I spent most of my time from May 2014 to May 2015 walking in Spain and have learned to love the country and the Spanish people. I made long walks∗ in the countryside, in the mountains, and along the coastline. I visited countless villages and towns, mostly staying in small guest houses and hotels, but also spent an occasional night outdoors camping.
GR-7 Andalucía
I met hundreds of dogs of unknown origin and experienced breathtaking views from paths high up in the mountains of Sierra Nevada and the Pyrenees and from rocky coastal paths winding past a myriad of small beaches (calas) alongside the azure blue water of the Mediterranean Sea.
Andorra is still far away 🙂
And I can honestly say that I solely met nice and friendly people that were pleased to help and also showed great patience with my faltering Spanish pronunciation and gave me credit and respect for trying to speak their language. Right now I am compiling the web site, joriki.eu “Inside the head of a hispanophile”, in order to organize my memories, experiences, and knowledge, and to make it accessible and hopefully useful to other people.
∗For example: GR-7 (E4) from Tarifa to Andorra la Vella and GR-92 from Valencia to Portbou.
It took many years for me to realize what I had to do in order to stop being unhappy. A holiday trip to Mallorca was what really set things in motion. There I experienced several full days of walking in the Tramuntana mountains. It was christmas time, the air was crisp and fresh, and the pale daylight made everything appear in a mysterious glow.
The archduke’s path from Deía
I felt happy and calm and had complete trust in the performance of both body and mind. Excited as a small child on Christmas day I was moving silently along soft narrow paths passing through quiet oak forests and climbing steep rocky trails hanging on the mountain sides trying to decode the more or less cryptic instructions from the guide-book that I was carrying.
The archduke’s path from Deía
It was like playing an adventure game like Myst or Riven on the computer but this was real. Strange and unfamiliar things everywhere, like charcoal burners bread ovens, mill wheels, and other old remains of human made structures, scattered all over the mountains, all those stone walls, arduously built by generations of men under the burning sun. And it was quiet. Very, very quiet. Not a bird to see or hear, not a rabbit. Nothing. Anywhere. All this together changed something inside of me and I was never to be the same again after that. But it still took me almost another ten years to break loose from my old life.
Everything continued more or less as it always had for another six years but I traveled more than before and I walked a lot in places like mainland Spain, Tenerife, Mallorca, the Azores, and Madeira. I also toured the Iberian peninsula from north to south and from west to east by train and bus and visited many fabulous places.
Montserrat
Then one day after coming home from a three-week tour of Eastern Europe I had a clash with middle management over a trivial matter and I suddenly felt that I had had enough of poor management and egotistical, stupid colleagues. I submitted my resignation a couple of days later and after two months notice I walked out of that office and have never looked back.
Ronda
I thought a lot about what I wanted to do with the rest of my time on earth but the most I came up with was what I didn’t want to do. And I didn’t want to return to a job in an office working nine to five no matter how much I was paid. Then I made some calculations and it stood clear to me that if I could reduce my fixed expenses to a minimum I could afford to say no to wage labour for an extended period of time.
Córdoba, la Mezquita
I decided to have a go at one of Europe’s longest walking trails, the GR-7, also called E4. The trail starts in Tarifa near Gibraltar in Spain and ends in Greece after more than 10000 kilometers. I settled for the distance Tarifa to Andorra that is well over 2000 kilometers. And that I thought was enough for me at least for a start.
Casa de las paraguas, Las Ramblas, Barcelona
Now I had a defined target and could focus completely on what I had to do in order to reach that target. So, I began to sell, give away, or throw away everything that I didn’t really need and also investigated the possibility of getting rid of the rent for my apartment. At the same time I wanted to keep some of my furniture and some of the other things that I had further use for, and I had to find a way to receive my mail not having a permanent address.
Plaza de toros, Sevilla
I found the answers to all of my questions and terminated the lease for my apartment, rented a large box in a warehouse where I could store my furniture and stuff for as long as I needed for a reasonable cost, and changed my address to a post office box. I also bought a large backpack and stuffed it with carefully selected items. I didn’t want the weight to exceed 15 kilograms excluding water and food.
La Sagrada Familia, Barcelona
And then came the day when it was time to set off. Early in the morning the movers came and collected my furniture and my other stuff that was diligently packed in cartons. Then came my landlord to make his inspection of the apartment and collect the keys.
Casa Batlló, Barcelona
At noon I stood outside my old apartment dressed for walking and with only my backpack to carry. It created a strange but awesome feeling when I thought about that I now had left a place where I had been living for the past 25 years and that I never would return there again.
After an overnight stay in Málaga I caught a bus westward to Tarifa passing Algeciras and Gibraltar in the Costa del Sol. The first thing that I noticed when I stepped off the bus was the strong warm desert wind that would prove to be a very common phenomenon in that place. It is not without reason that Tarifa has a reputation as a surfer’s paradise.
Tarifa coastline viewed from GR-7
The second thing I noticed was the silhouettes of the Atlas Mountains on the other side of the straits of Gibraltar. I found a guest house in the middle of the city and booked a room for two nights. I spent the next day looking at the sights and investigating how to get started on the GR-7 trail. In my guide-book Walking the GR7 in Andalucia the authors suggestion were that you start out on the beach walking several kilometers westward and “paddle” over the river Vega that splits the stretch on the beach in half. According to my findings it was a much better choice to walk a couple of hundred meters further inland in a bird sanctuary where there was a good trail. I also found out that there was an alternative to getting wet in Río de la Vega (whose flow in the beginning of May that year was quite impressive to me), namely: the river could be crossed on a bridge, if you didn’t mind walking on a paved road for a couple of kilometers. I thought it a was small price to pay for not having to struggle through beach sand for several kilometers and then in the middle of it strip naked to cross a river that looked a bit nasty to me.
Many days left to Andorra 🙂
The next morning I tried my backpack on and it must have weighed well over 20 kilograms. No way that I was going to carry that. I had to get rid of some stuff to bring the weigth down to maybe 18 kilograms. Although I was a seasoned wanderer even that weight was actually too heavy for me as I wasn’t trained to carry more than maybe 5 to 6 kilograms in the hikes I had made lately.
GR-7 Cádiz
When I got on my way the sun was already burning and the temperature was well over 20 degrees centigrade. I took the route through the bird sanctuary but I couldn’t resist taking another look at Río de la Vega before deciding to take the alternate route passing the river on a bridge instead of swimming. The temperature rose to around thirty at noon and the wind blew quite hard and steady. The Cádiz province is wind power country and scattered all over the hilltops were hundreds and hundreds of wind mills rotating furiously. I made some navigational mistakes according to not having my GPS device adjusted properly and the sun, the constant blowing of the wind, and the heat was beginning to get at me. I found a spot of grass by a stream where I put up my tent for the night. I ate some supper and then fell fast asleep.
Bedtime
Later that night a strange sound caught my attention. It sounded like somebody was hitting a tin can with a stick. I looked out of my tent and saw a cow with a big cowbell around its neck four meters away. My tent occupied the only spot in the proximity where a cow could make its way down to the stream, so I kept an eye on the cow for a while until she noticed me and decided to move off. After that I went back to a dreamless sleep.
Early in the morning I had breakfast and then broke camp and continued on my way towards Los Barrios that is located 45 kilometers northeast of Tarifa.
Between Tarifa and Los Barrios
I was running out of water but got lucky finding a small stream. But the water wasn’t easy to get to depending on a tightly put up barbed wire fence and a steep slope, but I found a small opening in the fence and could slide down to the desirable running water.
Just a few hours later I came across a roadside restaurant and could feast on soft drinks, mineral water, and a sandwich with cured ham and cheese.
Los Barrios
The last part of the stage that day went really easy after that. I found Hotel Real in the center of Los Barrios, a typical countryside hotel with a restaurant as the main attraction but also with some rooms for rent at the second floor. I took a shower and then made preparations for the walk next day. I went shopping for water, apples, soft drinks, and biscuits, filled my water bag, and took care of my feet and my gear before allowing myself to relax.
Myself
This was to become my daily routine for a long time to come, together with washing my laundry in the sink. Later on I visited the town square where I had supper. Actually, I was lucky to get fed that early, it was only seven o’clock in the evening and often it is impossible to get a decent cooked meal in Spain before eight or eight thirty.
I left Los Barrios today (May 11 2014) at 7:30 AM. In my guide-book it read: Good hill tracks start the route, followed by a long road walk with the reward of a beautiful view of the hill-top castle of Castellar at end of the day. Heart and muscles already have begun to adopt to carrying a backpack walking many hours a day and I made good speed until 1 PM when the heat began to slow me down.
Los Barrios-Castillo de Castellar
A strange sight suddenly appeared before my eyes as I was rambling along: storks’ nests, sitting on almost every single one of the many electricity pylons that ran through the landscape.
The last part of the route that day offered a couple of road-side bars that makes it easier to drink enough, even if I normally carry four liters of water, a water bag with a suction nozzle and four small bottles to be safe in the heat for many hours even if there is no possibility to re-fill.
Castillo de Castellar
After climbing the hill to Castillo de Castellar I checked in at hotel El Alcázar that was located inside the castle walls. My room was large and almost luxurious, it had massive wooden beams in the ceiling, and was furnished with heavy wooden furniture. It also offered magnificent views: looking north I saw a huge man-made water reservoir (presa) with emerald-green water surrounded by a beautiful forestal landscape, and if I turned to the south I saw the impressive rock of Gibraltar and the Atlas Mountains in Morocco in the distance behind it. The twilight and a full moon created a surreal feeling and the picture was so beautiful that it almost hurt, and I could hardly take my eyes off it. After having made the usual preparations for the next day I had a very nice vegetable stew with eggs and a salad with tuna in a “hole in the wall” that seemed to be a place well-known for people who like flamenco and bull fighting according to the amount of pictures and event posters covering the walls.
Today’s hike (May 12 2014) was relatively easy to begin with but all that changed when I chose to follow my GPS when it suggested a different route from that of the guide-book. The GPS route took me for a walk through vast fields covered with bushy herbage growing chest high and it forced me to lift my feet high for every step I took in order for them not to get caught in the undergrowth with a headlong fall as an immediate result, cruelly pushed down to the ground with force by my backpack.
After having struggled through these horrible fields I went past a small group of houses where a white horse got trapped between me and a gate that I wanted to pass through, and it took quite some time before I could convince the horse to move towards me and then past me as it was quite jumpy. After climbing a couple of high fences and crossing a creek I finally re-connected with the track from the guide-book and from there I had a pleasant walk for the rest of the afternoon until I made my way up the last hill where Jimena de la Frontera resides.
Jimena de la Frontera
I got a room at Casa Henrietta and had a superb omelet with fresh, gigantic, mushrooms, and a huge salad at a restaurant at the town square.
Jimena is another one of those many beautiful, relaxed, and friendly places in Spain that also offers magnificent views.
Walking the GR-7 in Andalucía: Dominated by its castle, an Arab fortress built on Roman ruins, Jimena is a delightful ancient village built on a steep hillside and looking down over fertile green valleys with orange groves and cork forested hills. Many British residents enjoy its sunshine and relaxed pace of life. From the castle you can see as far as Algeciras and Gibraltar.
The walk between Jimena and Ubrique turned out to be quite rough and took many hours. The temperature was a little lower though than it had been until then, but the path was very crude and dotted with loose stones of different sizes that made the foothold insecure, and it moved constantly up and down the steep hillsides.
Ubrique
In Ubrique I went to the tourist information and they gave me an address to a nearby guest house, Hostal Rosario. The door was locked but there was a phone number written on the wall and five minutes after calling I was let in and given a room by a very hospitable woman.
I continued on my way towards Montejaque and went through wide valleys surrounded by mountains. For several hours I walked through vast pasture lands in the midst of hoards of cows and I must admit that every now and then I cast an eye at the area between the hind legs of the animals in order to convince myself that they all had udders and not something completely different that only bulls have 😮 Occasionally I went past very well enclosed fields where large bulls roamed behind fences and sturdy hedges. My guess is that their destiny was to end their days fighting for their lives in some bullfighting arena. The wind was hot and strong and blew in my face all day.
MontejaqueMontejaque
I reached Montejaque in the early afternoon and had a tortilla and a beer and refilled my water vessels. I carried on and soon, at a distance, I saw the characteristic silhouette of the majestic cliff upon which Ronda resides.
Approaching RondaRonda
The cliff or rock is divided by a deep crack that runs through the city where it creates several magnificent sights and lots of photo opportunities. It still took me a couple of hours before I reached my hotel close to the new bridge in the center of old Ronda.
RondaRonda
My room had double doors that led to a large balcony where I could take in the city and it was also an excellent place for hanging my wet laundry to dry.
I made an early start from Ronda and everybody else, both guests and staff, were still asleep. I was instructed the day before to drop my room key in a letterbox by the reception and that I did. Seconds later I realized that I had locked myself in behind a wrought-iron gate that sat between me and the door to the street. The key for the gate was now without reach for me in a locked letterbox. There was a bell though and I rang it a couple of times and could hear it make a muffled sound somewhere deep inside the hotel. After my third attempt a not too happy person, still half asleep, turned up and he opened the gate for me.
Ronda
I started the day by walking the remaining eight kilometers of stage 6 of the GR-7 that ends in Arriate. There I took the decision to try to make it to Ardales that day a further 32 kilometers ahead, making it a more than 40 kilometer day stage. It was my seventh day on the road and I felt that it was possible to extend the day stages. The wind was still very strong and steady and as usual it insisted on pushing me back instead of helping me to move forward. I walked mostly on roads all day and unfortunately they were quite busy at times and it is not pleasant being shaken again and again by the turbulent air that is brought upon you by trucks and cars, and the sound from the vehicles gets to you and make you tired and irritated.
Arriate-Ardales
But, eleven hours after leaving Ronda I reached Ardales and Hotel Restaurante el Cruce that is situated by a bridge over Río Turón. The hotel had everything I needed and after having made the usual preparations I had a shower and a delicious evening meal before calling it a day and taking a well earned rest.
