More daytripping

We’re home in Canada now, but there is still much to write about our time in Málaga and Andalucía. I left off in my last post after our excursion to Antequera. The next day, April Fools, we drove east in our rental car to Nerja. (The coast of southern Spain at this point runs almost due east and west before turning, after Almería, to track northeast.) There are fewer resort towns appealing to foreigners in this direction, and less development in general. Nerja, about an hour up the highway, is the exception.

The main attractions here are the beaches, and the very tourist-y old town. There is also a Neolithic cave just outside the city, which was on the itinerary Karen had planned. I knew she didn’t really feel comfortable in caves, though – she had a panic attack in one in France many years ago – so suggested we skip it, to which she readily agreed. She had only included it because she thought I was keen to do it. I did get interested in seeing the paintings in the cave after learning about them in our visit to the archaeological section at the Museum of Málaga, but not at the cost of worrying about Karen flipping her wig at being underground.

Playa de la Torrecilla, Nerja

We found a free parking lot a few blocks from Playa de la Torrecilla, the westernmost of the town’s beaches, and walked along the promenade above it – part of the coastal walkway I wrote about earlier – to the centre of the old town, and the Balcon de Europa. The Balcon is a terraced area that juts out into the sea with vistas along the coast in both directions and to the Sierra Almijara mountains to the east. It’s so called because a long-ago king of Spain came to town in the late 19th century to view damage from a recent earthquake and was taken to this spot. He admired it and commented that it was like the balcony of Europe. The name stuck.

Views from Balcon de Europa

The views are nice. There is a hotel here, where I begged a tourist map of the city, and restaurants and cafes nearby. There were lots of people taking in the views, but not an uncomfortable number – it wasn’t as crowded as some of the famous miradors in Lisbon on a Saturday afternoon, for example. A cheesy busker had set up with an amplified guitar, which somewhat detracted from the atmosphere. Otherwise it was pretty cool.

We walked back into the old town and found some steps down to the beach. It looked from the top like there was a pathway just above the beach, under the cliffs, and the map suggested there was too. There was a pathway at one time, but it had been closed because of rock falls. It ended after 100 feet or so. So back up to the top we trudged. At the head of the stairs a couple of flamenco buskers, a man and woman, were playing, the guy on guitar, both of them singing. They sounded pretty good. We walked through the old town, along streets running parallel to the beach. They were lined with tourist shops and restaurants, many with terraces overlooking the sea. We probably should have chosen one of them for lunch, but were intent on reaching Playa Burriana, the easternmost, biggest and reputedly best of the beaches.

Playa Burriana

It is a nice beach, lined two rows deep with shops and restaurants. Condos and villas climb up the hill behind it. Many of the restaurants have large terrace areas on the beach where they rent lounge chairs under woven grass umbrellas – which we saw them making on the way down from the cliff above. We walked to the end of the beach, looking for a reasonable restaurant. Most were fish places, of course. We ended up choosing a glitzy-looking burger joint. It was against our better judgement, but it was too late to traipse back up top and find one of the restaurants with a cliff terrace. And we were hungry.

The food was okay, the people watching, slightly better. We sat in plush furniture at a low table near the back of a tented section, well away from the beach. Most of the other patrons were tourists, many of them Brits. But there was a group of Spaniards near us who had a seemingly endless succession of tapas plates delivered to their table, mostly fish.

After lunch, we walked down on to the beach. There were a few hardy souls in the water – no doubt northern tourists. We found a spot to sit against a huge rock in the shade and read our books for 45 mminutes or so, then retraced our steps and found the car. Karen was amused by a car in the parking lot that had obviously been abandoned there. Whoever was maintaining the lot, rather than having the car towed, had simply let weeds grow up around it so it was completely boxed in.

This was not our most exciting day trip, to be sure, but pleasant. 

Miss Tom-Tom was not on best behaviour during many of these excursions. She seemed incapable of homing in on the satellites in the centre of Málaga when we first came out of the parking garage, presumably because the streets are so narrow and the buildings high enough to block sight lines – although the buildings are only three or four floors at most. It sometimes took her over half an hour to triangulate our location accurately, and even then, she frequently got confused. She was also flummoxed by some of the mountain roads we took, again, presumably because she lost sight of the satellites. It all added to the stress of driving in a strange place. In the past, I’ve never felt that driving in Spain or France was a big deal. Here, it was wearing me down a bit.

So the day after, the Sunday, we took a break from out-of-towning, and had a lazy interlude. It involved nothing more than walking around the city and ending up, as usual, at the harbour, where we sat on a bench in the sun and read.

Playa Malaguita, Málaga

We were briefly entertained there by a group of parrots that had flown down to forage on a patch of gravelly terrace in front of where we were sitting. Usually, we could only hear the parrots. They mostly cluster out of sight in the palm trees, and shout at each other. That’s what it sounds like, but maybe it's just that they’re like Italians and Japanese who sound like they’re arguing when talking normally. In any case, as many as eight of them at a time were waddling around on the terrace, poking their beaks into the dirt to dig out bugs or grubs or something. There were a few turf wars that involved the parrots getting in each others’ faces, shouting at the tops of their lungs and flapping their wings threateningly – until one gave ground and skittered or flew away.

The next day, Monday, we got back in the car and drove out towards Antequera again. We had two stops planned: a visit to the Laguna de Fuente Piedra, a salt water inland lake where flamingos come to nest and hatch their young at this time of year, and a return to El Torcal de Antequera.

It took us a little over an hour to get to the Laguna de Fuente Piedra, to the visitor centre there, which is part of a national park. As with any wildlife sighting activity, there is always the risk it will be a complete bust. The population of flamingos and other wetland birds here rises and falls each year according to climate fluctuations. One hundred and seventy bird species have been recorded here, and as many as 40,000 flamingos have congregated at one time. If it’s a dry winter, the lagoon doesn’t completely fill with water because it’s only source is rainfall. In that event, the birds don’t come, or not in as great numbers.

It had apparently been a middling winter in terms of wetness. More than half the area of the lake was covered with water, the rest was wet mud. But the flamingos, which looked to number in the hundreds, were mostly clustered a long way from the visitor centre at the other end of the lake. (The lake is over six kilometers long.) It was impossible to get much closer. They don’t want the birds disturbed. There were a few flamingos – white ones with some pink - in a smaller lagoon near the visitor centre, but they were still a good distance away. Bummer. I had imagined great hordes of bright pink birds close enough to photograph easily.

The visitor centre has a quite good display about the ecology of the area and the biology of the bird life. You could, and we did, purchase an audio guide that explained the displays inside and the nearby outdoor displays and bird-watching hides. None of the labels and explanatory plaques are in English, so you pretty much need the audioguide.

After we’d finished the self-guided tour, which took in just the area around the visitor centre, we walked out along one of the paths around the lake. It would have been far too long a walk to get closer to where the flamingos were, and we may not have been able to get much closer anyway. One pathway that led in their direction was blocked off, presumably to keep visitors from getting too close. We walked a couple of kilometers through farm fields. It looked like rapeseed, all brilliant yellow, but there were also olive groves on the nearby hills. Then we turned and went back. We didn’t really see anything much of interest. Oh well.

We drove around the lake to see if we could get any closer to the birds, but it appeared we could not. We gave it up after several kilometers, and headed off to El Torcal. We went via the outskirts of Antequera, the same route we had taken up the mountain a few days before. At the visitor centre, we took our picnic a little way into the rock fields along one of several walking paths, found a rock to sit on and ate our lunch. Just in the few days since we were here, the place has begun to green up and blossom out. We don't remember any blossoms on the trees on our first visit. Today, most were out.

After lunch we went for a walk from the visitor centre that we thought would take 45 minutes or an hour. But we somehow got on to a different path – one much longer that took us more than two hours to complete. It was up and down slopes, through a narrow crevice in the rocks at one point, into little glens, under towering rock spires. Near the beginning of the walk, we had noticed what looked to me like cow pats just off the pathway. Karen didn’t think there could be cows way up here, thought they must be goat droppings or something. But later in the walk, we came into a little glen where a few brown cows were grazing.

It’s a gorgeous place, but the walking was not easy and, although it was cooler up here than it had been in Málaga the last few days, it did warm up in the sun as the afternoon wore on, and we were over-dressed, especially me. I was quite damp by the time we got back to the visitor centre.

Rather than taking the return route to Málaga that we’d followed the week before, which was down a narrow mountainous road with switchbacks, we backtracked to Antequera to pick up the A45 motorway. However, Miss Tom-Tom was not being very helpful – no idea why this time – and we got lost in Antequera. At one point I went down a street that turned out to be a cul de sac, ending at some steps. I had to back out a quarter of a kilometer, squeezing past parked cars. Any time that we might have saved coming this way was lost. We should have gone the mountain route.

The next day, Tuesday, we had what turned out to be our last outing in the car. It wasn’t what we’d hoped it would be. Our first idea was to drive towards Granada to a place in the mountains where there is a spectacular walk along the edge of a gorge on a boardwalk that clings to the sides of the rock. It’s called the Caminito del Rey, the pathway of the king. It was originally built for workers at the hydroelectric plant there. The king of Spain famously walked it shortly after the plant was built in the early 1900s. Hence the name. Today, after millions of euros in renovations to the walkway, it’s a popular tourist attraction.

It looks like a fabulous thing to do, but it is a long-ish walk (they say to allow four hours), and an awkward, remote place to get to and back from. And as we discovered, you can’t just decide to go on the spur of the moment. It’s tightly controlled and you have to book ahead online. When we looked on the website, all of the slots for this day were booked.

Luckily, we had a Plan B. We drove instead back towards Nerja, then up into the mountains to visit the Parque Natural Sierras de Tejeda, Almijara y Alhama, a mountain nature reserve about half way between Málaga and Nerja. There are many recommended walks in the park, including one to a waterfall with petrified logs in the pool below it. This sounded like a reasonable substitute for the Caminito.

The route up to the visitor centre we’d selected, one of a few for the park – it’s huge – was along another winding mountain road with lots of switchbacks, and fabulous views. It took almost an hour to get to the place, Sedella. The visitor centre was right in the village, not at a park gate as I had expected, and it was closed. At this time of year, it was only open Thursday through Sunday, I suppose to cater to weekend walkers. This was not something mentioned at the park’s website, however.

Now what? Plan C, of course.

We didn’t have information with us about where the park’s other visitor centres were, and there was no way to know if they’d be open even if we could find them. And we had no information about where walks started. In any case, it was clear that most of the walking around here would be very hilly and challenging, especially for the weak of knee. So we decided we’d drive back down the mountain the other way and do a more modest walk we knew about, near the cave at Nerja. The place we headed was miles away, but actually in part of the same nature reserve – that’s how big the park is.

Near Sedella, Karen with our Renault Megane rental

It was another slightly harrowing drive down the mountain, though not as bad as going up. We stopped a couple of times to take pictures of the splendid views of white villages.

When we finally got to the Cave of Nerja, where the walk starts, it was lunchtime. There was a reasonably priced little restaurant near the parking lot where we got a good menu del dia lunch, and sat outside on a sunny patio. The clientele was half Spanish – walkers at a guess - and half tourists, presumably there for the caves.

The walk, which started from the parking lot, was up a gently winding dirt track around a steep hill. It led eventually to a couple of restaurants – which we didn’t get to – and took us through hilly, rocky terrain, with pine woods. It was fairly easy walking, if up hill on the way out. The scenery was nice, but nothing like as spectacular as the mountainscapes we’d seen earlier in the day near Sedella. We walked up for 40 minutes or so, then turned and walked back down the way we’d come.

Miss Tom-Tom dropped the ball again on the drive into  Málaga from the highway. I basically navigated my own way home from memory. By the time we got back to the apartment, I was a little frazzled and managed to ding the car slightly pulling it into the parking elevator. I swore at this point that I wouldn’t drive anymore in Spanish cities. Karen, sensing I was fed up with driving, suggested we just take the car back the next day instead of going for another excursion. We had it until Thursday, but we’d only paid $78 CDN for the week, and there was nowhere else we were desperate to go.

So that’s what we did. The next day we drove into the centre, found, with great difficulty, a gas station not far from the train station, refilled the tank and returned the car. I didn’t say anything about the very slight damage I’d done when I turned in the keys, and they didn’t ask me about damage. When we got the final bill from the car rental company several days later, it was only the amount we’d agreed to pay, nothing extra. Whew!

We walked home from the station and had lunch, then set out again down to the water. We walked east along the beach to the same exercise patio we’d stopped at before, and sat reading in the sun for an hour or so. Afterwards, I wanted to go look at a shoe store over by the train station, an activity that for some reason did not interest Karen. So I left her on another sunny park bench at the harbour and went on my own.

Plaza de Toro - where they had finally posted ads for this year's fights

Harbour front park

The route took me through part of the Soho district, between the Alameda Principal and the water, where the city has encouraged street artists to “express” themselves. I found some very nice pieces I hadn’t seen before. This city is still not a patch on Valencia for street art, but it was starting to go up in my estimation.

I thought the shoe store I was heading for, which I’d spotted on one of our walks, might have a deal on the Camper shoes I want. It was a wasted trip. It turned out to be a place that sold cheap, remaindered shoes. If they’d ever had Campers, as the sign in their window suggested, they didn’t have them anymore. I did find another, more upscale shop nearby that did have Campers and other good brands, but the prices were the same as everywhere else – too expensive: €140 for shoes that I’ve never paid more than €90 for. So sad. 

I went back and collected Karen and we walked home. End of post.