Downsize-me: En route north

Spain - what a country! Well, is it?......one country, I mean. Each region has its own flavour and we’ve now had a little taste of some of them. After Murcia and Almería we entered Castilla La Mancha soaring into the heights of the Natural Parks Sierra De Cazorla, the Sierra Segura, and into Aragon’s Calar del Mundo, Sierra de Alcaraz....... I say “soaring” as though we are like the eagles who live in these parks, but it was more of a low gear haul for poor Hymer as she carried us up to more than 1200 metres from our entry to the first park at La Iruela and down again into the valleys and canyons over the week it took us to get through. She has bravely hauled us around the most amazing scenery and I have a cricked neck from staring up at the cliff sides of the gorges or staring down into the scary rocky depths as Gareth keeps his eyes firmly fixed on the road. Great roads, these, mind you! We have to congratulate Spain on having created a road network that makes travelling almost anywhere in this great country, easy-peasy (I hope Gareth agrees with me). Oh, I’ve just remembered, though, that the road to El Berro definitely needs some attention; it’s a political issue apparently.

Heading into the Parks from La Iruela

A highlight of our geographical tour was a visit to the Haunted City (La Cuidad Encantada) 1500 metres up in the Serrania De Cuenca. It is a park of incredible stone shapes, carved by water over the millennia. The strange stones have shapes that can easily be seen as likenesses to things like ships, a dog, an elephant fighting a giant crocodile, lovers, and other curious shapes. “Conan the Barbarian” was filmed there and it certainly lends itself to films requiring strange, other-worldly settings. We spent a magical couple of hours wandering through it and Gareth’s initial reluctance to visit (only 9 Euro for us both plus dogs, by the way) was soon replaced by fascination.

Wow!

A seal

Stone ships

A man’s face

A sadder relic of the past is Belchite, on a high plain in Aragon. It’s another haunted city, left in ruins and un-restored after its destruction in the Spanish civil war. Our guided tour of the place left us with the sad senseless feeling that accompanies mementos of war, like a cross placed in the plaza where so many had been shot, a once magnificent church and friary where the roof had collapsed in on the villagers seeking refuge there, an unexploded shell still embedded in a church tower that had served as a machine-gun placement. That war was a strange one indeed, and I struggle to understand the politics behind it, even after reading “Homage to Catalonia” by George Orwell. But then, is any war less difficult to comprehend?

Belchite

So, the geography, the history and the inconsistencies of Spain gives us much to think about. Another example is Cuenca - a town that hangs on a gorge, some of its buildings looking decidedly unsafe! I can’t get my head around how these places get built, rendered, painted and have people choose to live in them at all, unless the inhabitants like places where a leap to certain death is always a suicide option. A visit to a waterfall, however, is often met with a series of safety warnings, and instruction to wear suitable shoes, not to bathe in the water, to step carefully, to take great care of children. Given the precipitous nature of Spain’s geography and how Spanish people have adapted to living in it so well I would have thought that safety instructions were a bit superfluous. It seems, though, that European money has funded the creation of Natural Parks in Spain, and with it has come European directives in relation to such things as signage, health and safety. Feeling that the magic of a waterfall visit was being intruded upon by such instructions we reflected on why so many people have become tired of EU standards and regulations. While still being ‘Remainers’ (too late now, of course) we share some of that disillusionment as regards the EU, especially when being nannied through a beauty spot.

Do they have buildings insurance??

While the ‘powers that be’ have so little faith in common-sense (is it to do with litigation concerns? Need I ask?) EU money is also regenerating some rural communities. In one old wood-milling hamlet that we over-nighted in, the two remaining original inhabitants, now very aged, were acquiring the families of forestry workers as new neighbours. The old mill is now a forestry school providing a fluid population of trainee foresters to bring vim and vigour to the sleepy little place. What we don’t understand is how these projects, begun with such vision, energy and extravagance, often finish abruptly and incoherently, like roads neatly finished with pavements and zebra crossings but going nowhere! Spain seems to have an issue with maintaining some of these developments, too, though we were glad to see some road crews out on those canyon roads, even if their repairs to road-side collapses looked a little slap-dash. Spain copes with crazy geography, crazy weather, and crazy tourism and crazy times, so I raise my nice glass of tinto and say “Muy bien muchachos!”.