Tag Archives: Antequera

GR-7 08 Valle de Abdalajís-Antequera

Surprise, surprise

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I had an early start as usual, checking my equipment several times, leaving the keys in the door to my room, moving down the stairs from the second floor, and shutting the front door locked behind me. If something was left behind it would imply waiting for a couple of hours until the guest house owners woke up. The weather was perfect for walking, overcast and around twenty degrees centigrade. Moving through a hilly agricultural area with billowing fields of corn and scattered farm houses.

Antequera
Antequera

Reaching Antequera early in the afternoon and after spending an hour in the historic town with a skyline dominated by the towers of a Moorish fortress and a multitude of church spires I decided to continue walking for couple of hours. My guide-book has one weakness in that it is not very good at describing the way out of populated areas, so I followed my GPS instead. Sometimes a track can take you in the opposite direction from where you’re going for hours but after a while I got suspicious and examined the GPS more thoroughly. The GR-7 on its way through Andalucía splits up in a northern path and in a southern path and that occurs 15 kilometers east of Antequera. I intended to follow the southern leg but I had the GPS tracks for both routes in my device. When leaving Antequera I just chose to follow the track that was next in sequence and assumed that it was the track leading to the fork where the GR-7 split up.

Slowed down
Slowed down

But there and then I realized that the last common track that led to the fork was missing in the GPS. I had downloaded all files but the person who published the tracks had forgotten to include exactly that vital track. The track I was following was actually an extra track, which was a shortcut to the northern path heading directly out of Antequera, that someone had thought would be of great interest to all hikers 🙂 Well, well, well, I accepted my mistake and turned around 180 degrees and moved back to Antequera in the afternoon sunshine in order to find a place to spend the night and to get something substantial to eat after a long day.

GR-7 09 Antequera-Riogordo via Villanueva de Cauche

Encounter with a huge white Labrador

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It was a nice cool morning but the walk was quite boring with a lot of tarmac to begin with but after a while the track continued on a narrow dirt road that suddenly after a bend passed straight through a farm between buildings to the left and to the right. Suddenly a huge white Labrador came running straight at me without making a sound. I also saw a woman and a child standing to the right outside the main farmhouse looking in my direction. The dog snapped repeatedly at me from behind, taking hold of my trousers with its teeth shaking its head vigorously. I didn’t know what to do so I just continued walking dragging the dog behind me while urging the woman to call off the dog. She made a couple of lame tries to do so but Pietro, as she called dog, continued to defend the household against the intruder. I am convinced that Pietro applied the same methods on me snapping at my heels as he knew would work getting the cows to where he wanted them 🙂 After a couple of very long minutes Pietro decided that he had won and let me off the hook in order to return to his normal business.

Villanueva de Cauche
Villanueva de Cauche

The terrain became rather difficult from there on with a lot of obstacles to pass like barbed wire fences and ravines and I began to suspect that I had chosen the wrong path when passing a fork a while before being abused by the dog but I had no intention to go back and take a chance with Pietro once more so I strode on using my GPS and my compass to navigate safely forward through rocks, boulders, and fissures and soon I found myself facing a motorway from way up a hill and down there in the valley was Villanueva de Cauche, my halfway target for the day.

GR-7 fork
GR-7 fork

As in all villages in Spain no matter how small they are there always is at least one restaurant and this was no exception. I had a ham and cheese sandwich and a beer and had a rest for a while listening to the locals talking. In Villanueva de Cauche the GR-7 through Andalucía splits in two, of which one goes north of and the other one south of the Sierra Nevada. I continued following the track to the south mostly on tarmac but with magnificent views over the nearby mountains. My guide-book told me that there was no accommodation to be found in Riogordo but i went by a Casa rural a bit up the mountain and asked the people in there watching television all family together if they would have me but the answer were that they were closed for business and when I asked if there was any place to stay in Riogordo I got a no as an answer from one of the older women. But when leaving one if the younger women stopped me and told me that there certainly w-a-s a bar beside the public swimming pool in Riogordo that had rooms to let. I thanked her and went on my way downhill for several kilometers.

Riogordo
Riogordo

The place she had told me about had rooms to let but the problem was that this was on the one day of the week that the bar staff had their day off so the bar was closed. But there was a note beside the door with a phone number and ten minutes after having called I was installed in a brand new hotel room with all conveniences.