Sunday 26 February 2017

Leaving the Cabo.

I can't believe our stay here is nearly over! We leave Rodalquilar tomorrow, Monday 27th February, arriving home on Thursday.  I hope the Bay of Biscay is as calm as it was coming - the sea was like a sheet of glass - but unfortunately there have been a lot of storms recently! 

We're both feeling very sad to be going.  It's been a really interesting experience, especially comparing life on the Cabo de Gata now with life in the 1950s, as Goytisolo describes it in 'Campos de Nijar'.  It's striking both how much and how little has changed.  At the end of his visit here, Juan talks of his endless "anger and despair" over the relentless poverty and suffering he has witnessed.  Things have improved vastly in the last 50 years since then, yet some things are oddly unchanged.  More on this later as I'm very busy now packing up and getting ready to travel. 

Saturday 25 February 2017

Rodalquilar - colour and light.

Rodalquilarte is having a facelift!  The old art works that have grown rather shabby from being displayed on the walls for months are being replaced by fresh new ones.  Our friend in the panaderia says there will be another festival in the summer too.  Sadly, we won't be here to enjoy it - well, I doubt it.

Here are some of my favourites among the new pictures that have been put up around the village:




But the whole village is like an artwork!  An eye-catching cacti garden:

A colourful corner:



We went down to El Playazo yesterday.  The wildflowers blooming everywhere grow more and more stunning; just when we think they can't get any better, something new comes into flower.  The clifftops look like giant rock gardens:
Flowers bloom on the very edge of the beaches, in the sand.

I liked this gorgeously painted camper van in the car park at the beach:

This morning in El Abardinal botanic garden, there was a sunflower out - the first time I've ever seen a sunflower in February!

Only one more day here and then we have to go home to grey, colourless London.

Thursday 23 February 2017

Water in a dry land.

We get a lot of our basic shopping in San Jose since it has a supermarket, if a small one, unlike Rodalquilar. One day on our way there, we stopped off in Pozo de los Frailes ('Monks' Well') and looked at the well in the centre of the village. It has been restored and provides an interesting example of the kind of communal amenities that used to be widely used here, right up until recently.



It worked by a donkey pulling a wheel round and round to hoist up pots of water.

When Juan Goytisolo came through the village in the 1950s, also on his way to San Jose, he watched the well being used:
    "After a fifteen-minute descent, a new settlement appears . . . It is Pozo de los Frailes, which has a school and looks bigger than the last one. By the side of the road a blindfolded ass is pulling on the axle of the draw-well. The wheel turns slowly, hoisting bucketfuls of water from the well which are then poured into the trough.
    "The children crowd around to see me, and some run-off to tell their mothers. 'A foreigner, a foreigner,' they shout. Women appear out of their hallways; there is an atmosphere of expectation. Rather intimidated, I pretend I'm looking at the cloudlets gathering over the mountains"

The trough Juan mentions, into which the water is channeled:

By chance, we discovered there was another beautifully restored well in the Rodalquilar valley down near El Playazo beach. In this case, it's a double well with an impressive reservoir tank in between the two wheels.




Why it's so far from Rodalquilar village seems a mystery.  Maybe it dates back to the alum mining settlement built by Francisco de Vasco at the beginning of the 17th century?
It's right over on the far side of the large bay, there is no obvious path leading to it and no sign to tell you that it's there, which seems strange since the restoration cost nearly a quarter of €1 million!  But this is typical of the Cabo!
After the Moors were driven out of Almeria, the people continued to use the aljibes (the Moorish wells and reservoirs) which centuries on can still be seen dotted about the landscape, but De Vasco's settlement was built after the Moors had left and so it would have needed a new water system.

Monday 20 February 2017

Where wild boar roam . . .

In many of the valleys and steep ravines leading down to isolated coves, such as Cala del Carnaje and Cala de los Toros, we've seen wild boar tracks and the characteristic signs of their rootling.

The valley of Cala del Carnaje:


A steep ravine leads to Cala de los Toros:



But it was up above Rodalquilar, in the valleys among the volcanic hills, that we found the freshest tracks.


"Here be wild boar"!

At the cove, Cala de los Toros - I don't look much like a hunter!


Thursday 16 February 2017

A Recipe for Lizard!

Flowers aren't the only wildlife here in abundance; we've seen (and heard!) many bullfrogs croaking to attract a mate; a small black snake slithered at speed in front of us, across the dirt road to El Playazo; and a lizard was basking in the sun in a sheltered ravine leading down to one of the isolated coves. He's lucky he is small and alive today - in the 1950s, when Juan Goytisolo was here, large lizards were eaten.

While Juan is travelling away from Rodalquilar, in the truck taking the workers home from the mine, they see a lizard half a metre long.  One of the miners comments that if the truck stopped, they would catch the lizard: "'We cook them with tomato and a spot of garlic and parsley.  They're very tasty.'"
 Juan tells him that in Catalonia "the farmworkers like them roasted."

I doubt anyone eats lizards here now, although the locals do often go foraging for food on the hillsides.  Besides the multitude of herbs, at this time of year wild asparagus grows everywhere and we've seen many people gathering it.  Our favourite bar in Rodalquilar, Casa Pintau, serves a wonderful soup with wild asparagus from the "campo."

In the ravines leading down to the hidden coves, and in the valleys among the volcanic hills above Rodalquilar, we have seen the tracks of wild boar, usually near great patches of churned up earth where they have been rooting:

I'm thankful we haven't met one - although judging from the freshness of the tracks, we have come close - as the wild boar in Spain can be large!

Then there are great numbers of birds here. Hundreds of swallows, come south like the camper vans in search of warmth, swoop about the village after insects; also, to my surprise, they fly about the clifftops.  I've never associated swallows with the seashore.  In fact, I always thought swallows migrated to Africa, but I suppose these must be tough northern swallows, from Scandinavia or the far north of Scotland!  And we aren't very far from North Africa here - the Cabo de Gata only lies about 350kms across the Alboran sea from Melilla and the Moroccan coast.

Flocks of crested larks hop about the hillsides, and the fields and scrub, taking off into the air when we approach with their characteristic fluty song.


We've seen siskins on the hills and by the side of footpaths.  Here is a male siskin in his bright plumage for the mating season:
There are hoopoes in Rodalquilar but although I've seen them at least four times, they have evaded my attempts to photograph them so far, and the eagles and buzzards that soar above the valleys, riding the thermal air currents, have proved equally as difficult to capture!
Most exotic of all are the flamingos on the salt lake at Las Salinas, near Cabo de Gata village, picking their way on long, delicate legs through the saline water.

Monday 13 February 2017

Cats, flowers, and camper vans!


There are three things you find everywhere on the Cabo de Gata at the moment: the first are cats, the second wildflowers, and the third are camper vans. Cats, of course, you will find here all year round, whereas January and February seem to be the best time of year for wildflowers - also, almond blossom which has fully opened now. As for camper vans, in the summer I think they are more closely controlled and kept to the campsites, but now they are everywhere; on any piece of waste ground they can find, filling the village car parks, and even parking down at El Playazo and other beaches.

The majority of cats on the Cabo are among the most well-fed and sleek I have seen anywhere, possibly because of the amount of fresh fish here! In Rodalquilar, which is set 3 kms inland, they seem to live in a separate, if parallel, universe to the humans. They are friendly on the whole but not interested in people, going about their lives in relation to each other, occasionally agreeing to a stroke or a cuddle but seeming mostly rather bored by the human desire to make contact with them.




 There are exceptions - twice we have seen cats going for a walk with their humans; one walking around the olive grove with a man and a woman, and another walking down the main street with an elderly man. On our road there are just two (among many) who are sociable and enjoy it when we make a fuss of them.

In the fishing villages, Las Negras, La Isleta del Moro, San Jose,  the cats are a lot friendlier and the bars and cafes (especially, but not only, those on the seafront) all have an attendant cat or two going from table to table to share titbits with the customers.



We hadn't expected there to be so many wildflowers out, but they are everywhere in masses of stunning colour, along the side of the roads, all over the hillsides, the clifftops, even the beaches - on Monsul beach we found sand crocuses in vast numbers:
 By the sides of the road and in the meadows there are poppies, bermuda buttercups, daisies, and on the hills and the cliffs there are flowering thyme and rosemary, lavender, broom, asphodels - both common and white, bermuda buttercups, many kinds of daisies, succulents and cacti.  Here are just a few:



Bermuda buttercups:



Spectacular "common" asphodels which are certainly common here, coming up everywhere on the cliffs and the seashore:



Flowering broom:


One of the most iconic plants of Almeria province are the agaves, whose flower stalks can be as tall as trees! 

Finally, the almond blossom is spectacular at the moment:



The incursion of camper vans is another unexpected thing to find at this time of year.  There are campsites where they're supposed to stay, but as they have to pay for these many of them try to avoid it and park for free instead! I think there are more camper vans than usual this year because it has been such a terrible winter throughout Europe. While it has been colder here than I would have liked, it is still warmer and drier than anywhere else. Many of the camper vans carry plates from Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, as well as Britain and Ireland. A few are Spanish but not many. They divide into two groups; the old shabby vans owned by young travellers (who we have christened the "alties") and the smart big comfortable ones owned mainly by the retired.  It seems rather mean of them to invade the car parks of these small villages, paying nothing for doing so and leaving the local townhall to pay for disposing of their rubbish, especially since this is such a poverty-stricken area.  I hope they contribute to the poor communities here by spending money in the village shops and bars!
One day we counted at least 20 parked in the car park at San Jose: