Category: Spain Travel

Let’s find out just how much you know! How many of the questions below can you answer without using Google or other online search engines, wiki’s etc to help you? Answers in the comments please, and remember, if you use Google etc to help you, please do not enter your answer here!

The prize: huge amounts of Kudos to anyone who gets all 12 questions right! Full respect for anyone that knows 9 or more. A few points for anyone that knows more that 6, and nout for the rest of you 🙂

Quiz time!

1. Where do the lovers lie of which it is said ‘stupid her, stupid him’?

2. This photo was taken from a vast protrusion of rock overlooking a very pleasant Mediterranean town not far from Alicante? What is the name of the rocky mass, and the town it looks over?

3. Who created the combs of the wind, and where are they?

4. In, for example, 1998, how many ‘duros’ were there in ‘un kilo’, and what is each of these?

5. Name this vertiginous nothern walk, the mountain range it starts in, and both of the villages it links:

6. Name two things you often find floating in the top of a Sopa Castellana.

7. In which northerly port is the football pitch in the photo below located, and what is the name of the stadium?

8. What is Tarifa often claimed to have the highest rate of in Spain, and why?

9. Where is the Puerto del Suspiro del Moro and why is it so named?

10. In what classic Spain novel did the earth move, and for whom?

11. In which city does this crazy biannual competition take place?

12. Which is the 5th biggest city in Spain?

Answers below, and remember, no Google etc!

Update: Wow, all the correct answers are in, in less that 12 hours! Scroll down the comments until you see CORRECT ANSWERS HERE printed 3 times (about comment no. 27) to read the summary. Well done all, and you can still test your Spain knowledge if you haven’t taken the quiz yet – let us know how you do!

On our recent Andalusian wanderings, I came across a poster for a local fiesta, the Fiesta del Toro Embolao.

What is a Toro Embolao, I wondered? I wish I hadn’t asked…

(To really see this photo, check out the large version on Flickr)

Barbate used to have the second biggest fishing fleet in Spain, until the local tuna supply started running out. Now the town isn’t as rich as it used to be (Franco used to holiday nearby, which also helped) and to be honest, some corners of Barbate (map) look a little ragged.

But who cares when you are 9 years old and can play football on the beach? On a beach that stretches for kilometers to the south, and on clear days has a perfect view of the continent of Africa just across the Straits (Africa! So close!)

And what happens when one of the kids boots the ball through the netless goal posts and it runs 200 yards down the beach?

The striker isn’t getting it. The beligerent goaly won’t budge. So they all sigh in exasperation, crash to the ground, and make sand castles for 5 minutes, until the most football crazy of them all can’t bare it for another minute and takes off down the beach, sprinting full pelt with the wind behind him, to fetch the ball.

Their future in Barbate might look a bit edgy, but I don’t think you can beat a childhood like this!

Google Maps have added geotagged photos and wikipedia entries to their already invaluable service. It really is quite fun to click around Spain for a while. Click here to check it out!

(Thanks to Alan Em. for the tip!)

From Wikipedia: “El Caminito del Rey (English: The King’s pathway) is a walkway or via ferrata, now fallen into disrepair, pinned along the steep walls of a narrow gorge in El Chorro, near Alora in Málaga, Spain. The name is often shortened to El Camino del Rey.”

Sounds innocent enough. Now watch this and tell me just how long it takes for your palms to start sweating!

http://www.brightcove.tv/playerswf

I don’t do relaxing very well, but this last week body and brain had a private conversation, and it was decided that a weekend off was very much in order. Marina and I booked tickets to Malaga on the new super-fast AVE route, and found a great deal in a 4 star hotel. Then we realised that going from one big city to another for the weekend wasn’t a good start, cancelled everything, and went back to the drawing board.

What we needed was countryside, but where do you find that these days? If you stop getting out of the city enough, ‘countryside proper’ starts seeming like this weird semi-forbidden construct, something from the past that you can go and look at to see how things use to be, but mustn’t touch, just as it becomes in scary future-fiction, like 1984 or Brave New World.

Still, after a weekend very much in contact with nature, I can report that it’s still there, in all it’s glory, not two and a half hours from Madrid.

The mighty Sierra de Gredos, in the Province of Avila, is as magnificent as the Alps. The air is achingly pure, the streams oxygen-clear, and even in April, the sawtooth peaks are covered in a thick white topping of snow. We stayed in the Parador de Gredos (for just 80 Euros a night, a special offer for being ‘friends of the Parador’ – free to sign up), a low, granite edifice set in the middle of a quiet pine forest.

The walking starts at the door, with a short circular route that quickly cleans lungs, heart and mind, but reception will give you a print out with other even nicer walks a short distance away. We headed up to the still-snow-bound Plataforma de Gredos, a base for hikes much higher into the mountains (there is a refuge after two and a half hours, you can spend a night there, then head for the top peaks), and to a lighter trail along a burbling mountain stream that started in the next village along from the Parador.

The result? We managed to relax. Enormously. We were pampered by the comforts of the Parador. We discovered that the wilds are very much ‘still there’ and we reveled in them. We want to spend more time in them. Soon.

Are you a city-dweller who occasionally wonders if the countryside is still really there? (Or a country-dweller who won’t go near the city?!)

Update: When we finished our half an hour jaunt upstream from the Plataforma de Gredos, we arrived back at the car and, to all of our amazement, bumped into Katie, fellow blogger and friend. She was just about to embark on an overnight stay at the refuge 2 hours uphill, before attempting the summit with friends the next day. See her awe-inspiring photos on Flickr, which really show that the Sierra de Gredos is indeed a mountain range to be reckoned with.