Gaudix and Géral (Returning from Cabo de Gata)

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.

They are still doing it now, but not with stone tools. 

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.

The photograph shows a derelict rock house I walked around. They are cool in the summer and with a fire in the hearth, warm in the winters. If you want to extend as your family grows you dig another room out. No planning permission, no builders costs, and you won’t be paying rates or suffering with noisy neighbours. The derelict house in the photograph would have had a porch outside so you could sit in the sunshine and keep up your tan. 

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.