Andulusia

 Olive tree and the lake with the huge fish where we like to swim, also the endless walls of limestone above the tine village of  El Chorro.

    cave drawing Cueva del Pileta 

 The gorge at Ronda.

 We stayed Benaojan station, down the hill from the regular Benaojan, a tiny village. the nice man gave me directions in the morning and made a reservation for us for the Cuevas de Pileta.  They also had a great breakfast with 7 kinds of jam...I don’t even know if that hotel is real it was so nice, I must have dreamed it.   And it was raining, I did not think it ever rained here.  We went out in the pouring rain, drove for about 8 minutes up the road to the parking lot for the Cueva (cave), ran up the path, and made it just in time for the tour.

 

This cave has been kept in one family for a long time. And it was the perfect cave.  First, the very pale blond girl who handed out lanterns, which cast ghostly shadows on her face, was also our guide.  It did not look like she got outside very much, but she did speak English.   The cave was enormous, with huge stalactites hanging down and best of all, no one could take pictures.  But I had my sketchbook and was trying to draw the gloomy dramatic scene of people carrying small lanterns into the huge cavern, up steps, into narrow passage ways. 

“Here is one skeleton we found”…it was like the haunted house tour, except for real.  “And by the way, 10,000 bats live in the cave” We could see them hanging from the ceiling and flitting around.  Then there were the cave drawings, very old, 7, 8, 10,000 year old, 25 or 30,000 year old drawings…”on the left a kind of animal, we don’t know what kind of animal”.   I was trying to make a drawing of all the drawings in my book.  “There are 250 steps carved into the limestone by the first owner of the farm and his son. It took them 30 years”. They must have really loved this cave.  When we were done, she told  me that there were other parts of the cave where they can’t take the tours because there is not enough air, but she showed us pictures of the paintings in these areas.  When we got out, the rain had stopped and it smelled just like the desert after the rain, we saw a few goats on the hill.  

 Ronda is build up on a big cliff escarpment, with a gorge running through it, surrounded by olive and almond groves with mountains in the background, not so big as Toledo or Granada, but still big enough to make it difficult to park in the medieval streets.  And like most of the cities in Andalusia, it has strong Moorish roots,  this is a part of the world where the Christians made a big fight with the Islamic Moors.  The moors made houses and palaces like Riads, enclosing a central area, then the Catholic kings turned them into their own palaces.  

But this is the gorge at El Chorro, with the Caminito del Rey, famous walkway into the gorge, and that is the beginning of the famous climb Amtrax, which we did.