Four Weeks, Four Countries, Ilka Cohen [manga ereader .TXT] 📗

waves, only I took off swimming for a bit. Then walked along the beach in search for pretty rocks and shells. I came away with the basis for a practical joke to be played repeatedly over the next couple of days: A rock that looked amazingly like a pile of dog poop. We managed to trick Maureen with it later on to everybody’s admittedly infantile joy. Micah used my walk time to eat at a fish restaurant and to stub his toe bloody on a rock hidden in the sand.
When the clouds became darker again, we moved on to the visitor center of the national park. 580 square kilometers of roadless wilderness, mostly marshland and dunes and pine forests, the largest roadless area in Western Europe. Doñana has its own Big 5: flamingo, fallow deer, wild boar, imperial eagle and Iberian lynx. Of course, we saw only a tiny piece of the park and rather discovered the small 4 than the big 5: dung beetles, ants, giant flies and small lizards. But the lagoons were also full of herons, coots, ducks and even a turtle (not a native species and frowned upon by the rangers). A couple of companies offer trips by boat, jeep or minibus into the wilderness, which promise more exciting sightings but were outside our budget. So we made due with a 1-hour hike and then drove on to Rocio. Outside the town, I got to see the flamingos I had missed at the national park. There they were in a great flock standing in a lagoon, and next to them were beautiful horses wading through the water. What a picture. Even being attacked by a small aggressive dog - the bitch apparently had puppies in the nearby bushes – did not make me miss the photo opportunity.
Rocio is a small town that comes to life once a year to play host to more than a million people. They come to participate in the procession of the extra holy local picture of the Virgin Mary at Pentecost. According to legend, some peasant found the picture hanging in a tree, loaded it up to take it home. But when he woke after a rest stop, the icon was gone and had returned to the tree. Reason enough to build a sanctuary and eventually a town around it. Brotherhoods – hermanidads – from all over the country own big houses in Rocio to house the pilgrims. They stand empty the rest of the year. The town has streets three times as wide as would be fitting and proportionate but unpaved. Probably because the pilgrims traditionally come on horses and in carriages, not in modern vehicles. Outside the big annual event, the place looks strangely oversized, empty and dust-blown, like a very Spanish version of a Wild West ghost town.
Our last stop of the day, in the evening light, was Niebla, one of the best preserved medieval towns in Andalusia, surrounded by an intact Moorish wall with five gates. There is also a 15th century castillo with an extensive torture museum, which we did not subject ourselves to. And again storks everywhere – on towers and gates but also almost all the power poles in the surrounding. Often with half-grown young ones, 4 or even 5 storks to a nest. I have never seen them in such a concentration and read later that many of these storks used to be part of the annual migration to Africa but have now become year-round residents in increasingly warming Andalusia. A side effect of global warming that is pretty to look upon at least.
We ended the day with Spanish treats from an Ayamonte supermarket – Ayamonte is the town next to Isla de Canela – Spanish cheeses and jamon, olives and sherry produced in nearby Jerez, the place that gave it its name.

The next day was to bring a family reunion – we were going to meet Maureen in Seville, where she had flown three days earlier, and take her back to a hostel in Ayamonte. What we had already suspected the day before turned into solid proof: Andalusia is bigger than it seemed on the map, Seville not just an hour away but two. So we were a bit late for our meeting at the huge cathedral. But Maureen had been sufficiently entertained by street musicians in the meantime. Seville’s cathedral is the largest of the gothic type in the world and third-largest overall. A building from Seville’s times of incredible wealth when the city profited from having the trade monopoly with the new American territories. A happy time that came to an end when the river got more and more silted and trade eventually moved to Cadiz.
Marcus and I joined the line to get into the cathedral while the others brought Maureen’s luggage back to the car. One of the magnets inside is Columbus’ tomb, even though it seems to be controversial whether his remains are actually inside. Further a huge altar with more than 1000 carved and gilded figures, many chapels full of art and relics, and an exhibition of church treasures. Climbing up to the Giralda tower next to the church was included in the tour and well worth it. The tower used to be a minaret for the mosque that filled the square before the cathedral. 98 m high after the Christian remodel, with the top not being reached by climbing hundreds of stairs but ascending a ramp wide enough that a rider could make it up there. I wonder who did. The muezzin? Great views of Seville from all sides from the top, of course.
When we finally made it down and out through the orange courtyard (full of orange trees), the others were waiting and we now wandered a bit through the narrow old streets of Santa Cruz, once the Jewish quarters of the town. We enjoyed our seats at the Café de Indias on Avenida de la Constitucion, across from the cathedral square. Less so the lunch, the service was slow, the orders not all filled correctly. Micah’s sandwich never came – they had run out of chicken but not bothered to try and tell us. At least I learned that a tortilla in Spain is a different beast altogether from what is means in Mexico: a kind of egg-and-potato omelet, quite good. We could not even punish the place by withholding tips since they were already included in the bill, with 20%.
Now I was really ready to see the Alcazar, the complex of first Moorish than royal Spanish palaces and the sight I had looked forward to most in Seville. Rightfully so, I would say. I went by myself since Maureen had already been there and the male family members are just not enough into royalty. While they munched on ice cream and fish and visited the bull-fighting ring, I was transported into centuries past and scenes from Arabian fairy tales. While I have seen my share of palaces, this is the one I would choose if I had to live in one. (And the Spanish royal family still maintains living quarters there.) Especially its oldest, Moorish parts with all the filigree masonry and decorations. And the inviting and intimate courtyards and gardens between. The crown jewel is the palace built by Moorish artisans for King Pedro. Who left a sly mark of their own: Above Pedro’s boastful entrance inscription proclaiming himself a great conqueror, they had set in ornamental Arabic the sentence: Only Allah is conqueror. I bet Pedro never knew.
The palaces are adjoined by extensive gardens, which seem even larger by the use of offset axes, a far cry from Europe’s huge formal garden alleys a la Sanssouci or Versailles. Water fountains and doves everywhere, a well-guarded paradise.
I rejoined the family at the Plaza de Trionfo but then left them once more for a brisk walk through some more downtown and along the Guadalquivir river to get at least a glimpse (and photos) of famous towers like the Torre del Oro, Torre de la Plata, the Triana neighborhood across the river, birthplace of flamenco, of the bridges, bull-fighting ring, theater and the 17th century Hospital de la Caridad. To round off the visit, Maureen led us all to Plaza España, dominated by a huge palace full of bright ceramic tile decoration – one tile mosaic for each Spanish city. Not a very old structure – it was built for the Ibero-American exhibition of 1929. Our guidebook rips it as ultimate kitsch, but I admit to liking it.
On the way to the car we encountered a public aseo - Spanish for toilet - and ended up giggling helplessly while trying to beat its automatic door into admitting 2 or 3 at once for the price of one coin. It was not easily fooled.
Maureen checked in at her hotel, fairly luxurious room for 24.95 Euro a night, then came with us to our apartment where she and Micah proceeded to prepare a tapas dinner, late, but that would be normal for Spain, and full of interesting treats. I had paid some serious money for jamon iberico, the regional ham specialty that comes from happy pigs who roam the forest and eat a diet of acorns. It is darker and very intense in flavor, if a bit fatty. Something to be eaten or added in small quantities.
The evening petered out in complicated negotiations about the plans for the remaining days. As we had discovered that the distances were greater than expected, Cordoba, Cadiz, Gibraltar, Lagos in Portugal and Tangier in Morocco seemed impossible to cram into four days. The boys cared most about Morocco and Gibraltar. Marcus also about Cadiz because of its Phoenician past. I would have given up Cordoba as the most remote destination but it was No. 1 on Maureen’s and Aaron’s list. Maureen had just discovered that her German passport had expired in January and she did not have her American one along. Now traveling within the EU just with her German identity card was no problem but going to Morocco without a valid passport not advisable. In the end a somewhat irritated stalemate ensued, and we decided to make the next day our local beach day and give it all some more thought.

So Sunday, June 13, was our day of rest. Or what counts as such among the Cohens. Aaron and I picked up Maureen after breakfast and I used the occasion to climb on the local watchtower from 1756, part of a chain of such structures to guard the coast. Then we all did some more planning and dropped Morocco as a result since the ferry would have cost us 240 Euro for a 4-hour stay. We promised Africa that we would come next year for sure. This finally resolved and with the temperatures somewhat improved to the upper 70s, we visited the hotel pool. Where we had to learn that its nicer part with water slide and whirlpool is for the guests staying at hotel rooms only, not for the apartment guests. Maureen and Marcus had picked the right and more modest pool but where the only ones in there. The water was prohibitingly cold. So we switched to the ocean, which wasn’t warmer either but at least had waves and a pretty sand beach. Marcus and I had enough inner heat for a short swim and then warmed up on the beach for a while.
Later in the day, we went back to Ayamonte for a little walk through the town and along its waterfront. The hotel grocery store supplied us with more tapas material for the evening as well as sangria. Before I felt ready for this feast, I went on a solitary hike through the marshlands near Isla Canela, observed multitudes of birds and very loud frogs. The village festival in Punta Moral must have reached its pinnacle that