The Coripe Trip

The Coripe Trip

This was one of the trips organized by the Spanish classes.

On the other side of Lijar from Olvera is the tiny pueblo of Coripe. It is a quiet village and would be a sleepy corner of Andalucia were it not for the Via Verde. The Via Verde is a very famous track (camino) that runs close to Coripe. Deep in a valley close to the pueblo, lies a railway track that never was. The tunnels are there to take the tracks, but no iron rails were ever laid. Civil war and national bankruptcy destroyed the dream of a southern line which would have linked the outlying and backward parts to a bigger marketplace and culture. It’s demise held back this part of Andalucia until the A382 and the network of excellent roads was built  1997 linking the white pueblos to the rest of Spain. This part of Andalucia became a gentle by-water in the cultural revolution of the 60’s and 70’s that changed the outside world. The Spanish had to wait until the early 70's, when Franco died for the freedom to change their country. Even now Olvera is outside the main bus routes that Algodonales enjoys. The bus companies will not invest in a connection to Olvera. The 15 km between the two pueblos is like a cultural and economic blockade.

As always there are two sides to this story. Anybody who lives in a tourist town will testify that the influx of tourists brings misery. Nowhere to park, crowds in the streets, escalating prices and the inevitable two tier pricing for outsiders and locals. The result is that Olvera is still an unsullied example of the original Andalucian culture, along with other outlying pueblos blancos.

The via verde was conceived in 1994 and over the intervening years has been promoted as a tourist and sport attraction to bring money into an otherwise static economy.

The natural countryside around the valley of the Estación de Coripe remained unaltered by Civil and World war. It is still as beautiful and peaceful as it was before the tunnels were dug. The river here is full of native Terrapins, who sun themselves on the rocks by the side of the river. The estación itself is now a restaurant run by Juan Ramon who, with his mother became good friends of mine. From personal experience I can testify they serve some of the best Andalucian food cooked to perfection. You can hire cycles here and set off in either direction. Towards Puerto Serrano 14.5 km or to Olvera 22km There is a restaurant at either end to eat or just have a coffee.

 
From Coripe the tunnel to Puerto Serrano is quite an experience either walking or cycling. It is nearly a kilometre long, but it curves. This means that if you are in the middle you can't see either end. There is a lighting system in the tunnel, but it is on a timer and if the timer switches off the lights when you are in the middle you are plunged into absolute darkness. This is fine if you are a walker, but bad news if you are a cyclist galloping along at 30 km hr. You need only wait until your eyes have adjusted to the darkness and in a while you will see the tiny green lights that tell you where the light switches are. Then you are off again.

One of the attractions in Coripe, apart from the Via Verde, is the recreation area off to the left of the tunnel entrance going to Puerto Serrano. There is a camino (track) that leaves the main route just before the bridge over the river and leads you to an open recreation area dominated by the a huge tree in it’s centre. This is where the Spanish class came to have a picnic.

It is a Spanish Oak or Encima (Quercus ilex). This is an old version of the young Oaks on Lijar. Fire destroyed the old Oaks on Lijar, otherwise it would be covered in trees like this.

As you can see from the photos four or five people have to join hands to encircle its girth.
It is over 700 years old and was declared a National Monument in 2001.
This kind of tree is much valued as a fuel in the winter. It's cuttings give off a lot of heat when burned in a wood-burning stove.

   
The olive oil or acetuna, is probably the biggest industry in Andalucia. By crushing the olive they obtain the oil that is known all around the Mediterranean. A second process crushes the nut or hueso, (Bone.) to release an oil that is turned into soap. Finally, the remains of the nut are burned as fuel.

                                           The olive oil factory


The embutido factory was more interesting because you could buy their products direct from the maker. The sausage is not like English sausage, but more gristly. The same sausage sold in England would be unpalatable. But cook their sausage in red wine and you have something so tasty it’s hard not to like. The only drawback is that it’s very fattening. Every once in a while I pig out on this particular dish.

El Torreón

On the horizon from my roof terrace the most striking feature is the huge escarpment dominated by El Torreón (1654m.), which is the highest point in Cadiz province. It was always a huge challenge for me to climb it. I waited and waited for the right day. There is no point in climbing El Toreón if you reach the top and it is covered in cloud or you have picked a misty day. You have to be focused on the weather for this climb to pay off. Good boots are a must.

(I have years of experience of standing on a mountains in cloud as a paraglider. It is like being in the centre of a ping pong ball. In England, where the weather is to say the least, unpredictable, we have often waited hours for an improvement, which sometimes never comes. Your limit of vision is twenty feet. It's cold, wet and miserable.

I once got bored sitting around waiting for the cloud to lift and asked a friend to grab a hold of my harness whilst I practiced ground handling, so not to waste the day. A paraglider will not lift two people, especially when one of them has a beer belly like mine. I pulled my wing above my head but when I turned to face the wind, he let go of the harness. I shot up fifty feet into the cloud and was lost.

Within seconds of leaving terra firma you are in the exact centre of the ping pong ball with no idea which direction you are going in. You could be going in circles, in which case, the mountain you just left is about to appear in front of you twenty feet away with an approach speed of forty miles an hour.

I shouted down to him to make a noise so I knew where the mountain was. Then I steered away from him. He started singing Onward Christian Soldiers and I avoided his singing like the plague. Five minutes later after pulling in Big Ears I dropped out of the cloud and could see the green landing fields below me.)

You are really supposed to obtain permission to do this walk from the tourist information office, but lately with all the cutbacks they don´t have the staff to patrol the walks. The Idea was to limit the number of walkers and stop erosion. I just set off and never saw a soul during the whole walk.

When I climbed El Torreon I did not ask my friends if they would like to accompany me, from experience I knew they could spoil a day’s planning with their vacillations. I set off alone. Before I left I told a friend which route I was taking and when I would likely to be back and that if I was not back by then, to ring the police.

The walk starts on the road from Grazalema to Benahoma on the A372. There is a bend in the road 4 or 5 km. out of Grazalema and a small car park on the left. It is easy to miss. There is a sign on the right under some trees announcing the walk. The walk itself starts at around 800 metres above sea level, so you only have to walk up the remaining 854m (1,861ft.)to the summit. Easy!

This walk is a rocky, uneven staircase. Each step is a foot higher than the last. It is two and a half kilometres long, or more accurately, two and a half kilometres high. It is a walk that a cyclist would find easy, but a walker would find arduous.

The summit of El Toreon is a wilderness of Karstic limestone tilted at an angle of 30 degrees. These slabs of Jurassic seabed range from car to house size. The summit is well trodden but not easy to get to amongst the boulders.

                                         The route
 

                                    Looking east over the escarpment

                                 Looking south towards Brabate

                                 Looking north

 

When you do reach the highest point you will be rewarded with one of the most spectacular views of Cadiz province to be had. To the south are the wild hills of Parque Natural de los Alcornocales and the shining waters of the Embalse de Barbate. A little more to the east is the unmistakable profile of the rock of Gibralter. Beyond which, in the far distance, across the silver Mediterranean, lay the Atlas Mountains of North Africa; Another continent!
To the north are the plains of Sevilla and Osuna, to the east are the Sierras de Nieves around Ronda. The view over the precipice to the valley 750m. (2,300ft.)below is also worth a look.
Pick the right day and this walk is the best to be had.
Now all you have to do is go down a staircase 800m. high to get to your car.
In England we have an expression which fits the way you will feel at the bottom of this staircase.....
It's a real knee trembler.
 

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.

The Cabo de Gato trip.

Cabo del Gato
    In the late summer of 2008 I drove to Cabo de Gata near Almaría. I had heard that the sea there was good for snorkelling. When I was married I had always liked to snorkel in Tenerife, where the sea is clear and you can see for ten or fifteen metres. The sea quality at Conil de la Frontera, my other favourite place, is unpredictable, sometimes clear, sometimes murky.  
    I had not seen the inland mountains of southern Spain and the route I chose would take me through them. If you remember the painting I did of the Sierra Nevada after a  spring snowfall, then the contrast of the Sierra Nevada after the heat of the summer will be striking.
    My route took me past Granada on the motorway, curving north of the Sierra Nevada. I was in a hurry to see the coast before the weather changed to Autumn and the rains arrived, so I did not make many stops on the way there. The return journey would be a different story.

I arrived at a little village called Cabo de Gata the edge of the National Park east of Almaría. Because it was out of season the beach was deserted The hotels were closed, as were the campsites  The only food was from the bars in the village where they served local Spanish food, with which I no problem. My little companion and I  slept in the car, where we had the benefit of air conditioning or central heating on request. We had a car stereo system and all our favourite music. The boot was full of wine or beer and the moon was rising over a wine dark sea. The stars above us were like an insight into the whole universe.

After all those years working in the factories I was at last free, sitting listening to the waves breaking on a beach which had never known frost. The most amazing thing was the number of  people doing the same thing as me. The beach road was full of motor homes

The next day we began to explore. There is an old military outpost along the beach with the signs proclaiming Torre de Guardia Civil. This would be from The Franco years when the beaches were patrolled and shipping watched. Apart from this one dark relic of a nightmare past, the beach was bright and sunny, the sea clear and warm.

From the coast road at Cabo de Gata you can walk along the beach to the lighthouse on the Cabo. The road winds up the hillside to the lighthouse.

It then passes along the coast to the headland beyond where there are only rough tracks for cars, but good walking tracks along the coast. We walked perhaps five kilometres along the coast, which is very rough and mostly volcanic in origin. Eventually stopping at a beach of milk chocolate brown igneous sand in a little cove. From my little rucksack I pulled out my facemask and snorkel and put on my swimming trunks. My little canine friend was not too happy about being left on the beach alone.
The water was crystal clear. I could see for five or ten metres. I swam along the two or three metre contour following the fish as they scoured the sand for food. Whilst I was watching what was going on two metres below me, a shoal of fish 30cm long, but pencil thin swam within a metre of my eyes without the slightest concern. There must have been  a hundred of them. As I swam nearer to the beach I saw a  rock maybe 30cm. in diameter which seemed to have fingers. Not only fingers, but eyes popped up over the rock. I was looking at a squid that was looking at me from behind the rock. I stopped breathing and hung still in the water. The squid looked at me for maybe thirty seconds and then shot away at speed.
I don't know all the species of fish that live along this coast, but I would guess that I saw ten or fifteen different kinds in the few days I was there. In all I had three days of swimming from these beaches until the weather cooled and a different wind brought a stronger sea.

I found a beautiful pueblo called San Pedro with a harbour and beach. Of all the places I  visited, this was my favourite. I would love to spend a summer there. Maybe one day....   

   I began to think about the return trip to Cadiz province. But this time I would take my time and sightsee. Once I had passed Almería on the A92 I climbed into the highlands to where the N340 turns off to Tabernas, which is famous for the films that were made there or in the countryside nearby. Almería is a semi desert and the constant clear skies mean uninterrupted filming.
There is a theme park just off the A92 on the N340 which uses the old scenery props from films to put on mock western gunfights as entertainment. Unfortunately it was closed on the day I passed. I climbed a nearby hill to have a look down into the fake town and have a look around at the surrounding countryside.                                                                                                                                                       

                                                          It really is a desolate place.

 The list of films made here and stars that have been in them over the last six decades is impressive. Peter O’Tool, in Lawrence of Arabia, Richard Burton and Liz Taylor in Cleopatra, Harrison Ford and Sean Connery in Indiana Jones and the last Crusade, Of a different genre: Arnold Schwarzenegger in Conan the Barbarian, as well as many Spanish films largely unknown outside of Spain. In all 171 westerns were shot here, by far the biggest percentage, with 62 adventure films, 60 dramas, 37 comedies, and 17 war films.

In the 60’s a young American actor was offered work on a string of  seedy looking westerns the first of which was being filmed near Tabernas. His friends told him this would be a bad step. (In Spanish, mal paso.) After the films were finished and Clint Eastwood had become a huge star he called his own film company Malpaso. Clint,  Lee Van Cleef and the haunting music of Ennio Morricone had put Almaría and Tabernas on the world stage forever with just one film. A fistfull of dollars. The rest is history.

The Twin Towers Walk

The Twin Towers
From my roof terrace I have a clear view of the twin peaks of Lagárin and LaVeriosilla. They tower over the lake at Zahara like the two sentinels of  Argonath in Tolkien´s The Lord of the Rings. They are an escarpment of  Jurassic dolomite, which formed a part of a fold that should have curved high in the air to join the ridge, whose highest point now is El Torreón, dominating the horizon behind the lake. It never did curve high in the air, because as it was pushed upwards from below over millions of years, it was eroded from above by wind and rain. The picture below shows the skyline from Olvera. The twin towers are just left of centre.

The lake at Zahara is a man made lake which flooded a wide valley that the Romans knew as  Manantieles salinas de ventas nuevas. (Salt springs) The Romans collected the salt to sell and it is perhaps from this that the low point of the valley where the dam wall is now was called the  Peurto de los yesos (Yeso is Gypsum, another product of seawater evaporation and the main ingredient in plaster.)

There are salt springs because when the rocks were laid down 100 million years ago Earth had only one landmass, the same size as all the present day continents put together. This continent straddled the Equator. It was a hot desolate place, which, from time to time over eons, was inundated by the sea as the land sank, then baked dry at other times. When the sea did invade the land it was as a shallow ocean. When saltwater evaporates the salt crystallizes and remains as a flat sediment. Sand may have been blown across the salt and trapped it for the next 100 million years. In the present day the salt has been lifted, and is now near the surface As water percolates through the rock around Zahara it dissolves the salt and brings it into the rivers. Yeso is here too, and if you know where to look it can be found as crystalline formations of amazing beauty.

The walk starts on the road at the back of El Gastor where there is a picnic area under the pines. If you are coming from the Olvera side you will have to drive right through the village and find the Ronda road out of El Gastor. You should come to a point where there is a fork in the village with a road going downhill and a road going uphill into the Ayuntamento Plaza. The road going up is the one you want. You should then leave the vilage turning left and going uphill on the Ronda road. You will know you are on this road when you see the smallest filing station in the world. The road you need doubles back on a hairpin bend which leaves the Ronda road and climbs up into the pine forest above El Gastor whee there is a picnic area on the left hand side of the road. 

Once at the picnic area you will be on a road which runs downhill. Don’t walk up the concrete drive on the right past the water reservoir where the signpost tells you to. This path disappears half way up the climb.
Instead, drive along the road till you come to a house on the left hand side and a sign for the dolmen up a concrete road to the right. Park here at the side of the road.

The Poplars and the old farmhouse.

The concrete road only lasts a hundred metres or so before becoming a track as in the photo above, but if you follow this it will lead you to a large gate with some tall  isolated Lombardy Poplars on the left. There is a spring close to here and the ground is often boggy. On the right a little way off the track is an old farm house and the route up to the peaks leads off fron the RH side of the farm house.


The dolmen is straight ahead along a well marked  track boardered with lines of stones. These bronze age dolmens are scattered all over the landscape around this area. They were constructed around four and a half thousand years ago during the Chalcolithic period between neolithic and bronze ages.The El Gastor dolmen is worth a look, but it is no more than  the burial place of a leader of renown erected by his family or tribe. It is not the stuff of legends, though some idiot published a story about  it being the tomb of a race of  giants, more to sensationalize themselves than the bronze age chief. The most famous dolmen is at Antequerea and is worth the trip to see it.

  

 The picture above shows the route to the top of  La Veriosilla with the yellow short spur to the dolmen.
The white line which parallels the route to the top is a Malaga/Cádiz  province bounery line and not a path or track.

Back to the walk.
The track starts to climb up to the saddle from the RH side of the farmhouse. This is a steep climb on a rough track, but it leads to the saddle 
LaVeriosilla is on your left with it's flat top. LaVeriosilla is an easy climb and you can walk right up to the precipice and look over the lake 600m below.
On your right is Lagárin which is a more difficult climb, but worth the effort. The last hundred metres is a scramble over rocks to reach the summit and it's spectacular views.

The triangulation point on the summit of Lagárin.

                                         View of the lake and Grazelema National Park

                                         View of Lijar

 The view across the saddle from La Veriocilla looking north with Olvera in the distance.
Finally, here is a painting of mine showing La Veriocilla in moonlight.

Artistandalucia

Artistandalucia 

I have missed out something important that happened in 2008 Myself and two others formed a small group of painters and created a web page for our art. There were just us three in the beginning, but within weeks more joined.

Over a couple of years we had the spur of competition and the quality of our artwork improved. I was still enjoying painting and some of my best pictures were from this time. Now in 2012 I am the only one remaining of the original three who created Artistandalucia. I maintain the page and we all share the cost.

To see all our paintings click here 

My pictures of the time

Cigerillo is a watercolor copy of a painting by Joaqin Sorolla, my favourite Spanish artist.

 

Man's Science is a statement about humanity. I wanted to convey a message.

"Man's science will develop and grow, whilst we remain animals. In time, our machines will come to understand us for what we are, then leave us behind forever."

I also painted myself into the picture. I am at the front just below the nude woman.

 

Pegasus: This painting was on canvas stretched over a bastido of wood. It weighed practically nothing. I took it to an outdoor art market and lay it on the ground. The wind came up and lifted the canvas and frame into the air and propelled it into a friend's face, who was also unloading her artwork. The wooden frame blacked her eye and forever afterwards this painting was called Pegasus, the flying horse.

Conil de la frontera

This painting was inspired after a day on the beach and copious amounts of beer. On this part of the Atlantic coast of Andalucia there is a secies of pine tree called the stone pine or umbrella pine. In my painting I have stylized them a little, but the sunset was real enough. I have put in the photo I painted from so you can compare.

 

Sierra nevada, On a sightseeing trip in the springtime to Cabo del Gatos I drove past the Sierra Nevadas. (Snowy mountins.) As I approached Granada I noticed a strange cloud formation on the horizon. I was watching the traffic on the motorway and listening to the radio, so my attention was distracted. The weather for the previous week had been constant rain and I had not connected the significance of last weeks weather to my location. As I drove along I uneasily watched the cloud formation as it grew. A third of my windscreen was filled with cloud, which more and more became less like cloud and more like something I had never seen before. These were the snow covered Sierras Nevadas reaching up to where clouds usually are. The previous week's rain had fallen as snow on the Sierras and they looked majestic in the sunlight as I drove along the flat valley bottom. 

 

Dappled stallion. This was painted form a photograph. The original horse was all white When I had finished I realized that the mass of white from the horse's shoulders was overpowering the rest of the picture, so I painted grey dapples and toned down the white. I think it worked.

 

 

The Zeppelin bar is a collage of memories of good times. It is made up scenes I remember as separate events, but painted and concentrated into one picture.

The people in the picture are still there. The chef on the left is still my neighbour Diego. The man playing the guitar is my teacher of Flamenco guitar, Danni.

The people have not changed much, but Olvera and Andalucia has. The Zeppelin has gone, but like the smile of the Cheshire cat, it lingers in the form of La Jornada, a journal and webpage created by various members of the young Olvera society to promote culture in the pueblo. They host and encourage emerging bands, several of the members teach in the Olvera school of music, whilst others are active in the theatre and as writers.