Andalucía, Castles, and Parks Entry 5

Andalucía, España

Hola a todos!! 😊

Free and on the road

To really get to know Andalucía and...

....by that, I mean moving out beyond the normal touristy beach and urban areas,....


....you have to rent a car to truly understand..

....the scent of the orange blossom, ...
....or the glimpse of a white village perched spectacularly atop a crag,
or the freshness of the olive grove,
or the beauty of the snow capped mountains,
or the mysteries of the cork forests....

.....all memories of Andalucía that will stay with you like collected souvenirs.

Hidden Gems:

Such a day was ours, a couple of times over the past week, as we headed up to visit:

Jimena de la Frontera and....

Castellar de la Frontera....

.....two exceptional little spots, gems really, situated where the Ronda Mountain Range meets the Strait of Gibraltar.

Curiously, it all began, after noticing on a map, a whole string of towns whose names had the “suffix” “de la Frontera”. 

What did it all mean?   

The locals here said these towns were all once a line of fortified frontier settlements, some well over 1000 years old,...

.....all built by the Muslim Moors in an attempt to stave off the “infidel Spanish Christians”,...

A walk through stone and time!

....who for seven centuries, stubbornly tried and ultimately succeeded in regaining control of the Iberian Peninsula (Spain). 

All the "Frontera" towns were strategically located

Known here in Spain as “La Reconquista”, this conflict which practically spanned the whole of the Middle Ages (from 718 to 1492), culminated in Spain’s victory which, ....

….along with Columbus’ voyage and subsequent momentous discovery of the Americas, constituted an incredible one-two punch…to the jaw of Western History, all the while, marking the beginning of Spain’s Golden Period. 

Eyes wide open: narrow roads and cyclists!

Oh, we needed to hear no more!  Smitten, we were soon in our rental….


.....with Google GPS barking out marching orders, as we happily made our way down the highway in the direction of Gibraltar.   

Castellar de la Frontera

Our favorite of the two sites was, without a doubt, Castellar de la Frontera.  

Standing on a rocky promontory with its magnificent castle overlooking the entire Bay of Algeciras and the Rock of Gibraltar, this fully intact little fortress was part of the Moorish 800-year defense against the Christians.

A rare gem, this almost perfect Medieval fortress with its thick stone walls and white-washed houses, is a true find. 

Even more curious, is the fact that this little marvel has yet to be discovered !!! 

No tour busses can physically reach the castle and cars were at a minimum on the narrow curvy climb.  In fact,.....

.....were it not for the cyclists challenged by the narrow 7-kilometer road upwards,...

.

....a few citizens of the fortress,....

.....and the occasional dog,

.....we most probably would have had the place to ourselves. 

El Parque Natural de los Alcornocales

Far more than just a watchtower for old borders, with their narrow-cobbled streets and white-washed Andalusian houses, these two treasures are surrounded by....

.....Los Alcornocales Nature Park… a wonderful green lung for the whole area and Andalucía’s 3^rd largest park with 1700 km² of forested mountain ranges,....

....standing second only to tropical rain forests for biodiversity.  

The term Alcornocales actually means "the cork oak groves"….

....and a walk through its hilly forests which even the Romans used, just seems to lead you to other latitudes and times. 

Sure, it is a hikers’ paradise with its songbirds, vultures, and eagles all making their home both here and in Africa. 

Most visible, in fact, are the colonies of storks;....

....oh, those beautiful, curious, and fabled storks, who sometimes seem to get along famously with their neighbors,....

.

...and at other times...

....well, just know how to stir up trouble!

All of them though,....

.....be the stork, or the  flocks of egrets, or the ever-present but more solitary heron, .....

.....all of them owe their presence to the ubiquitous oak cork tree,....

.....the tree that would be king.

Generally, the largest tree in the canopy, the oak cork's main feature is its trunk.... 

....standing out because it is stripped, or harvested.   

In fact, when freshly harvested, the trunks are blood red. 

Thanks to a perfect combination of soil, moisture and tradition here, Spain has one of the largest concentrations of productive oak cork trees, anywhere in the world today.  In fact, it is Portugal and Spain that produce most of the world's cork.

Cork is an insulating bark, which as it turns out, was nature’s evolutionary answer to forest fires and the result of a very happy symbiotic relationship between the tree and a fungus,...

.... providing the area’s inhabitants a centuries-long, traditionally rich, and ecologically sound way of life. 

That’s why these forests still stand.  Now, legally protected since the 1980’s, maybe they'll continue to stand forever. 

“Why Not Put a cork in it!”

However, under threat between 2008 to 2010, the cork industry had lost its buoyancy, so to speak.

Indeed, sales of Spanish cork plummeted as plastic wine stoppers or metal screw tops made headway globally alongside declining wine consumption leaving the industry looking like it’s cork had popped for the last time, hard work by cutting-edge Spanish agricultural researchers allowed cork to do something quite uncharacteristic for the material: it bounced….back!

....selling over 3 billion units in wine cork last year alone, a marker that showed a return to the level of its glory years.

But, it was perhaps knowing that they are not yet quite “out of the woods”, that we, while dining on a beautiful terrace in the park, were asked if we might not ask Canadians purchasing that next bottle of Rioja (or any wine for that matter), to think about the benefits of cork, the tradition it represents, and it’s role in the millennial-long practice of forest conservation.

There you go, Jorge!  Done!

Until next time when Linda and I will be making a trip to Seville. I can't wait. :)

Thanks for reading along.