Heading North!…

Week 3

After reaching the southernmost point of the European continent, we have already started moving up north again. This week, a fortress in danger, two kittens and an experience of life on Mars…

Tarifa is the southernmost point of the European continent, and also the place in the Strait of Gibraltar where Africa and Europe are closest (at least, geographically speaking, with only 14 km separating the two continents). Tarifa is also the place where the Mediterranean Sea becomes the Atlantic Ocean and vice versa. Biologists will say that, in reality, there is only one ocean on the planet, with several different names, and in Tarifa, this concept makes perfect sense…

This time, we had the surprise of discovering the town of Tarifa. It seems incredible, but until now, we had limited ourselves to the typical photos of the promenade to Isla de las Palomas, and really never ventured inside the city walls. Those who know Tarifa will say that until now, we didn’t know Tarifa, and… they will be right! We have discovered an extremely beautiful and welcoming town, and walking through the old alleys of the center (especially at night) left us with an image of peace and tranquility that, until now, we did not associate with Tarifa…

From Tarifa, and despite the desire to take a ferry so that we could say that Marvin had already arrived in Africa, we could only begin the long road that will take us to the other end of the continent: the North Cape. We made our first stop in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, a town of discoverers since it is from here that, in 1519, Ferdinand Magellan set sail with 5 ships and 250 sailors for the first circumnavigation (the first trip around the world), in search of one of the most precious species at the time: cloves. Magellan would never see the Spanish coasts again, but one of his lieutenants, Juan Sebastian Elcano, would take over from his deceased captain and return to Sanlúcar on 6 September 1522, with only 18 men and one ship: the Victoria.

Little remains today of Magellan’s great era in Sanlúcar. The few fishing boats in town seem half asleep in the Guadalquivir estuary, and the enormous military helicopter that flies over the area permanently seems to indicate that the only boats that move here are the narco-boats going upriver at full speed to reach Seville… Lucky that its Manzanilla and its famous shrimp make Sanlúcar a town where it is still worth stopping, even if it is only to contemplate a sunset on the bank of the Guadalquivir…

Sanlúcar was, in reality, one of the highly guarded gateways to our next stop: the Doñana National Park. In addition to offering a refuge to the most endangered and emblematic feline in Spain (the Iberian Lynx), the marshes and dunes of Doñana are like an island surrounded by two seas: on the one hand, the real sea, or rather, the Atlantic Ocean, and on the other, a sea of plastic similar to that of El Ejido. Square kilometres and square kilometres of greenhouses or fruit fields seem to be pushing the national park towards the sea, gradually leaving it without its vital element: freshwater. The smaller marshes of Doñana have not received a single drop of water for years, and the millions of birds that, years ago, passed through the park are only a memory or the optimistic claim of a promotional video for the park made in the 60s…

Doñana is suffocating, just as its flagship species, the lynx, is. The triple wire fence that protects the different parts of the park is both its last protection from the outside world and the bell that suffocates it as the marsh environment changes, under the effects of climate change. Talking to the park guides was very interesting to realize that, despite the fact that the lynx captive breeding program is more successful than ever and that the IUCN has reclassified the species from “Critically Endangered” to “Endangered “, its real effect on the ground is increasingly limited due to external factors, among which climate change, the speed of which surprises even local experts. As the habitats of Doñana change with increasing temperatures, the logical solution for the lynx would be to migrate north. But where to migrate when the park is literally surrounded by strawberry greenhouses and fruit fields?

Be that as it may, we were lucky enough to see two lynxes. Two older specimens from the captive breeding program, now too old to reproduce and who spend their days huddled against each other in an observatory for visitors, like two grandparents by the fire watching their grandchildren grow in the hope that they can continue living what they lived themselves…

After four days by the ocean, it was time to head back a little inland. We chose a place that is so similar to Mars that NASA installed a laboratory there to study and carry out technical tests of life on the Red Planet… We ended this week in the Rio Tinto mines, an incredible and fascinating place. Although it was the Romans who began to exploit the minerals of the Río Tinto, it was in the second half of the 19th century that this area reached its peak, with the arrival of the English company Rio Tinto Company Limited. The mining basin expanded up to 170 km², until the last decades of the 20th century, when the exhaustion of the mines and the fall in mineral prices on the international market marked the end of the activity in the region. Today, the Cypriot company Atalaya Mining continues to operate a small mine through its Spanish subsidiary, while the rest of the basin has been abandoned, except for a few tourist initiatives that try to keep the region’s mining heritage alive.

Wandering through the Rio Tinto mines is a strange feeling, somewhere between fascination and desolation. Little remains of the ancient hills that were surely here many years ago. They have been replaced by another type of relief: the mountains of runes and mining waste that have accumulated here for decades. The landscape definitely has a Martian look, although some rebellious pine trees refuse to give up and are recolonizing some areas. The rightly named Rio Tinto has a rusty colour, dark waters with iridescent reflections that gives the impression that anything that touches it will immediately dissolve. The color, however, is natural, due to the oxidation of the metals in the rocks that the river passes through. The water is highly acidic, however, and the level of sulfides in the region is extremely high. Walking in the mountains of mining waste is like stepping on these rubber mats in playgrounds so that children do not get hurt if they fall. The ground seems elastic… From a distance, the landscape is as if painted with reddish, ocher, gray and blue tones. In some parts, you can see the old structures used by the mine: train tracks, tailings dams that can no longer hold even the rain runoff in the accumulated tailings, half-destroyed stone buildings, mineral silos, etc.

The landscape itself is desolate. But within this desolation, there is beauty. It is like a mineral world that someone would have tried to model from scratch, staying in the initial phase without reaching the vegetation stage. For its immensity, the variety of its colours and the mining heritage that still persists there, the place is fascinating. A mix of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, a Mad Max set and a post-apocalyptic world… After all, it is not surprising that NASA came to do its experiments here…

Next week, and after visiting all its provinces (with the exception of Córdoba), we leave Andalusia and enter Extremadura (the homeland of Jamón de Bellota! 😋)…

PS: The main photo of this post is not a montage. There is actually a NASA robot in the pile of mining waste in front of where we have settled…

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In Doñana, EVEN MORE THAN anywhere else, LEAVE NO TRACE!

– Always travel on public ways and respect the signs.
– Limit noise and interfere as little as possible with wildlife.
– Respect the other users.
– Leave rocks, plants and other natural features as you found them and respect historic sites.
– Take your waste with you and throw it into the appropriate containers, in the nearest village.
– Do not camp inside protected areas and do not make any fires.