Gaudix and Géral
After leaving the Wild West
Town I stopped at Géral,15km further along the A92 because I had seen something
from the A92 which jogged my memory concerning a very rare event that was first
seen here but which actually happened tens of millions of miles away. Géral is a pretty pueblo
overlooked by a Moorish castle. But if you look at the photo I took from a
builders yard you will see a white dot on the horizon just to the right of the
castle. This is the Cala Alto Astronomical Observatory. It is at an altitude of
2168m above sea level (7,111ft) and is in a zone that has been designated as
light pollution free with laws to preserve it’s dark night sky.
On 24th of March1993 Eugene
Shoemaker and his wife along with David Levi were photographing the night sky
at Mount Palomar Observatory in the USA with a Schmit camera. They were looking for comets. Later as Carolyn Shoemaker
was checking the plates with a comparator she discovered something she could
not explain. As events unfolded she had spotted a comet, the likes of which
nobody had ever seen. It had broken up into 22 fragments and was spread out
like a string of beads. As the weeks went by and better and better photos
emerged, other astronomers were doing calculations. After a lot of checking and
re-checking it was announced that the first of these comets would strike
Jupiter on the 16 July 1994.
When all the calculations were
done it was realized that Cala Alto would be in exactly the right place to see
the first impacts. Other observatories would see the subsequent collisions as
the Earth rotated.
I debated whether to drive up
to the Observatory, but it was getting late and I was a little tired so I
pressed on. There is a walk up to the Observatory which I would like to try one
day. If I don't walk it I can drive up. The view has to be fantastic.
I carried on along the A92
until I came go Guadix. I had wanted to stop here because the landscape and
some of the houses are very interesting. The flat land around Guadix is
something rarely seen in southern Spain. It is a glacial outflow plain. High
above, on the horizon are the Sierra
Nevadas. (The Snowy Mountains.) Mulhacén 3483m(11,424ft.) and Pico Veleta,
3394m ( 11,132ft.) which during the last ice age were glaciated. I don’t know
how far the glaciers extended. But the valley in which Guadix lies is filled
with more than a hundred metres of glacial sediment. As the glaciers retreated
they left a typical landscape of rivulets. The flat plain has mounds, one of
which has a castle on it’s summit. Some of the mounds are moraines left at the
snout of a retreating glacier.
In the photograph the Sierras
look like low hills, but they are 32 kilometres away. (20 miles.) Guadix is a
an altitude of 1,029m above sea level. By comparison the highest mountain in
the British Isles is Ben Nevis in Scotland which stands at 1,343m above sea
level. The panoramic photo here is higher up the plain from Guadix. I would bet
that the castle in the photo is as high above sea level as the peak of Ben
Nevis, but it is still 2000 metres (6560ft.) below the summit of Mulhacén.
When the ice retreated rivers
re- established themselves and began to erode the sediments. Today the valley
of the Rio Fardes is like a miniature Grand Canyon with multicolored layers of
sediment exposed.
The sediment is compacted but
quite soft to cut. I would guess that the post Ice Age hunter-gatherers would
have soon realized that you can cut your own caves in this rock. Stone tools
would have sufficed to dig your way into the sediments and create a home safe
from the wind and rain.
These are modern looking
houses, but they are only a facade. The clue to what is really going on are the
chimneys. The rooms these people live in are deep within the rock. They have
bedrooms, kitchens, living rooms with TV and fireplaces to heat them. But no
windows.
Space outside to park your car
and you are all set for living underground. In this house the living room is
complete with fireplace and window, but the other rooms leading off are
windowless Another name for these kind
of houses is Troglodyte houses, which I think is a little unflattereing, but
typical of southern Spain.