Day 37 Saturday 7 April
Have decided to have rest day and awake to sun. Most people would think all we have are rest days but these are days when we do even less than usual. We’re going to a very nice seafood restaurant for lunch.
After breakfast, thunder and lightning with naturally, pouring rain. It seems set for the day and at about 2.30 we decide to drive into town for lunch rather than walk the half hour and get soaked. Only one of us can now drink and it’s me ! We park up 100 yards from the restaurant, get into our waterproofs and walk. By the time we get there, the sun has come out. It’s difficult to believe how quickly the weather has been changing. Excellent lunch and sun the rest of the day.
I know I’ve gone on about the weather but it is unpredictable. The rain usually doesn’t last too long but it comes down in torrents when it does and then disappears very quickly. Unfortunately it sometimes returns just as quickly.
Day 38 Sunday 8 April
Drive to a place called Sanlucar, which is at the mouth of the Guadilquivir with, on the other bank, the Coto Donana National Park. For those of you who don’t know, this is a huge wetland and sand dune area which is one of the prime wildlife areas in Europe, particularly for birds. Virtually all of the park is closed to the public with just a couple of possible entry areas and most of the viewing opportunities are from the edges. When you think that the National park is 55,000 or so hectares with the buffer zone of the Natural Park a similar size around it, there’s a lot that can’t be seen at all.
One of the only ways to see the National Park is by boat with one stop one each side of the river, one of which is in the park itself. We manage to book the 3.5 hour trip for tomorrow. Manage is the word, the booking office, National Park info office and museum is in a completely unmarked building near the quay.
Day 39 Monday 9 April
Back to Sanlucar, watched the world go by and had our boat trip. Well worth while, lots of birds on the trip and at the lagoon for our first stop. We saw what were probably a pair of mongooses (yes, it is mongooses)
from the boat but the onboard guide didn‘t so we can‘t be certain. She said mongooses from the description. Did see Booted Eagle.
Watched the sun drop into the ocean from Sanlucar, an attractive, nontouristy (non touristy gets automatically changed to notoriety by this machine so if that word appears it only because I’ve missed it.) town with very little in anything other than Spanish.
Day 40 Tuesday 10 April
Long drive today from Santa Maria to the western side of Donana, where ther’s a bit more access and bird hides, but very little.
We have to drive north to Seville and cover 130 miles to get to our campsite, just to get around Donana from east to west.
Day 41 Wednesday 11 April
Visit the various Information centres for Donana, about 4 locally. Lots of money spent on the buildings and the high levels of staff but not on the information. Some info. on the history, very little on the birds and a bit about the trees and nothing on the plant life. Good sets of hides, although a number now look onto areas that were clearly once lagoons but have been dry for some time judging by the vegetation growing in them.
The town we’re in, El Rocio has only streets paved with sand and every weekend it‘s full of horses, like a wild west town according to reports. It seems very empty at the moment but fills up from miles around when horse day arrives - we’ll be gone by then. It’s also the home of a religious statue which is carried round the town on WhitSunday, when, we read, up to a million (yes, million) people turn up - we’ll definitely be gone by then.
Day 42 Thursday 12 April
Awake to rain and decide not to get up early and go birding in the hides nearby. Drive across to Huelva instead, about 30 miles to the west. Vast oil refinery at it’s eastern edge. Went on to the west to a long spit of land running parallel to the main channel from Huelva to another wildlife area called the Marismas del Odiel. The info. Centre here was better than all the Donana ones put together. Only one person, but one who seemed interested in telling us something. At the hide next to it we saw our firset Red Knobbed Coot - no, it’s on it’s head. Also a family of Red Swamp Hens/Purple Gallinule, quite stunning birds. The salt pans and marshes further on along the spit were really good for birds.
Day 43 Friday 13 April
Clear morning so up earlyish and to the hides and lagoon.
I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned it before in the blog or not but the time seems odd to us here. We’re an hour ahead of British Summer Time but further west so it’s still completely dark at 7.30. It’s light by 8.00 and light much later in the evening. So earlyish means about 7.15 for us.
Not many birds but good ones. New ones for the holiday being Whiskered Tern, Squacco Heron, and a Woodchat Shrike. After that down to the coast to walk the dunes a short way into Donana in one of the very few places you can get in. All on a boardwalk and with the awful town of Matalascanas right on the boundary.
Everywhere there is any information about Donana it’s all about what a treasure it is, unique, important, World Heritage site and the rest. Along the western edge there are miles of strawberry tunnels, and plantations which we understand all pump water from the underground aquifers. The lagoons in Donana now dry out in the summer and rely on rain not ground water to even exist. The town of Matalascenas is a great big development reminiscent of the Costas, including the golf course with fountains. I don’t know where all the water comes from but I can guess. The strawberries and the holiday town are of course big money and it seems that there is no real political will to protect Donana, just a lot of relatively empty slogans. The life of Donana is quite literally being sucked out from underneath it, so come and see it quickly before it really becomes just a wasteland.
Day 44 Saturday 14 April
I seem to be complaining a lot which I don’t mean to because we are having a great time and it’s difficult not to compare with what I’m used to.
The Spanish are very friendly, helpful people. Driving is generally very well mannered and non aggressive, with speed limits stuck to and drivers stopping at crossings and sometimes just in the street when a crossing isn’t there. However, the amount of litter is mind blowing, with fly tipping everywhere. Incidentally, I’ve just seen the rubbish bins emptied on the campsite. The standard rubbish plus the recycle bins (paper, plastic and glass) all tipped into the same black sacks and thrown into the trailer behind the site landrover.
The road signs are clearly designed to drive people completely mad - it can‘t possibly be by accident. A place will be signed and then before you arrive the signs just stop, or only after you leave a roundabout, having guessed which exit, is there a sign, perhaps 50 yards or so along the road you’ve taken. Many’s the roundabout we’ve driven right round twice trying to see a sign. We have navigated quite regularly by checking where the sun is to get a general direction and taking that, occasionally, the compass will come out, even in town. We think that the signs might just be put up by someone who knows the route and thinks that everyone MUST know that you take the second on the right after the last sign. Only a fool wouldn’t know such an obvious route !
We’re still heading westwards and stop at a small monastery near Huelva where Cristobal Colon plotted and planned his explorations, although for some reason we call him Christopher Columbus. He was only 29 or 30 when he left for, as he thought China, carrying a letter to The Great Khan, which of course was never delivered. The story is quite interesting. He appears to have got a lot of info. from his pawnbroker Father-in-law’s pawned articles, maps, logs etc. and he was clearly a bit of a chancer. Little is known about his early life and I guess he was a rogue who got lucky. He’d been to Britain, been turned down by the Portuguese and doesn’t seem to have even tried to get backing in his home town, Genoa. The actual voyage seems to have been handled more by the Huelvan brothers who captained two of the three ships than Columbus himself. These two ships were only 50 feet long and the Santa Maria never returned to Spain. Columbus managed to find someone to back him with 20,000 Crowns so he could appear richly clothed and therefore rich to the Spanish Court. He set out a number of demands, so he wasn’t short of cheek, and was made ‘Admiral of all the Oceans, but not the Seas’. Copies of a number of the documents are on show with a dozen or so different versions of Columbus’ signature with his coded letters and numbers around them. It looks a bit like his 15th century pin number so that it would be known to be his signature to those who needed to know. It was quite fascinating to wander through the rooms that he had his discussions in with the monk who knew Queen Isabella, so that his approach would work. I would have thought that the place would be a magnet to any Americans in Spain but we were the only non-Spaniards we heard in the place.
Now past Huelva and the Odiel Marismas to the sandy beaches a by a place called El Portil. Drove through to a dirt road ending at river/sea edge and parked up for a couple of hours - no-one else came along. More birds, most of which we’d seen before although the new one was a Great Spotted Cuckoo. We seem to have got into birding a lot in the last few days, but then the whole area at this end of the Costa de la Luz has been particularly good.
Day 45 Sunday 15 April
The site we stopped on is about 200 yards from the beach and absolutely full of frame tents and awnings filling almost every spot, all laid out very well with walls separating the plots. Not our sort of site at all. Then we realise that most are empty and it seems to be like a mobile home/beach hut site where plots are rented long term and used at weekends. It’s also ‘Andalucia’s first Ecologico Campsite‘. As far as we can tell, this word is one of two used for ‘organic’ in Spain, so I’m amused (in a way) to see all the weeds on the tracks being sprayed while we’re there.
Absolutely stunning golden sand, about 100 yards wide and 15 miles long, backed by small dunes and Stone Pine woods behind that. Building only extends along only a small part of it and even in the built up bit there‘s a really good lagoon and walk. 11 hectares for the lake plus a 1300 hectare buffer zone.
The campsite is, at the end of the weekend, like a ghost town. We find out that a large wooded, sand dune buffer zone surrounding the campsite, which is fenced off, is actually part of the campsite but not accessible, so it might be the wildlife buffer zone that a w
Day 46 Monday 16 April
Decide to stay a further day on the coast doing nothing slowly. Read a bit go to the beach, read a bit more, actually go for a swim in the Atlantic. That sort of day.
Even so, on a quick visit to the lake mentioned yesterday, we saw another first for the trip, Black Tern.
Day 47 Tuesday 17 April
Leave the south coast and head northwards back through Heulva again towards the north west of Andalucia at the western end of the Spanish Sierra Morena. We’ve been told that Spain has more different mountain ranges than any where else. Looking at the maps I can believe it. This area is where the best Iberian Jamon comes from, free range pigs in Cork Oak forests eating as many acorns as they want. The hams are often air dried and for up to two years. We saw one herd of grey pigs wandering through Cork Oaks on the way here. Just before that we’d come through a sort of moonscape with huge Rio Tinto Mining open cast mines, looking to be a couple of miles across and several hundred feet deep.
We settled down at a campsite near a town called Aracena, parked close to a stream on the edge so we couldn’t see any of the rest of the campsite, although it is virtually empty. Lots of birds flitting about and then not more than 10 feet away onto a wire fence flew a Crested Tit. Never seen one before but unmistakeable and really lovely. Very jerky almost clockwork sort of movements and clearly with a nest with young nearby. We see it a number of times in the next two hours with beakfuls of food. The area looks superficially like a nice piece of open, lightly wooded English countryside, until you notice the Cork Oaks and the rather exotic bird life.
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