Friday 12 October 2012

Adventure!

Today is a national holiday, El Pilar, and the trees are beginning to turn. We took our old, recently repaired Ford Escort to Zuriza in the western end of the Aragonese Pyrenees. It was lovely. The beech trees in the valley were beginning to change,

we walked for some time and then drove down to a place called Borda Arracona where we ate a delicious dinner of  "migas" - breadcrumbs fried in lamb suet (not for eating more than once a year) salad, then for some wild boar stew, lamb chops or leg of lamb, washed down with red wine. 

migas a la pastora

This was on the wall above my head.
Up to this point everything was great. Andrés, who had only drunk water started to drive home. It was about four o'clock. We were going along the picturesque Foz de Biniés when the car died. Rafa and Andrés went for help; there was no phone signal there at all. David put up the warning triangles and we waited. A car stopped and we asked the occupants to pick up the others and take them to somewhere with a phone. An hour later a towtruck arrived and rescued us. Rafa and Andrés had been taken to the Guardia Civil in Ansó, where they rang the insurance, who sent the tow truck and ordered a taxi which picked us all up from the Cuardia Civil and took us home. What a day! Monday, back to the Ford Garage.

Tuesday 2 October 2012

Trip to England

Broken pier in Brighton

"Hang on lads, I've got an idea" at the De la Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea

The Pyrenees on the way home
It was raining when I arrived on Sunday 23rd September. It was raining when I left Ringmer on Monday 1st October. It rained most of the week I was in England. Saturday was sunny and Sunday it didn't rain. The rest of the time it was mild and wet.

Friday 21 September 2012

Sprouting

A couple of years ago, I took up a fun, restful hobby; sprouting seeds. This is my sprouting jar.


This is a mix called "Salade folle" (I bought the seeds in France)


I put the sprouts in mixed salads



Canal Imperial

Canals in this part of the world aren't like canals in the UK. They were made for purposes of irrigation, not transport. However, one day a year the Canal Imperial is filled with home-made boats.


Thursday 23 August 2012

La Vuelta

La Vuelta de España is an international cycle race which goes all over Spain. Today it finished a stage in Jaca. The cyclists and their entourage started out this morning in Tarazona, 170 kms away. We watched their approach to Jaca on TV and only went outside to the barriers in timeto see them pass for the final 6-minute climb to Rapitan Fort. Actually, waiting outside was fun, with neighbours dashing in and out to update on the peloton's progress. There was Antonio of the big green hand:
Benito, who didn't have his big poster to advertise his restaurant La Abuela 2, so I said I'd put his photo in the t-shirt on Facebook.
Support vans, cars, a squadron of Civil Guards on motorbikes and some in vans (who gave themselves frights on the speed bumps), ambulances and Red Cross, photographers, official merchandise vans.....and cyclists:
Whoops!
It takes 45-60 minutes to walk up to the fort from our house. The cyclists did it in about six minutes, average temperature today about 34º C.



Monday 20 August 2012

I didn't see the hoopoe!

Andrés came downstairs the other day and said: "Mum, I've just seen a funny bird; what was it?"
I got my bird book out and flicked through until I found something which coincided with his description. "Yes, that's it!"
It was the hoopoe; not very rare, but I haven't seen one from our house before. They are colourful and pleasing to see.
(Once again, this isn't my photo.)

Friday 10 August 2012

Trip to Canfranc


These are my notes for a trip to Canfranc on the train from Jaca

Aragón: history and importance.

Jaca has the first Romanesque cathedral in Spain, dating from the 11th cen. This is frontier land and always has been; a place of skirmishes rather than big battles. There is evidence of history going back to prehistoric times- not sure if we can see the dolmen from the train, and there are others in the Selva de Oza. Of course, there’s also the St James Way which runs from Somport to Jaca.
Coll de Ladrones fort at the entrance to the paseo de los melancólicos
The mountains

The Pyrenees are a massive natural barrier some 500kms long and 50kms wide dividing France and the Iberian Peninsula. Access is through the valleys. Looking  at a map, the mountains are like the spine of a comb and the valleys the teeth running parallel to each other and perpendicular to the spine, in Aragón the highest peak is Aneto at 3,400m above sea level. However, in this area the mountains are around the 2000m mark. From Jaca at 820m/sl we’ll be climbing gently to Canfranc at 1,195m/sl, following up the valley of the river Aragón from which the medieval county and later kingdom took its name. The kingdom expanded and became a great commonwealth which included Catalonia, Valencia, Mallorca and Sardinia.
 An important date in later times was 1288, when the Treaty of Canfranc was signed by Alfonso III of Aragón  and Edward I of England. Sons were taken hostage to seal the agreement.

Legends:

There are plenty of legends about the conflict between Christians and the Moors who managed to penetrate all the way to the north of Spain and to the Pyrenees. In Zaragoza and Huesca they had some centuries of coexistence, but here there is only a history of battles and confrontation; (Jaca First Friday of May, Sta Orosia, the Carline thistle).

The railway:

First thought about in mid-19th cen, the Pau-Canfranc route was considered too difficult and discounted in favour of the Basque coastal route. The French and Spanish governments finally agreed to the construction of a central-Pyrenean railway, and work began in 1904. It was an enormous challenge for engineers and took more than 20 years to complete. In the Aspe valley on the French side, 80 bridges, 4 viaducts, 24 tunnels, and massive deforestation were needed. The treans-Pyrenean bridge is 7,875m long. In Canfranc itself, great thought had to be given to the problem of avalanches, and millions of trees were planted on the slopes. On  18th August 1928, king Alfonso XIII and French president Gaston Doumergue came here to celebrate the inauguration of the International railway station and the tunnel. The railway line was never profitable. The Great Depression struck in 1929, there was a serious fire in 1931 and in 1936 the Civil War started and the tunnel was closed off. Although it wasn’t opened to civil traffic until 1948, there was special wartime traffic I’ll tell you about later. Trains used the line from Pau to Canfranc until 1970 when a heavy freight train crashed as a French bridge collapsed and was never repaired. They have tried very hard from this side to re-open the line, but there’s resistance from France, they don’t want it.

The station

Built between 1921 and 1925, when it was opened in 1928 it was the biggest railway station in Europe. It is Art Nouveau/Classical/French in style, 241m long, three stories high, with 75 doors on each side and more than 365 windows.  It is made of materials which were fashionable in those times, concrete, steel, glass and marble. As a good international station it had a luxurious hotel, customs offices, an infirmary, bars, restaurants and offices for both the French and Spanish railway companies. Two passenger trains run to and from Canfranc every day, and there are frequent freight trains carrying grain, but the station building is not in use. It has recently had the roof replaced, but the future of this building as a hotel/leisure centre/spa is still uncertain. In 1944, a fire consumed more than half of the houses in the original village of Canfranc, and so the centre of population moved up to the station area  

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Nazi gold.

In 2001, a Frenchman was poking about in one of the station outbuildings and found a pile of papers, which he pieced together to tell an incredible story: between 1943 and 1945, Canfranc station was used to load 45 convoys, 1,200 tonnes every month, including 86 tonnes of gold confiscated from the Jews. Spain sent many tons of wolfram to Germany, and received some 12 tonnes of gold and 4 of opium. The rest of the loads of spoils went to Portugal from where it was sent to South America, where many Germans went after their defeat.
Some German soldiers; engineers, chemists and Gestapo, lived in the station, some in a local hotel. Local people moved the merchandise; their lives were pretty hard in those days.

“P” line 

Franco’s Spain was isolated after the war and there was always a fear of incursions by the Maquis. “P” line was and ambitious defensive project which involved building 10,000 pillboxes through the Pyrenees to prevent this from happening. If we walk along behind the station we will see some.
Over the tunnel mouth and behind the station, we can go onto the footpath called the "paseo de los melancólicos"

 Paseo de los Melancólicos
It runs parallell to the railway line and the village all the way to the hydroelectric turbines of the Canalroya. In the undergrowth along the way we can see various pillboxes or bunkers which formed part of the "P" line. All work on the line was stopped in 1959, and they were never put to use defensively.
References: http://www.heraldo.es/canfranc/
http://depaseoporcanfranc.blogspot.com.es

Tuesday 7 August 2012

Griffon Vultures

This isn't my photo. I simply can't capture these birds with my camera, so I've just copied this one and pasted it in, sorry. There are lots of them here though. Yesterday I saw ......about thirty or forty overhead. There was probably a dead animal somewhere around. I've heard that 80% of the European population of vultures live in Aragón; I can believe that, seeing how many there are!

Thursday 12 July 2012

Gabardito revisited

Just a few flowers from yesterday's walk.
A pretty dianthus

broad-leaved helleborine

Probably Pyrenean iris. Very pretty!

Wednesday 11 July 2012

Atapuerca

On the way home from Galicia, just out of Burgos, we stopped at Atapuerca, where in the 1970s they started excavating an enormous prehistoric site; basically a 900,000 year-old dump, full of the bones of people and animals. There is so much material in this vast excavation site, apparently, that they dig for one-and-a-half months every year, and the rest of the time is spent examining the findings.
Group beginning the visit.

One of the excavation sites.

Trip to Galicia

Last week we drove to the north-western corner of Spain; Galicia. It's a long way from Jaca! On the first day we stopped mid-afternoon in León, a bit more than half-way. León cathedral has got the finest stained-glass in the land; it's a pretty, luminous Gothic building. At the other end of town is the "Hospital" of St Mark- originally a place for pilgrims to stay; they can still lodge there now, but it's a luxury Parador.
Here's a nice statue outside the hospital- a tired pilgrim with his sandals off!
 The following day we stopped in Lugo, Galicia. It's got a Roman wall around the old city; very impressive!
Galicia is Green Spain; lush and fertile. There are trees and allotments everywhere. Coming from hard, sparsely populated Aragón, we found it rather crowded, but beautiful.
The Rías Baixas, estuaries where people work diligently at low tide to collect shellfish; what backbreaking work!
Santiago de Compostela-the big cathedral which is the goal of all the many pilgrims. Being Green Spain, it poured with rain! It looks like this on the outside, but inside it's elegant Romanesque.
Food Octopus is good and very tender, all kinds of seafood, and pimientos de Padrón- little green peppers which are mostly mild, but every now and then there's a hot one.
Served with local wine Albariño. Delicious!




Sunday 17 June 2012

Midsummer in the mountains

We haven't had time to go to the mountains recently. Or if there was time the weather was bad. Today, however it was hot in Jaca so we drove over the border with France and stopped at the cross-country ski resort of Le Somport and went for a walk along the tracks where people ski in the winter. Sheltered by trees and lined with wild flowers it was perfect for a hot afternoon.

Here are some of the flowers we saw. In the open it was very windy, but not a bit cold. On the way back to the car we sat down for a moment, without talking,  and suddenly there was a roe deer on the path ahead of us. There was an instant before it noticed us, and then it bounded up the hillside into the trees; we could still see it now and then because we knew it was there. I'm sure it's not rare, but what a treat! This is a snippet of video; the wind makes a terrible noise!


Wednesday 4 April 2012

Alquezar

Today we had to drive to Huesca, so in the early afternoon, after dropping David off at the bus station to catch a bus to Barcelona, we went east to Alquezar. It poured with rain! Even so, the village of Alquezar is extraordinary. The area is the Somontano de Barbastro. There are lots of vineyards around, mostly just showing dry sticks at the moment. You have to drive 18 km off the main road, past various little villages, then up a steepish ramp. There is a car park with lots of ancient olive trees in it. You walk down well-made cobbled streets and suddenly you have the collegiate-fortress before you.

It's got this amazing chasm just opposite; in fact there are cliffs all over the place. We climbed up the ramp to the fortress and were given a quick explanation  of what we saw by a priest who kept saying: "the guide will be here in a minute." He told us what the capitels of the columns in the cloister represented. Romanesque, by the same "Master of Aguero" who carved the capitels in San Juan de la Peña and some in Jaca cathedral.                                           
I'm not sure if my favourite is Noah's Ark, with the birds lying on their backs on thr roof of the ark.

Or the sacrifice of Isaac with what looks like a donkey on a spit.
Home to Jaca and it hasn't rained at all here.



Sunday 18 March 2012

It's plum blossom time again. Trees all over the town are covered in pink blossom.

Friday 24 February 2012

Roman Zaragoza

We wanted to go to Merida in Extremadura this week. It's where there are important Roman remains, and the journey is about nine hours by car. We couldn't do it, we had to be in Zaragoza, so we went to see a bit of late-Roman; the crypt of the church of Santa Engracia. It's right in the commercial centre of the city. On the outside it looks like this:

And in the crypt they've got these two fourth century Roman sarcophagi. They are for various martyrs: called innumerable but actually eighteen, I think. The biggest names are Engracia and Lamberto.