SPAIN

LA GRAN SENDA DE MALAGA : GR249. 18th Feb La Capeta de Velez to Nerja

I managed to get 2 stages completed today, a total of 28 km altogether which according to my computations was the same as yesterday, the difference being that today involved my first real climbs and first contact with the wilder side of the Costa.
I started from our quiet seaside street and continued along a paved beachside promenade.
I’m always impressed by the facilities provided on the Spanish beaches with changing rooms and showers every 100m or so.

The early morning sun shone through the palms as dog walkers and joggers fulfilled their daily routine.

The high rise apartment buildings and tourist bars and restaurants ran out as I came into Lagos, a small scale traditional settlement without the sandy beaches that fuelled the development elsewhere. The simple seaside dwellings around there continued through the busier town of El Morche, sometimes with large tower blocks behind them.

There were a series of fortified watch towers keeping an eye out for pirates and privateers along the coast and the route led me through patches of flowers and cactus past the winches used for hauling the boats out of the sea.

As I approached Torrox Costa the hulks of unfinished developments again reared their ugly heads above the beach.

But back on the prom of the town proper I admired the exotic plantings and the creative pruning.

Just before the lighthouse was a strange construction with a glass floor built out over the ancient ruins of a necropolis and fish salting factory where they also made the unappetising sounding ” Garum sauce” whose chief ingredient was “guts”.

This was the point where I finally left the Costa behind and headed for the hills. I started up a track beside the dryish river bed with irrigated fields to one side.

Before long I had to make my first river crossing, described in my translated guide as wading.

I climbed up and up, the track getting smaller and smaller towards the humming edifice of the A7 motorway that strode across the valley on giant concrete legs.

Strangely some youth had decided that the undercarriage of this alien environment was a good place to have a good time and declare so in graffiti.

Incongruously, as I passed under the most modern transport route I started down the days oldest, a mule and walkers track that wound down to the valley bottom and over a tiny old stone bridge.

The vegetation was lush and small little subsistence farms plots were still tended in the shadow of the gigantic motorway structure, the slow movements of the gardener in contrast to the rushing traffic above.

Climbing back under the A7 on the other side of the valley I rose up on higher ground until I was looking down across it, to another huge area of unfulfilled property speculation. We’d seen the signs for years as we sped down the motorway, advertising houses that never got built, but now I could see the extent of infrastructure that had been put in. Roads to nowhere.

I’d been hearing the noise of the motorway for too long and was relived when the traffic was swallowed up by the gaping mouths of tunnels that I climbed high above.

Passing by a hill seemingly held together by lines of plastic webbing

I finally came to the peak of El Puerto at 265m where I sat by an ants nest and had my lunch gazing at my destination , Nerja , a long way below me.

The landscape changed again as I started down the long descent with a vista of avocados before me.

A little later I came across a grove of the most radically pruned olive trees I’ve ever seen.

There were some spectacular villas on the hills here with sea views and very wealthy inhabitants but alongside that , a simpler lifestyle continued.

As I walked through a tunnel under the motorway for the last time I found more graffiti evidence of youth seeking freedom in unlikely places

before approaching Nerja on a labyrinth of tiny lush tracks through the crops.

Just before I emerged into the town proper with its roundabouts, shops , bars, and general busy 21st century life I passed another reminder of simpler times, one that is still managing to co exist with the present.

LA GRAN SENDA DE MALAGA: GR 249 16/17th Febuary Malaga to La Caleta de Velez

A little while ago when we were hiking a bit of the GR 7 in southern Spain, we discovered we were also on the GR 249. A bit of research showed that this was a new route that circles the entire Malaga Province, a distance of around 660km. Very tempting.
Although I’d have loved to set out to do the whole thing over a month responsibilities did not allow such wanton walking but I have managed to slip away for a week to tackle the first 120 km or so.
After a night trying to sleep on a bench at Dublin airport McDonalds and an early morning flight I arrived into a barmy 17′ degree and made my way to the seafront where I had to walk about 5km west to get to the start of the grand circle at a bizarre sculpture.

Immediately turning on my heels I returned eastwards along the prom, my anal instincts for starting at the beginning satisfied. It was a fairly blowy day and the waves were crashing on the seashore while people watched and surfers retreated.

The first days hike took me about 20km eastwards, all of it along the coastline, past the marina,
the old brick chimneys and the Pomidou centre.

All along the prom for miles I past the enticing smell of woodsmoke and grilled fish from the string of beachfront chiringuitos but the urge to keep going towards my rendezvous kept me from indulging.

Moving out beyond the city limits the surroundings became a little wilder.

I found myself on the old Malaga to Almeria train track and past through a number of tunnels on the now pedestrianised greenway.

Eventually I came to the outskirts of Rincon de la Victoria where another few Kms of prom brought me to where my friend Trevor had his support vehicle camper wedged in between a bunch of others on a patch of waste ground.
After a long day and night the food and drink and general hospitality were most welcome and set me up handsomely for a continuation of my seaside ramblings the following morning.
After a couple of hours along the coast, sometimes on the beach , sometimes on little paths and sometimes on the side of the busy N340, the route turned inland along rutted tracks through the vegetable fields.

I went from an area resplendent with exotic plantings to one far more prosaic.

This was part of the intensive cultivation zone that feeds the habit of Northern Europe for summer veg in their depths of winter and that was supposed to have failed recently leading to shortages and panic buying.
There was no signs of it here although the methods and suspected chemical additives were a little unnerving to this organic smallholder.

Arriving back at the coast I found myself surrounded by a failed development at Niza Beach where abandoned plots and dumped rubbish were all that was left of property dreams.

After a while I was back on the old railway line passing a station and bridge across the arroya before passing under the motorway, skirting an obscenely green golf course and more colourful chemical avocado plantations.

I’d arrived at La Caleta de Velez after moving on beyond the days stage end at Velez Malaga ,hoping to shorten some long climbs ahead.
I met trusty trev and we parked up on the seafront, wined and dined with old friends before retiring with the sounds of the waves soothing us to a state of unconscious.

CAMINITO DEL REY: The Walkway of Death

The somewhat dramatic title of this post, on a hike we did recently ,has been earned over the years by numerous people being killed whilst attempting to complete the original and badly crumbling walkway clinging to the side of a sheer cliff face 100m up above the waters tumbling through the Desfiladero de los Gaitanes gorge northwest of Malaga.

We had visited the area a couple of times over the years and seen climbers clambering about and watched videos posted on youtube by daredevils of themselves teetering on narrow and rusting steel beams supporting patches of crumbling concrete over the sheer drop but were never brave or foolhardy enough to attempt it ourselves.

Officially closed to the public in the 1980’s it continued to be a popular illicit attraction reached by crossing the iron girder railway bridge at the southern end while keeping a close eye out for trains emerging from the tunnels on either side.

Following a string of fatalities around the millennium , 30m of the walkway were demolished next to the bridge making access much harder. But still they came, and so plans were made to provide a safer, money making, route to satisfy the obvious demand and it was reopened last year after a €3million refit and we were keen to experience this magnificently engineered path under less nerve racking conditions.

caminito-map

Following the course of the Guadalhorce upstream from Spain’s southcoast the river has cut deeply through the limestone sierras as they rise up from the plains to the north, creating a ravine at some points only 10m wide and 300m deep.The last few km before the huge embalse or reservoir system forms the Garganta del Chorro, a staggeringly dramatic, jaw dropping sliver of a passage between the towering slabs of contorted rock.

The walkway was originally constructed over 7 years to 1912 to facilitate construction of a hydro electric scheme with much of the work being carried out by sailors hanging on to ropes suspended from the top of the gorge. The story is that the most dangerous tasks were saved for prisoners on life sentences with nothing to lose.

The area had already been witness to formidable engineering feats when 40 years earlier the railway from the interior of Spain had blasted tunnels through the sierras on route to the coast at Malaga. The line still serves passengers to Ronda, Seville and Granada and must be a very scenic ride.

It was during the construction of the railway that the idea of harnessing the 100m drop in altitude from one end of the gorge to the other for hydro power was first mooted and by 1921 when King Alfonso x111 used the walkway to inaugurate the completed dams (and so giving it the name ” The Kings Little Pathway”) the controlled waters of the Guadalhorce were producing the power for a burgeoning Malaga.

The old path, what’s left of it, has been retained and is just below the new walkway of wooden boarding on a galvanised steel framework anchored securely to the cliff face and with reassuringly sturdy cable and steel post railings.At the southern end a new steel suspension bridge with a metal mesh floor and another section with a thick glass floor allow an uninterupted view to the river below.

Initially the route could be tackled from either end but now can only be done in a southerly direction, presumably to ease the congestion of criss crossing groups on narrow or convoluted sections. Parking at El Kiosko bar and restaurant at the beginning of the 3km trail to the northern access gate we had a pleasant walk through the pine woods with the blue waters of the Embalse de Gaitanejo to our side.

As we approached the access point control we could see the gorge opening in the mountain ahead, and a large group of people milling about.The Caminito is popular and even on a September weekday, a year and a half after reopening, with groups leaving every 30 minutes,I was glad we had booked on line as our time slot, in fact the whole day, was sold out.

It was with surprise and relief that very soon after our group had been given our safety talk and helmets and been released into the wilds the majority raced ahead and out of sight and we were left to slowly stroll and marvel at our surroundings, with no time limit on our ramble. We were quickly immersed in the sandwich of rock faces.

Looking down over the wire railings to the river below revealed the sculptural power of the rushing waters with countless rock bowls turned over eons by their spiralling flow.

There were many bits and pieces of hardware left over from the original structure and many pegs, rings, cables and hand or footholds hammered like giant staples into the rock.

After a slow kilometre or so the narrow gorge began to open out ahead of us and the Hoyo valley came into view.

We passed by a couple of the maintenance guys working away on the end of a rope. The project must have created some good job opportunities for local climbers.

On the other side of the river the railway tunnel disappearing into the mountain came into view. Nowadays the new high speed Malaga-Madrid track has dug a route under Huma mountain, about 1km further east but the original line is still well used.

The valley widened before us and we stepped down off the boardwalk onto a trail through the wooded slope studded with Aleppo and Stone pines, Holm oak and Eucalyptuses. Juniper and Mediterranean Fan Palms also thrived in the parched and stony soil and the scent of brooms and rock roses wafted on the warm air. Down along the riverbank the moisture supported rushes, canes, oleanders and tamarisks.

Above us many vultures circled in a thermal of rising heat and there are often golden eagles and buzzards accompanying them. Below us an abandoned farmhouse commanded a fine situation looking over the land it once worked, isolated by it’s encircling sierra.

We continued for about a km on the level shady path, sometimes alongside the little canal that used to carry water to a turbine at Chorro, and sometimes in it, before scaling steps at the sluice gates.

And then we were back to the boardwalk and approaching the massive bulk of limestone and dolomite whose sedimentary layers have been uplifted over millennia to now stand as vertical slices where fossils reveal their ancient origins.

We were getting to the most dramatic section of the Caminito, the last 500m, where the narrow walkway snakes around a series of acute bends,

crossing the suspension bridge,( where the sufferers of vertigo may have a hard time),

and following the curve of the sheer rock wall around to it’s southern face towering above the blue water where after a series of steps, we climbed over the steel girder railway bridge to the exit gate.

Our return bus was another few km walk alongside the reservoir from which water is pumped by windmills atop the mountain to a high altitude at times of excess energy, to be released back through turbines as the need arrises. The hydro scheme is clever engineering and the Caminto del Rey, both original and modern, was a thrilling walk built to enable its construction and appreciation. Long may it last.

If your looking for any information on how to visit the Caminito a useful english language website can be found by clicking here.

GR7: Rio Gordo to Ventas de Zafarraya

On a (too) short break in Spain last week we tackled the local section of the GR7 route that works it’s way 1900km from Tarifa on the southwestern tip of the country, through the regions of Andalucia, Murcia, Valencia and Catalunya.

And the Spanish trail is only a small part of the International E4 route, starting in Portugal and traversing Spain, Andorra, France, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece and finally Cyprus making up an epic 10,500 km. Thats some hike.

Unfortunately we didn’t have time to do the whole thing and so made do with a 500th of it.

Starting out in the early morning light we climbed a long way up out of Rio Gordo north, over the main road towards Malaga, past a lot of the prickly pears that been struck down with the white fly infestation of the cochineal beetle that is a relative of the one that produces the vivid red dye and ironically the original reason for the introduction of the prickly pear, its home and food source. But for some reason the population of this species is out of hand and has wiped out the iconic pear across a large and growing area of Spain.

It took us about an hour to climb the couple of hundred mts up into the sun, levelling off at about 650m with fantastic views back down the sierra and on towards the imposing bulk of Dona Ana.

The wild flowers were a glory, mid April, and although a good few had obviously gone over there were plenty to admire, and smell, and gather seeds from.

Even though there had been very little rain all winter the fields of grain and broad beans were green and the hedgerows lush. The colours of the flowers were very vibrant in the sun and the buzz of insects became loader as the heat started to rise.

The broad open flatish land up on the high ground below the limestone peaks was obviously richer and easier to cultivate than the steep and stony olive groves of the lower levels and it was up here that the oldest and biggest fincas or cortijo seemed to be.We approached the crumbling ruins of one that was supposedly the birthplace of Andalusia’s famous Robin Hood figure Omar Ibn Hafsun whose rebel army controlled a vast territory in the 9th century, but had since been used to house a load of sheep in sheds above some ancient caves in the cliff.

From here a narrow and sticky farm track that gathered on our boots as we went led us between the fields yellow with some weed or old crop (rape? mustard?) , across a little arroyo running with the previous mornings rain, and slowly down again to reach a road.

We hit tarmac for awhile at the Puerto del Sabar at 600m but the wide views and wealth of roadside flowers made it an enjoyable stretch until we crossed a river and turned up a narrow track and gained height again to reach a little hamlet with a bar and an interesting looking Casa Rural.

Climbing up and away from the houses on a track that heads southeast around the hillside we had our first view down the valleys towards the reservoir at Vinuela and beyond it in the distance the twinking Mediterranean .

Before too long we were approaching another fine old Cortijo, this one boasting a cobbled track and era (grain threshing platform. Not far beyond Sally got a bootfull in a puddle and we stopped for lunch by a fountain on the way into the elevated village of Guaro.

We needed the sustenance to fortify ourselves for a pretty big climb up out of the prosperous looking village and up to the crest of the hill at about 900m where we turned left to join an old railway bed that was built to accommodate mine workings in the mountains and led us eventually all the way to Ventas de Zafarraya.

We had more great views across the sierra and down to the lake and at one point there was strange bridge across the track whose purpose we could not determine.

We crossed into Granada province as we approached the end of our 8 hour 30km journey.The highest mountain in the area , Maroma, at over 2000m, came into view and soon after we passed through a short section of tunnel and through the gap in the ridge thats allows the road up from the coast and into the high plain beyond that is a very productive vegetable growing area. Many of the (presumably low paid) workers on the land here seemed to be immigrants from North Africa and we shared the plaza and bus stop with some of them.

We passed a sign on our way into town that showed we were right on time.

8h. Eight very enjoyable hours on the GR7 E4. Only another 500 days to go.

MADRID POST MOZARABE: 23/25th March

23km

My Spanish journey is nearly over- I’ve taken roughly 1,900,000 steps so allowing for a 5% poetic license I’m calling it a two million step journey.

The last four days have been the most intense immersion in art of my life and it’s been both exhausting and life affirming. There are shows everywhere. Not just in the big three galleries but a host of other civic and private buildings display world class art. My campaign to assimilate as much of it as I could continued yesterday morning at the Thyssen Bornemisza gallery containing maybe the best private collection in the world spanning works from the 17th to 20th centuries. The first to really strike me was by a man from Clonakilty in west cork Michael Harnett who painted “Material for a leisure hour”. I think he nailed it.

I was there for many hours admiring the work of all the finest artists of the last 400 years. Here is a small sample.

It had been raining all day so when I emerged the streets were awash.

Nothing for it but to engage in some appreciation of the fine art of drinking in the celebrated bars of this city.

I ended up in one of Hemingways favourites.

Of course food and eating are also an art form here and the shops reflect that.

I ended the night by going to the movies. Many of the films shown here are in the original language with Spanish subtitles so I caught up with Pride, about the gay and lesbian support of the miners strike which had a pretty low attendance in spite of the huge and open gay scene here. I guess it was a bit too English. Great feel good movie though.

Today, my last, it was time to tackle the big boy. The Prada, with works spanning nearly 900 years but mostly concentrated on the old masters. Incredible stuff, my vocabulary could not possibly do it justice. I stood in front of the huge Bosch’s, fascinating since childhood, till time stood still. Unfortunately no photography was allowed though I did sneak some later.

I was interested in this scene of the Med coast near Torreminos from 1860 by Carlos de Haes.

How things have changed! The galleries had quite a few artists working on their own copies of masterpieces.

I staggered out to the botanical gardens next door in the late afternoon which had the tulips out.

Into the greenhouses to admire the cactus

and the rainforest complete with jungly soundtrack.

Up the road to Madrids green heart, El Retiro park, a godsend in summer I’m sure.

Where I discovered more art in the palace of Velaquez showing modern sculpture by Italian Luciano Fabro.

And finally, nearly sated, I called in to the Palace de Cibeles for a couple of cutting edge shows of new work by a host of artists. On approach I reaLized the cops were out in force again as were the demonstrators.

Inside there were 4 floors of this huge building given over to art displays and a restaurant and bar above.

One show was strictly no photos another was not ??

While I’d been passively looking at art some of Madrid had been gathering for more democratic demonstrations.

And I have to hand it to the civic authorities because they know how to deal with it in a organised fashion. The police controlled the movement of the crowd that was followed by ambulances and civic defence vehicles and bringing up the rear were the clean up crew in formation.

So that was Madrid for me. A vibrant stylish city that loves it’s food and drink and its art and culture. It loves to party. It’s in your face but not brash.

Gort has its work cut out to follow that.

MADRID POST MOZARABE: 21st/ 22nd March

i guess all my regular readers are no longer checking in believing that I have no longer anything to say. However, I’m still on my journey and will continue to report from the front line. The walking can become a bit of an addiction and so it seems can the blogging.

A soft misty start to Saturday.

It looked like they had run the train track through the Roman viaduct.

The track followed the route of the Camino north until Caceres so noted with interest that the countryside changed back to Holm oak and granite before long and became hilly again. Then cork oaks became predominant as well as wild areas of scrub. I was just thinking that it was a great area to walk through when it changed again and a long , long stretch of flat, treeless grassland from horizon to horizon made the going look tough. The clouds had built up and it was grey and gloomy and I was glad I was on my way to the bright lights of the city.

The old terminus building has been transformed into a botanical garden and still manages to deal with the high speed trains.

Just across the street from the station is the National Centro de Arte Reina Sofia where my cultural tour of Madrid began with a 5 hour session with a massive collection of the worlds greatest artists of the last 150 years or so. I cannot begin to list my favourites that I can as able to get up close and personal with but I made some new ones. It’s a rush for me to come upon a painting in real life that I’ve loved from books especially if the scale is impressive. Like Guernica for instance which has a huge room constantly full of admirers.

It fact it was great to see how much time and effort the human race wants to put into an interaction with artwork. Especially if it’s free. This is the queue to get in at 7 when it’s free till 9

The galleries are so many and large that the numbers were accommodated without crowding. Mostly paintings there was also sculpture and some video, film and photography. In fact there was a temporary show about the reinvention of Documentary Photography which included a load of counter culture stuff from the seventies squatting scene which took me back. But mostly I just soaked up the visuals of work like

and

also

and so many more

At 8 o’clock hunger and a need to find my hostel drove me out into the throbbing city streets. They were actually pulsing a little more than usual because there was a demonstration going on which by the time I got to the hostel had got out of hand and the riot cops were out in numbers.

A police car window had been smashed outside and it took a few hours for quiet to return.

Well when I say quiet its relative. Saturday night in the centre of Madrid is not quiet and we were one floor above the street. The cries of the revellers continued till after the sounds of the daytime activities started up around 7. In fact when I got to Puerta del Sol the runners warming up for big event shared the space with many not in such good shape.

Then off for walking tour to the Plaza Mayor where stalls were being set up by the purveyors of collectables. Coins,stamps,postcards and all sorts of assorted medals,keys and bric-à-brac were keenly scrutinised by those in the know. Down to the Sunday flea market area of El Rasto, a huge space of everything from secondhand clothes to antiques.

After a bit of shopping it was back through Puerta del Sol again which had by now become the venue for a dog show with policemen on ?

After moving rooms to somewhere I didn’t have people coming and going all night and didn’t proudly display letters of complaint I returned to the art orgy.

Two of Spain’s biggest companies Telefonica and Mapre both have fundacion a to support and display art and both were running shows I wanted to see.

Telefonicas was housed in what was considered Europe’s first skyscraper and was a very impressive mixed group show called Big Bang Data, concerned with the exponential growth of data production and storage we are all complicit in and the uses/ misuses and the art created from it.

Real time flights over USA

Amount of photographs uploaded to Flickr everyday.

A huge wall of babbling video diaries.

Different globes different data

And a good interpretation of the data world.

Coupled with a big show of Instagramer’s photos it gave me food for thought after my recent entry into the blogging world.

Then off to the Mapfre foundation show of an old favorite.

Where a notice on the comment board was from someone who had completely by surprise came upon a picture from 1964 of his mother and brother!

More at the Circulo de Bellas Artes. The one I liked was a show about the cabins, sheds , huts and cottages used by writers, poets and philosophers. Photos, little scale models, plans and dried plants from around the sites were included. And a slide show of artistic representation of the cabana. It made me keen to get to the cabana of my own.

Finally a visit to the roof terrace there and a much needed dinner in the posh surroundings of their cafe.

And so to bed.

CAMINO MOZARABE: Merida to Merida 20th March

14km (without getting anywhere)

It’s just as well I’m heading home. My boots are finished. The soles are so worn that there are loads of holes that little stones keep getting in. More strap fixings on my rucksack have given up and it’s held together with baler twine. On the techie side of things my data allowance is running out and my charging lead has got very iffy.

I’ve been exploring the ancient Roman city of Emerita Augusta, capital of Lusitania, one of the three provinces of Hispania and now, as Merida, the capital city of Extremadura. Big areas are fenced off and semi excavated- other architectural remains have had office blocks built on pillars above them. It’s a bit of a culture/ history clash at times but the modern city does its thing while accommodating layers of the past.

It’s not just a Roman past on show either. Visigoths, Moors and then Catholic Spanish have all left their mark here and you buy replicas of all of it.

There’s so much stuff here it’s left lying around on roundabouts.

I started my sightseeing with the Acueducto de Los Milagros

before moving on to the Museo de arts Romano, a building that incorporates a 2000 year old housing estate in its basement.

Just around the corner was the Ampiteatro with ahead of its time street lighting

past some baths

and the Portico del Foro

to the temple of Diana

The Puente Romano, spanning the Rio Guadiana,

is pretty impressive

The entrance to the Moorish citadel Alcazabe not quite so

Next door government offices are built over Edificio Multiple

So that has saved you the bother of visiting Merida.

It felt strange to be walking about without a rucksack and I can hardly manage without my poles now. It felt very wrong to be going on the opposite direction to the yellow arrows- but I’m still watching out for them.

CAMINO MOZARABE: Torrefresneda to Merida 19th March

28km

There was a miscalculation in the remaining kms so it took a bit longer than expected today. I crawled out of my bunker to a clear sky and I could see my breath on the air. My new sleeping bag ( not a Lidle product) had done well to keep me cosy. It was a few km to Torrefresneda and a cafe con leche in the bar with the boyos. It’s such an early morning hang out in every city, town and village for the lads. Nowhere like it in Ireland. This was a real one mulo place. Basically one road through a new village to accommodate agricultural workers. But they still had the civic pride to design and build an amenity that no one will ever use.

The buildings were all low rise and the same.

Slap bag In the middle of miles of intensively productive farmland with a motorway running alongside I wasn’t tempted by the for sale signs. Of which there were many.

The landscape might have been a bit grim but the walking felt good and I flew along listening to my favorite tunes of the last 2 1/2 months.

With the motorway one one side and a natural park on the other

and the storks nesting on the pylons between the fruit trees

I carried on to San Pedro de Merida where more civic plans had gone belly up.

and on through more “countryside”

Until I came to the outskirts of Merida

A big city that luckily was well signed for the peregrino.

Past many Roman bits and pieces to the river and a old mill ow serving as an albergue and my home for the next two nights.

After weeks on the Camino Mozarabe with no one about this place is alive with pilgrims on the way to Santiago from Seville. I say alive, of course they’re all in bed by 9.

Bloody pilgrims!

CAMINO MOZARABE:Don Benito to Torrefresneda 18th March

25km

The Camino Mozarabe finishes at Merida, another 26km away and I have decided, after much soul searching, that my Camino will also finish there.

A feeling has been growing recently that this journey is nearing completion and I have tried to know if it’s real. My head has been telling me otherwise- that I’m only half way there- that I’ve only been on the road 3 weeks- that I can’t stop now.

My destination was always unsure. Having finished two Caminos in Santiago already I knew I wasn’t fixed on going all the way there. I didn’t want to walk again the 250km Sally and I did last year on the Camino Sanabria, the end of the Via de la Plata. And my schedule meant I’d be doing the last 100km during Semanta Santa when it would be crazy busy.

I had thought about maybe going due north, backwards up a Camino route from Leon to the north coast, but it seemed a bit artificial, and a long way. So my soul searching told me that I was ready to go home. That the Via de la Plata can wait and should be started in Seville.

It told me mainly that I would rather be with my loved one than walking on my own.

To complete the Mozarabe from Malaga to Merida is to start at the beginning and finish at the end and I like neat endings.

It’s pretty spacey being out there in the empty vastness on your own day after day and I’m looking forward to some grounding work in the garden and woods.

And I’ll have to walk the dogs!

In the meantime I have another 25km to go and I’ll spend a day or two in Merida before getting a train to Madrid where I will soak up art and culture for two days before my flight home. The rambling and blogging will continue.

Today the way was through flat industrial farmland, alongside busy roads and amongst a lot of strung out housing- not the prettiest of penultimate days.

I started being a sightseer as well today in the churches and fortress and Roman theatre of Medellin.

Here’s the video

and here’s the reality

and the hilltop fortress from the river

then it was back to intensive farming around Santa Amalia

Here’s where your tomato purée comes from

One good thing about the productive land is that it meant that the poor folk in their tiny simple houses can grow a lot of veg on their tiny plots.

And the weather picked up in the afternoon and I carried on past the town to bivvy out for the last time in the sunshine. I might be in a kind of underground bunker near a noisy road but it’s by the river, the birds are singing and the sky is blue.

CAMINO MOZARABE: Monterrubio to Don Benito 16th/17th March

42km/ 26km

What a difference a day makes.

Yesterday as I walked in the baking heat under a deep blue sky I contemplated how lucky I had been with the weather. More or less cloudless skies the whole trip. I had read reports in the albergue logs from pilgrims who had suffered struggling through muddy tracks and I had wondered when fording the rivers how it would be in the rain. I may find out tomorrow.

The day was grey when I awoke this morning and it got darker and darker. Spots of rain at lunchtime turned into a full on downpour just as I came into Don Benito so I found myself a bed and have been watching it come down all afternoon. There seems to be more forecast for tomorrow so the going could get muddy.

But it was different yesterday as I left Monterrubio.

The olives had returned and been painted white.

But mostly it continued to be a mix of holm oak and granite

before climbing up to a high plain of grain fields dotted with round stone wells.

I stopped at Castuera to have a look in the centre for information on the area of special protection of birds, a huge area of the countryside around here that contains loads of different valuable habitats and is rich in bird life. I know nothing of birds but had noticed lots of different types and heard some lovely song. There is a big drive on to increase tourism in the area and bird watching is one of the ways they are trying to do it by setting up hides and observation platforms and encouraging Casa rurals and places to stay out in the campo.

Unfortunately the museum of nougat was closed ! Apparently the town is famous for it and the building looked unusual.

Some of the paving on the outskirts of town looked a bit nougat ish.

Then it was onwards down the long trail again

Passed another granite quarry

until finally after 40km I walked through Campanario only to discover that the Albergue was another couple of km out of town on the converted railway station.