelers back in the day, before the modern tourist trade sank its teeth into the place. Well, here’s a corner of Granada they haven’t spoiled: quiet, ancient, magical. Sure, it’s an hour’s hike from the Alhambra, but some things are worth the trek.

On my way up here this morning, I paid a visit to the Capilla Real to see the tombs of Fernando and Isabel, the Reyes Católicos. I figured I’d made the voyage to El Escorial to see the other kings and queens of Spain, so I ought to pay my respects to the ones who started it all.

A surly security guard at the door gave me a long, hard look as he waved me in and warned me not to take any photos. I indicated the notebook and pencil in my hands and asked if I could sketch. He didn’t reply. His stoney expression might have been cast in the same marble as the sarcophagus behind him. I guess he didn’t see the joke.

It’s funny how some people get so uppity about tourists taking photos, but nobody ever seems to mind a sketchbook. I’ve stood on street corners for up to an hour sketching and nobody bats an eyelid, but whip your phone out in some places and there’s hell to pay.

I bought a couple books in the gift shop (I needed some reading material and they were relatively cheap, by Spanish standards) and climbed back up the Carretera Empedrada through the Alhambra forest, where I stopped to check in my flight for next week and sort out tomorrow’s bus to El Rocío. An enormous tour group of German pensioners ambled by. There must have been at least sixty of them, perhaps more. They were followed not too far behind by two outings from a Spanish private school – recognisable by the distinctive shade of blue uniform that is so popular with colegios privados out here.

That figure of eight thousand a day I heard yesterday really does seem more believable when you stop for a while and watch the tourist traffic.

A short amount of time in the wilderness was enough, so around midday I dusted myself down, left the swallowtails to their games and headed back the way I came. When I came to the Alhambra, I took the right fork this time, following the Cuesta del Rey Chico down along the Acequía Real. It’s a steep descent (and an even less forgiving ascent) but it follows one of the main water channels right down to the Darro, so you’re accompanied all the way down (or up) by the most beautiful sound of running water. The Alhambra’s watchtowers serve as waymarkers: the Tower of the Captive, the Tower of the Judge, the Tower of the Peaks, and the Tower of Comares, the seat of the Sultan of old. The Sultan and his family may be long gone, but their waterworks are still running as they did then, six hundred years ago.

As I came down the hill, a thought came to me that had come several times now since I arrived in Granada. Who would not defy the world for such a place? Who would not have fought off the very hordes of Hell itself to defend this paradise on Earth? And what greater heartbreak can there be than to be banished forever from a place that was more than just a home, to know in the very depths of your heart that you had lost the keys to Heaven itself?

It’s not hyperbole. I’m merely paraphrasing the laments of the Andalusian poets of old when Granada fell to the Christians in 1492. It puts my own petty broken heart into a much-needed broader context. There was a sense of loss here far greater than anything a single heart can withstand. I have felt the tremors of it before in Sevilla and Córdoba, but nowhere stronger than here, the last bastion of the Muslims in Spain. Such a raw outpouring of emotion leaves a mark. Ghost stories would spring from it in more credulous parts of the world. Here, it is an indistinct melancholy – something in the air that once was, and is lost forever in all but memory.

Writing two hundred years before Granada’s demise, al-Rundi’s lament for the fate of Sevilla captures the grief:

A pretty lady, splendid as sunlight,
Her beauty just like coral and jewels bright,
Dragged off by infidel for rape most vile,
Her heart perplexed, she’s crying all the while.

Abu al Baqa’ Al-Rundi, Ritha al–Andalus

I wonder how the Muslim tourists to the Alhambra feel upon seeing such a place? There do not seem to be as many as I remember.

One week remains. Tomorrow, I make for a place that has always been close to my heart: my Granada, my Jannah, my paradise on Earth. It looks like it will be a rainy weekend. But nothing could put a damper on the thought that I will see that place again, after all this time: El Rocío. BB x

The Hall of the Dead

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

San Lorenzo de El Escorial, 13.45

A shadow lies upon his tomb, in Moria, in Khazad-dûm. The Company stood silent beside the tombs of the kings of old. There were many recesses cut in the rock of the walls, and in them were large iron-bound sarcophagi of black marble. Frodo and the Company stood in awe, but Pippin felt a compulsive urge to reach for his iPhone so that he might share the spectacle on Instagram. He held it aloft, and for a moment it glimmered, faint as a rising star struggling in heavy earthward mists, and then it issued forth a minute heart of dazzling light, as though Eärendil had himself come down from the high sunset paths with the last Silmaril upon his brow.

“No photos!” barked the security guard, gesturing wildly in Pippin’s directions, before muttering a loaded “turistas” under her breath.

In the year 1563, Felipe II ordered the construction of an enormous palace in the foothills of Monte Abantos, partly to commemorate his victory over the French at the Battle of San Quintín, partly as a country retreat where he could hunt big game, but perhaps most importantly as a necropolis for the Hapsburg line. Here, entombed within the bowels of the largest Renaissance building on Earth, lie the remains of almost every king and queen of Spain of the Hapsburg and Bourbon lines.

To get here from Madrid, you have to catch a bus from Moncloa. Spain is steadily catching up to the rest of the world as a cashless country, but most of the local bus companies are still coin-operated. I was delayed by an hour because my first attempt to board was a flop: the driver thought I said “puedo cobrar” instead of “comprar” and wagged a finger at me, saying “yo cobro, tú pagas”. Granted, I had a cold, but I’m pretty sure I made myself clear. I was honestly so ruffled by his wagging humour that I forgot I did actually have a ten euro note on me, so I got off the bus and went in search of breakfast and a cash machine – and a few plasters for my wounded ego.

The next bus driver wasn’t a wisecrack, so I had a very enjoyable ride across the dehesa. To the north of the road to El Escorial, the snowbound peaks of the Guadarrama rise up out of the plain, its mantle pure and unspoilt by the ski-lifts and stations that criss-cross similar ranges in Central Europe. At one point, the road crosses the Valdemayor reservoir, and on a cloudless day such as this, the mountains rise again into the mirrored surface of the blue waters.

The centrepiece of El Escorial – as is so often the way with Spain’s grandest architectural treasures – is an enormous basilica, featuring a collection of saintly portraits, painted ceilings and a gilded reredos of jasper and red granite that stands an eye-watering 92 ft tall. As if that weren’t enough, the high altar is watched by the sentinel eyes of life-size bronze sculptures of Felipe II and his father, Carlos V, and their respective families, eternally offering their prayers to God above the crypt where their bodies are interred. It’s no great leap of the imagination to compare El Escorial to the Valley of the Kings: should it fade into memory someday, the discovery of the altarpiece alone would be an archaeologist’s field day.

The comparisons don’t end there. Much like the triumphal engravings of Ramses’ victory at Kadesh in Abu Simbel and Trajan’s Column in Rome, El Escorial’s “Sala de Batallas” (Hall of Battles) testifies to the martial prowess of the Habsburg line, depicting the greatest victories over the French, Moors and other enemies of the dynasty across over a hundred metres of fresco. That’s ten times the length of my mega drawing and eight times the height. I clearly missed my calling by four and a half centuries.

As well as a hoarding place for countless royal artefacts (including one of the largest collections of holy relics in the world, numbering around 7,500), El Escorial is most widely known as the final resting place of Spain’s monarchy from the early modern period on. These most haunting treasures of the royal palace can be found in the innermost depths of the palace complex, entombed within vaulted marble sarcophagi that contain the remains of princes, consorts, bastard sons and daughters and other high-ranking members of the Hapsburg line, right the way up to the present. The blank headstones above the sarcophagi in the last rooms sit waiting for Juan Carlos’ relatives and their progeny.

If that weren’t chilling enough, one of the rooms features an enormous marble monument to those of royal blood who perished before puberty, marked with A or B to differentiate between the Austria and Bourbon clans. With their famous predilection for morganatic marriages, it’s perhaps no surprise that so many infantes never made it to adulthood.

In the deepest reaches of all, far below the palace itself, is a golden chamber called the Panteón de los Reyes. This is the Habsburg Holy of Holies, where the bodies of the kings and queens were laid to rest: from Carlos V, who oversaw the conquest of the America’s and the birth of the Spanish Empire, all the way up to Alfonso XIII, exiled in 1931 by the short-lived Spanish Second Republic. In a single 360° turn you can see them all. There can be few places in the world quite like this, where you are quite literally encircled by the tombs of the kings of the past.

In such a sacred space, photos are, quite naturally, forbidden – but that didn’t stop a couple of Korean and American tourists from trying. I just carried out a quick sketch in my journal and was done with it. Nobody ever seems to mind the sketching. I wonder why that is?

Outside, the air is a lot less oppressive. A number of articles describe the location as “austere”, and I can imagine that in the grip of winter it may well be, but under the warm spring sunshine it is anything but. A cool wind blows down from the snowy mountains, but it is accompanied by a warmth in the air, sweeter with the scent of cherry blossom. Crag martins and wagtails twitter merrily over the pool, and in the dehesa beyond, I saw (and heard) a family of one of Spain’s most beautiful birds of all, the Iberian magpie, a relic of the Ice Age whose nearest living relatives can be found in eastern China. As I watched them hopping around in the branches of the nearest tree, a little owl flew into sight, calling to its partner in the valley below.

Finally, the greatest sight of all. As I made my way back to the bus station, a lonely black shadow came down from the mountains, casting an unmistakeable silhouette against the intense blue of the Spanish sky: a griffon vulture, the true king of these mountains. They were here long before the Hapsburgs and will be haunting these hills long after they have been forgotten.

I have been fascinated with vultures since the first time I saw one. That boyish glee I get when I see that shape in the ether hasn’t gone away after twenty years. I don’t think it ever will.

Austere? The building, perhaps, in true counter-reformation style, but the location? Hardly. I don’t think Felipe needed much convincing. If I had all that Habsburg money floating around, I’d have wanted to end my days here, too. BB x

A Parting Gift

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

A loud knocking at my door woke me this morning. It was only Łukasz checking I was up and about, but it caught me off guard all the same. I must have passed out the night before. I guess I was more worn out than I thought. My phone was on about 18% battery and the bathroom light was on. I sheepishly turned it off, threw on some clothes and all but inhaled a cup of green tea so as not to hold the others up any longer. Talk about a bad start.

I needn’t have been so flustered. It was absolutely miserable outside, the earth damp from a night of rain and melted snow and the sky dark with the threat of more. The temperature had risen by about six degrees, which was something, but it was hardly what you’d call perfect wildlife watching conditions.

Nature, however, is and always has been fickle, and we were in for more than one surprise before we bade farewell to Białowieża.

We agreed to try for the bison once again, after our lucky encounter with the wolves the day before. We found the herd even faster than on the first morning, grazing in a field just outside Narewka. They seemed unapproachable at first, but Łukasz had a better idea.

A hidden track ran through the forest on the other side, allowing us to get a lot closer than we’d managed on the previous occasion. Of course, the conditions were awful for photography. The focus assist light on my camera kept blinking in its struggle to focus on the dark shapes which Łukasz admonished me for, fearing it might spook the herd. I gave up pretty quickly and contented myself with watching the bison through my binoculars. I did manage a grab shot through them with my phone again, though.

A squall came in and we backed down. Łukasz concluded it was not the herd we’d seen before, which had numbered some thirty-nine individuals and hadn’t featured the bull with the twisted horn. Hoping to show us more in the time we had left, he took us back to the last place we’d seen the larger herd. He offered to go out and run to the spot where we’d left them. I volunteered to go with him. We had barely gone more than a few yards when he suddenly stopped in his tracks, held up his hand and said ‘Wolf!’.

I dropped to my knees and followed his line of sight. And there it was, standing on a rise at the edge of the forest: a white wolf, its winter coat lightly flecked with grey and brown. Like an echo from yesterday, it soon got wind of our attention and slinked back into the trees and out of sight. Łukasz tried calling after it, but there was no response.

After waiting for several minutes, we counted our stars for a second encounter with wolves in as many days and started heading back to the car. I must have been on high alert since being all but shaken out of bed this morning, because I saw it first: a second wolf, barely fifty metres away, watching us from the field adjacent to the track. This time it was me that gave the signal. I’d made the choice to leave my camera behind on this quick sortie, but I didn’t care. With only my binoculars to rely on, I was spared the frustration of staring through a viewfinder and getting poor results, and instead had the joy of watching the beautiful creature bounding away across the field as though it were only feet away.

I can’t show you what I saw. So let me describe it to you.

A tall and powerfully built creature, with the faintest of black lines down its legs. A warm buff colour lines its flanks, the colour of undercooked gingerbread, but its eyes – a lot more visible at such close range – are an amber so intense that not even the best of Warsaw’s jewellers could hope to replicate it. It runs as gracefully as though it were sailing across the field, and its body moves like a wave, arching and falling with every step. When it stops to look back – and it does this only once, and for just a moment – the black lips on its white muzzle are drawn into a grin. And then it turns away with a swish of its tail and lopes off into the forest.

This is Białowieża’s farewell: a final encounter with one of its most handsome creatures of all.

It is magnificent. I am lost for words.

The car is now flying through the vast flats of Eastern Poland. Scenery I remember seeing only in picture books of the East plays beyond the window like a zoetrope: stands of towering, limbless spruce trees, bending under the weight of the wind; lonely cabins and hunting hides in the fields; water towers and the bulbous spires of Orthodox churches rising out of the low-lying villages we pass.

It’s unlike any place I’ve ever been before – but then, I guess I haven’t ever traveled this far east. Go any further than Białowieża and you’ll run headlong into the Belarus border wall – a reminder that Iron Curtain of the previous century was, true to its name, only drawn back, and not ripped down for good.

One day, if the fates allow, I would love to see Siberia. I suspect that kind of adventure is absolutely off the cards for now, but until then, I can only hope things do not spiral out of control the way they did before.

There is too much that is beautiful in this part of the world, too much that has been done to save these treasures from the brink of oblivion. Too much to sacrifice on the altar of ambition. Well – that’s my ten cents on the matter, anyway. BB x

Forest of the Dead

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

I’m kneeling in the snow, staring down an arrow-straight road carved through the forest by the Russians more than a century ago. Our guide makes a signal and tells us to wait. We could be here for up to an hour. The fever that has followed me since stepping out of the plane in Warsaw has not broken yet: I’m still nursing a headache and a bad cough, my back hurts, and I’m starting to freeze from the feet up. But I’d suffer it all again to see what I just saw: a genuine forest spirit, a shadow of the ancient world, loping out of the trees and onto the road. A wild wolf.

When I woke up this morning, it was to a frozen world. The snow hadn’t started falling when I turned in around midnight, but there must have been quite a lot of it during the night, because there wasn’t a single track to be seen in the village. That may have more to do with the fact that we were up and gone by six thirty, a full hour before sunrise, and on a Sunday morning to boot.

After a short drive through the frozen forest, Łukasz brought the car to a sudden stop and jumped out to show us what he had seen: a single set of footprints in the snow, larger than those of any dog I’d ever seen. Following a tip-off from a friend of his, we set off into the forest to try our luck with one of the wolf packs that inhabit Białowieża Forest.

We didn’t have to go for before we found another set of prints. And another. And another. In all, we counted around eleven sets of prints in the snow. They had to be recent: the snow had only started in the early hours of the morning, and it was still very early. We pushed on to the crossroads, hoping to catch a glimpse of our quarry crossing the road in one of four possible directions.

We waited. A couple of red deer broke the cover of the trees, but they didn’t look particularly perturbed – not a good sign when you’re tracking a creature that puts the fear of God into nearly everything that moves in the forest. Łukasz tried calling out to them – and a bloody convincing mimic he is, too – but the forest was silent. Wherever the wolves were, they were doing what they done since we first crossed paths as a species hundreds of thousands of years ago: giving us a very wide berth.

We moved on, taking a chance on the left road. A couple of minutes into the walk, we came to a sudden halt at the sign of a dark shadow in the road at the top of the rise. On closer inspection through the binoculars, it was another tracker and his party staring right back at us through a pair of binoculars of his own.

We met halfway. Łukasz and the other guide swapped information. They’d come from the other side of the quadrant and had found tracks on the road leading into the woods, but nothing on the forest trail, meaning the pack of eleven had to be in there still. They might well have been watching us all the while, invisible between the thousand arms of the trees within.

Well, some of them, anyway. One of the women from the other party suddenly pointed back down the road and said something. My head turned so quick it might have snapped – and then I saw it. A lone wolf standing in the road, staring straight at us. Łukasz gave a signal and we all dropped to the ground, some on their bellies, since wolves are more likely to be spooked by a standing human silhouette than a prone one.

It didn’t hang around. Before my companions could get their cameras ready, it had loped off into the cover of the trees on the other side and was gone.

We waited there for quite some time. Where there was one, the other ten were sure to be nearby. Just as we were getting restless, three red deer came hurtling through the trees to our right, from the part of the forest where the wolves were hiding. Had they been spooked by the pack? The others were momentarily distracted and in that moment I had my eyes on the road, and that’s when I saw it: a second wolf, emerging right where the first had come and gone. Unlike the first, this one didn’t cross the road in one go, but instead came trotting towards us. I motioned to the others and tried a few photos, but my poor camera was struggling in the low light, so I contented myself with the binoculars instead.

Nothing quite prepares you for the size of the wolf. You expect a dog, or something like it, but it is so much more. Bigger. Stronger. A restless hunger in its yellow eyes. An untamed purpose in its gait. Even its footprints tell you you’re in the presence of something magnificent: there’s no graceless wrinkles or adapted opposable thumbs in its pug, just a perfect symmetry of power.

We never did see the other nine members of the pack. It’s possible they made a kill during the night and decided to remain close to their prey, sending the two we saw ahead as scouts. Who knows? Eventually, we elected to abandon the vigil and leave them be, since by now the pack must have worked out where we were and how to avoid us. We left the forest by the same road we came, but not before a lone bull bison emerged from the trees just a hundred metres or so down the road. Poland, you sure know how to pull out all the stops!

We ventured into the strictly protected area of Białowieża Forest after breakfast, hoping to try our luck with some of the park’s rare bird species, but a combination of high wind and sleet cast a spell on the woods. A single mistle thrush cackling at the gates was the only sound we ever heard: neither the croak of a raven, the wittering tattoo of a nuthatch, nor the hoot of an owl, the mew of a buzzard or the drumbeat of one of the nine species of woodpecker that call the forest home. Nothing. Even the wind died away as we wandered deeper into the woods, where some of the trees are hundreds of years old, and others older still.

Białowieża Forest is famous for being one of Europe’s last remaining primeval forests, but what is even more fascinating – if a little disturbing – is that an astonishing 30% of its trees are dead (some figures indicate it may even be nearly 50%). It is, in a way, a forest of the dead, albeit one so full of life in the spring and summer that you could be forgiven for missing that small detail.

Not so in the bleak midwinter, however. The towering spruce trees look more like the charred pillars of a gutted cathedral, while those that have crashed to the ground seem like the carcasses of enormous serpents, their curving branches like shattered ribs on the forest floor. Everywhere is the sweet smell of decay and black fungus grows on the stumps of the fallen giants. The presence of several stones and crosses marking the mass execution site of hundreds of Polish Jews by the Nazis only adds to the creeping dread.

We spent around three hours in the woods, learning about the ancient trees and the various species of fungi that call the forest home, but the eerie silence of the birds was sorely noted.

We did not leave disappointed, however. Something far more beautiful and far more chilling took its place.

Just a hundred metres or so from the main gate, an unmistakeable howl broke the silence, echoed a few seconds later by another. It’s amazing how a sound that you must have imagined and read about in books for years can still make the blood run cold on instinct.

I would have settled for hearing a wolf over seeing one on this trip, and I got both. I may not have been the luckiest in love this year, but I’ve taken all the chips home with the wolves on this trip. Maybe it’s a sign that I’m doing something right at last – reconnecting with the younger version of me who was far more interested in the natural world than anything else.

If I have any budding resolutions for the New Year, it’s to do something like this again. I am, and always will be, a naturalist first and foremost, and everything else I claim to be second. I should reclaim that part of me. It is, it must be said, a genuinely happy and fulfilled part of me, and the greatest gift I could give to any children I should be lucky enough to have someday. BB x

Thathanka

/ Benjamin Barnabas / Leave a comment

Local Time: 21.00

Bojarski Gościniec, Narewka

The temperature has risen a little since yesterday, though not by much. I’m still nursing a bad case of end-of-term-itis – it always hits me bad in the first few days of the holidays – so marching through the frosty Polish deepwoods with weak lungs and a headache was a bit of a challenge. But if I was properly breath-taken, it was on account of the incredible wildlife encounters I had this morning.

We must have set off shortly after 7am, about half an hour before sunrise. We had a couple of false starts – it turns out hay bales make very convincing bison half an hour before sunrise – but it didn’t take us long to track down a sizeable herd grazing in the fields.

The European Bison, or wisent, is one of conservation’s greatest success stories. What was once a ubiquitous symbol of Pleistocene Europe had been driven to extinction in all three of its holdouts by the end of the first quarter of the 20th century. Though strictly protected on the hunting preserves of the Russian Tsars, their numbers were already dwindling during the Early Modern Period and the last wild bison was shot here in Białowoeza in 1921, shortly after marauding German soldiers during WW1 whittled the herds down to just a few surviving beasts. With so many bison in zoos and private menageries spread across Europe, however, an effort was conceived to bring the wisent back from extinction. From an initial breeding stock of twelve, the population gradually recovered over the second half of the last century. The wild population now stands at around 4,000 individuals, headquartered along the Poland-Belarus border, with reintroduction projects from Blean Woods in Kent to Castelo Branco in Portugal – a truly remarkable rescue operation.

Our guide, Łukasz, took us to a number of places where the bison often leave the forest to graze. It’s been a good year for acorns, so they aren’t venturing out into the open as much as usual, browsing instead on the bumper crop in the dark heart of the ancient forest. Perhaps that’s why we had no luck after leaving the first herd to try our luck elsewhere.

We did find a solitary elk sitting beside the road, half covered in frost, which was an amazing stroke of luck.

Łukasz made the call to return to the herd we’d seen at sunrise, so we parked at the last spot we’d seen them and ventured out across the frosty meadow in search of our quarry.

It wasn’t hard. The heaviest land animal in Europe isn’t exactly inconspicuous.

My camera didn’t really do the beasts justice – I don’t possess a supertelephoto lens like many amateur wildlife photographers – so I resorted to a little optical trickery by “digiscoping” – that is, holding my iPhone camera up to the viewfinder of Łukasz’ scope. It took some manoeuvring and I only got one usable shot, but the result was pretty good… for a phone.

Tomorrow, we set out in search of the reason I booked this holiday in the first place: wild wolves. I’m well aware the odds are stacked against us, and to be honest I’d settle for hearing them, or even just following their tracks, but it is set to snow tonight, so who knows – we may get lucky. Watch this space! BB x