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With David into March

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Welcome to March. Also welcome to a day without a house, shack or wideside cafe. We begin the day, alongside the main road. Google will have us scrambling up the embankment, nipping over the barrier and so across the way and out among the olive trees. Today is the Dia de les Illes Balears. This day was picked because on 1st March 1983 the Statue of Autonomy was published. It became a non-working day in 1999. I’m sure they are up to larks over the sea. It is Saint David’s day. Last year the Welsh migrant community came together at the Plaza de la Mezquita in Benalmadena to, to quote Euroweekly, ‘to eat and drink Welsh cuisine, sing, dance, and celebrate the ex-pat Welsh community’. This is what I have found out about St David in Spain. The websearch answering to the call did offer me a fair bit of St David’s as a Pilgrim Route; the Camino de Santiago and ‘Napoleon Crossing the Alps’. Hum Ho. Not much going on. Not a lot to look at. Alright, some saints. The two earliest Iberian...
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The virtues of a waitress and the rise and fall of the iron rails.

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  We have barely moved into Baza then we are on the way out and into one of those routes which is the only way between two lumps of inconveniently placed geology.  But first, a few steps back and nip round the Antigua Estacion Ferrocarril.  The railway reached Baza in 1894 when a line from Lorca arrived.  This was so popular that a second line, linking Baza and den of inquiry, the bishopric stealing city of Guadix, in 1907 - built by the British Great South of Spain Railway Company.  This event was so important it would lead to the station having a wiki page all to itself.  Eight tracks ran into Baza. The station has two platforms which kept going for 90 years. In 1985 the line was closed as it had become very unprofitable. The station building now stands before a big area which appears to be used for fairs and flea markets.   Clare said of it ‘A disused but fine example of an old rural town station in Spain complete with rurntable’  Tomas was mor...
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The accidental death of a bishopric

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  We are heading into Baza. In 2003 21,000 people lived here. It is a dead diocese.  I have a slight problem with the term ‘Reconquest.’ It sort of suggests that the Islamic Invasion of Spain was just that, an Invasion.  A couple of years later the plucky chaps from Asturias have nipped down, everyone is RC again and all the better for it. Even if you ignore the fact that these parts of the world had had a different religion for 700 years.  700 years ago Edward II was trying to patch up his relationship with his misses and the damn weather was the thing that people worried about killing large percentages of the population, not the Black Death. 700 years changes people.   I am of an age when I am getting memes saying how good the olde dayes were - playing out, games of conkers, much higher rates of violence death on the road and comedians wondering if they’ve been cancelled or just the taste of things has moved on. I suppose, with music, it is more instant a...
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The interestingly unalive

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You won’t mind if I wing this one a bit.  We end today at Baza and it has a rather splendid roundabout to prove it.  Beyond that we are hunkered up against a major road and, while some of it is weird and wonderful, towards the end there is some old stuff, so lets get old. I always get worried talking about stuff before the Romans because it seems to be the one area that changes really dramatically as new discoveries are made.  In my brief teaching Archaeology at lunchtimes we did old stuff and you realised that the books you could find were well out of date - even if they were only ten years old. The Iberians to quote wiki ‘ The Iberians (Latin: Hibērī, from Greek: Ἴβηρες, Iberes) were an ancient people indigenous to the eastern and southern coasts of the Iberian Peninsula ’  Even the term indigenous worries me. I mean, it conjures up ideas that sometime in the distant past they all suddenly woke up from a deep sleep rather than wandered in, then some wandered out, ...
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Sigh me a river

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  It is a bit of a day today. We are nipping under the motorway and mostly following the route down alongside the motorway.  We will hit, what appears to be, the old road - as seen in 2014 - and then head into 2025 and end near the Rio Baza. Baza definitely sounds like an 80s sit com character, possibly the decent side kick of the wheeler-dealer.  Rio Baza, meanwhile, has 68 reviews on Tripadvisor. When I say reviews, I mean not reviews.  85 reviews mention the word baza, but are riverless.  It hasn’t even got a wiki page. Oh well, let’s talk rivers.  The Ebro River is the largest, while the Tagus is the longest in Spain.  The Duero has the largest basin in Iberia - and some rather lovely wines - while you can actually navigate a decent way up the Gudalquivir. The Duero begins in Spain and ends in Portugal, with a length of 897 km, of which 572 km is in Spain. This river rises in the Picos de Urbión, in the province of Soria and its mouth is in the Atl...
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