Category: Spain

Restoration & Renewal

I have chosen to end this month’s Squares series with another visit to l’Albufera. It was there that I went on my last afternoon in Valencia some years ago. I’d gone to learn Spanish, for two weeks only, staying in the home of a Spanish woman who spoke no English – which was challenging, since I’d started my stay on Page One of the Spanish book provided by my language school. I’d had an exciting time exploring the city in my free time, but the experience was pretty full-on. A bus journey to nearby L’Albufera, a natural park set amongst lagoons seemed to offer a perfect last afternoon. And so it proved. I’ll never forget the sunset I enjoyed there, as one of a very few passengers on a lazily wandering boat, puttering gently through the reedbeds. It was renewing, transformative, and throughly reconstructed my somewhat battered mind.

Thank you Becky, thank you everyone who has contributed to this #SquaresRenewal. I’ve seen so many interesting, beautiful, thought-provoking posts: and all thanks to Becky, who after a long and understandable break has once more launched and managed this month of photos, fellowship and fun. Looking forward already to the next month of Squares

A Restorative Lunch

If you’re anything like me when you’re on holiday, buzzing with new sights, sounds, experiences – perhaps wrestling with the language – you need the break that a leisurely meal provides. It gives the chance to renew energy and to re-charge with the get-up-and-go needed for the rest of the day.

So let me take you to l’Albufera, near Valencia, home to the right kind of rice for paella. That’s a rice growing field – a little fallow in mid-winter – in the image above, and lunch in my all-important Square photo.

L’Albufera holds a special place in my heart, so tomorrow, for the last square of the month, I’ll take you there.

For Becky’s #SquaresRenew

Make Haste Slowly

To travel in the Cordillera Cantábrica in Spain – or in any other mountain range, anywhere -is to know that in order to move forwards, you may not be – exactly – moving forwards. You’ll be going ‘this way, that way, forwards and backwards’, to quote a pirate song beloved of British pre-school children.

Here’s a tiny portion of a fairly recent journey.

For Becky’s #SquaresRenew Challenge.

Greenwich Mean Time

Greenwich is the historic home of the Prime Meridian Line – Longitude 0º. It has served as the reference line for Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) since 1884.  GMT became the worldwide time-standard a century later.

So it was quite a surprise to find this on a road in Northern Spain:

There we were on the Greenwich Meridian line, whilst incontrovertibly some 1000 miles south of London. And the bull shown in my featured photo, which is a common roadside sight in those parts, proved us to be incontrovertibly in Spain. We must have been moving forward.

For Becky’s #SquaresRenew Challenge, she’s inviting us to post square – only square – photos on the themes of Burgeoning; Moving Forward; Reconstruction; or Renewal

La Sagrada Familia – Constructed at Last?

Everybody knows that Antoni Gaudí’s La Sagrada Familia is the oldest new church in (probably) the world. Begun in 1882, it may finally be finished in 2026. Promises, promises. It’s certainly been burgeoning for years.

The header photo, taken from the flat where Emily’s partner Miquel once lived shows how this monumental edifice dominates the skyline in a city where so many modern buildings scrape the sky.

For Becky’s #SquaresRenew

Dogger, Fisher, German Bight …

Paula, who blogs at Lost in Translation, offers each month a different set of five words to illustrate. Look at this month’s: sabulous; brimming; guarding; berthing and bight. Interesting, aren’t they? I bet you had to haul the dictionary out for one, maybe two of them.

It was bight that caught my eye. It actually means …

But it doesn’t mean that to me. Like so many Brits, I’m a devotee of the Shipping Forecast, that four-times-daily forecast to anyone out at sea within reach of the British coast. The coastal waters are divided into zones, each evocatively named.

I’m not out at sea, dicing with the elements: I’m a rotten sailor anyway. But I can be soothed by the predictable poetic rhythms of the regular broadcast. Do watch this explanatory video. It’ll take up under two minutes of your life.

It’s so much a part of my life, I even have a cushion showing many of the much-loved names.

… and there you’ll have spotted it. German Bight. So that’s what Bight means to me. Ships at sea, their crew always ready, four times a day, to tune into that most necessary programme.

It seems only right then, that my four remaining photos should have been taken on the sea, or at any rate by the sea. Here they are …

This beach at Alnmouth, Northumberland is pretty sabulous, I’d say.
The Mediterranean is brimming at the moment: so much so that it’s slopped over the sands and is stealing the beaches of the Maresme coast in Catalonia. Diggers and excavators are fighting back, building groynes to inhibit the relentless march of the sea.
Just another day at work for this lifeguard, guarding the safety of Sunday swimmers at Premià de Mar.
Berthing at the fishing port of Arenys de Mar, Catalonia, before another night of fishing at sea.

Rocks of Ages

This week, Donna’s Lens Artist Challenge invites us to celebrate rocks, their geology, and what they have meant to humankind. Bloggers have responded with hosts of natural wonders: extravagant, bizarre, subtly beautiful and all extraordinary. I had planned to respond in kind, by showcasing – as I have in my feature photo – our nearby geological extravaganza which is Brimham Rocks. But I already have several times – here – here and here – to name but a few.

Instead, I’ve chosen to show rocks in the service of mankind. Brimham Rocks even fit in here. These days they’re our very best local playground.

The grandchildren are king and queen of the castle.

But rocks have been pressed into service since prehistoric times. Here is Cairn Holy in Dumfries and Galloway. It’s a Neolithic burial site – perhaps that of Galdus, a Scottish king. But perhaps not: he’s thought to be mythical.

Farmers have divided their land up into fields for almost as long. Drystone walls march across the rural landscape here, particularly in the north of England.

And where would our churches, our cathedrals be without a ready supply of local rock and stone?

Rievaulx Abbey, North Yorkshire, in ruins since Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536
Rievaulx’s walls continue to provide shelter and nourishment for local flora.

Scuplture too. I’ve chosen a few pieces that have weathered over the centuries, to reveal the underlying rock that the original sculptor had chiselled to the form that he, not nature had decided on.

Nature too can be a sculptor. This rock, hauled from the sea on the Spanish coast, has been transformed by – what? Underwater snail trails?

At the port, Arenys de Mar

Nature doesn’t need any help from man when it comes to artistic expression. I’ll conclude with an image of rock at its most painterly, in the Gorges du Tarn in France.