Month: March 2019

It’s Wednesday, my last day in Spain, and it’s raining. The first day of bad weather I’ve had the whole trip. 

I checked out of my Seville room this morning and ate the hotel breakfast while I waited for my taxi to the train station. The El Rey Moro hotel has been excellent: it’s in a convenient (if you don’t have a car) and amazing old town location, provided a great breakfast, and the staff have been very helpful and speak excellent English. I highly recommend it to others visiting Seville.

My taxi driver came to the lobby after parking on the nearest drivable street, which is a two-minute walk from the hotel. We walked back to the cab in the rain. The drive to the station took about 10 minutes. The station isn’t too big, so it was easy to check the reader board and find the right platform. I joined the others walking toward our high-speed train destined for Madrid. We put our baggage through an x-ray machine on the platform, had our tickets checked, then walked on board.

My train car wasn’t full, and my seat was by itself on the right side of the train. There were also a pair of seats on the other side of the aisle. After the train got started at 9:45, we were served breakfast. My second breakfast. An omelet in tomato sauce, a croissant, a yogurt drink, and choice of other beverages. Notice all the silverware I was provided – 6 pieces!

I didn’t take any pictures through the train windows because they were rain splattered and it’s really hard to get the scene you want when the train moves so fast. But we traveled through orange and olive groves, as well as fields of green “grass” that might have been wheat. We made short stops in Cordoba and a couple of smaller cities before arriving in Madrid at 12:20. It was a speedy, smooth and enjoyable trip.

Before I left the Madrid Atocha train station, I wanted to find the garden that was planted in the older part of the station. There weren’t any signs I could find, so I had to ask directions from one of the station security guards. I finally found it.

In the train station, there was a Metro subway station too, so I pulled out my Madrid subway card and navigated via three different subway lines to reach my hotel near the airport. It’s the same hotel I stayed in before the birding trip began, so I knew how to get there. But I have a different and slightly bigger room this time. It wasn’t raining when I walked from the subway station to the hotel, but I was lucky because it started raining and thundering just a few minutes after I reached the room. 

Tomorrow morning, I’ll take a taxi to the airport for my flight to Atlanta and then on to Seattle. It’s been a wonderful vacation and I really hope to be able to visit Spain again. But I’m very glad to be heading home now.

 

Today was my day to tour the Alcazar, Seville’s palace with a history of more than a thousand years. The day dawned cloudy with a morning temperature in the 50s. After breakfast in the hotel, I went to the meeting point at 9:15 a.m. for the tour I had reserved yesterday. Surprisingly, I was the only person signed up for that time with this particular tour company, so I had the guide to myself. Maria spoke excellent English, learned in Bristol, England and from cousins who live in California. With her as a guide, we skipped the long line of tourists waiting to buy tickets and went in shortly after the Alcazar opened at 9:30.

The history of the place is amazing and much too long and complex to talk about in my blog. But it involved the Romans, Vizgoths, Vikings, Moors, Jews, and then the Christian kings of Castile. It was the place where Christopher Columbus received the Spanish king and queen’s permission to explore. And it received much of the riches found in the Americas. Today it remains a second residence for the current Spanish royal family. The tour took 1.5 hours, with Maria expaining lots of history as we walked through the enormous labyrinth of a palace. There is a very large garden attached too, complete with peacocks. At the end of the tour, Maria left me there, after explaining how to find my way out when I was done exploring.

After nearly 3 hours at the Alcazar, I found my way out of the labyrinth of rooms and gardens and walked back to the hotel for a short break and a little souvenir shopping nearby. Then I walked to the river in a light shower – the first rain I’ve experienced in Spain. At the river, I paid for a short cruise and immediately got on the boat. It was still raining lightly, so it was nice to be inside the boat. It cruised up and down the Guadalquivir, which is more of a canal, for an hour with short automated narration in several different languages. The cruise and scenery weren’t that great, but it was a nice break in a dry spot.

After the cruise, I picked up a savory pastry in a small “take away” shop near my hotel and had that for lunch. It was pizza flavored, so was a little like a calzone.

Tonight after dinner, I’ll pack my bags once again, getting ready to leave Seville in the morning.

My 8:30 breakfast was in the hotel this morning, in a small area off the lobby where they have a few tables and a continental buffet. I was the only guest there, perhaps because most Spanish tourists stay out late drinking and don’t want to get up early. Or perhaps there are only a few guests in this small hotel.

It was overcast to begin the day, but later changed to partly cloudy.

I joined a free walking tour of Seville that gathers people from area hotels by 10:30 a.m. and then segregates this large group by language into smaller groups. My English-speaking group was about 20 in number, led by Ruben, a native Sevillano with passable English and a man bun. (He probably would have benefited from some time in Vaughan Town.) We followed Ruben and his purple umbrella around for the next 2.5 hours and he told many interesting stories about the history of the city. We ended up at the Plaza de Espana, built for the 1929 Ibero-American Exposition, and the location where some scenes of Lawrence of Arabia and the second episode of Star Wars movies were shot.

After the tour ended, I bought a sandwich for lunch at a restaurant we had passed and returned to the hotel for a siesta. Here is another photo of a typical street near my hotel in the Santa Cruz area of Seville.

My dinner was simple fare bought from a little grocery store nearby: a small, fresh baguette, some cheese, and an apple. Sadly, no wine. But I learned of a sweet wine made in Spain from oranges, vino de naranja, that I want to try and find tomorrow.

 

Saturday was a long, final day of birding in the Donana wetlands. At dinner afterwards, we tallied up the species seen and counted more than 140 kinds for the trip. We celebrated the great birding and our nice trip companions, plus Pau being an excellent guide. The restaurant provided flamingo-shaped desserts at the end of the meal.

This morning we left El Rocio at 9:00 after breakfast and drove the hour to Seville in the sunshine. I was the first one that Pau dropped off because of the location of my hotel on the close side of town. Ann and Mike were taken to the train station, Linsay and Dean to the airport to return to Scotland, and Malcolm was accompanying Pau back to the Valencia area where they both live.

Pau couldn’t drive all the way to my hotel, which is in the old part of Seville along very narrow streets. But I was dropped off within a 5-minute walk of my hotel about 10:15 a.m. Here’s the street my hotel is located on.

 I dropped off my bag and checked in to El Rey Moro Hotel, but of course my room wasn’t ready so early. So I set out to explore the area. I quickly found Sevilla Cathedral and La Giralda, the Moorish tower adjacent to the cathedral. 

 

I walked around quite a bit, exploring the old city. I stopped for tea along the Guadalquivir River that runs through the city. And I sat in a small park for a while, watching people. I wasn’t really hungry, since I had eaten a lot for breakfast, so I just bought an apple and water at a little store nearby. About 2 p.m. I returned to the hotel and my bag had been placed in my room already. 

At 5:30, my tapas and flamenco tour from Devour Seville started in a nearby square. The guide was Sofie, an English and Spanish speaking French woman who was really knowledgeable about tapas and flamenco. 10 people were on the tour: two couples from Atlanta, an American woman who lives in Paris, two men living in Minnesota, and two women from India, plus me. Sofie took us to three tapas bars, where we sampled sweet vermouth, various ham, cheese, shrimp and veggie tapas, two different sherries, and wines. Plus, from 7 to 8 we watched some flamenco – guitar, singing and dancing in a small venue. Sofie did a great job of explaining everything beforehand. The tour ended about 10:30 p.m. and I walked back about 10 minutes to my hotel.

 

Yesterday, we left Trujillo in the morning and drove south to the Andalucia region of Spain, to the small and unique town of El Rocio. It was another sunny day and we birded at a few stops along the way. El Rocio is located on the edge of Donana (spelled and pronounced with a tilde over the first n) wetlands, a national park. We arrived around 5 p.m. which is peak tapas time and happy hour. It was also Andalucia Day, a holiday for the region that commemorates the start of the provincial autonomy. So there were lots of people in town, probably many who came for a day trip from Seville.

One thing that makes El Rocio unique is that the streets in the town center are just sand, not paved. That’s because lots of the locals ride their horses into town at tapas time to socialize on horseback. They also have horse-drawn carriages that families take rides in, drinks in hand, talking to other people they know who are also in carriages or on horseback. So the downtown is a crazy mix of horses, carriages, and cars. And bars all over the place with places to tie up your horses while you go inside, or high bars where you’re served drinks while you are still on horseback.

Dinner was at 8 p.m. before the hotel restaurant got busy with Spaniards. A macaroni starter, tuna steak with vegetables, a cherry mousse for dessert and of course…what?…WINE! The bars were still busy and loud after dinner, but with ear plugs I brought along, I had no trouble getting to sleep. I think the bars were quiet by 3 a.m. or so.

This morning was foggy to start, but cleared up and was sunny by noon. After our buffet continental breakfast at the hotel restaurant, we drove to more wetlands and the coast near the city of Huelva. And we saw lots of birds. Pau is an excellent guide who knows just where to go to find lots of birds, new species each day. Today we saw many shorebirds near the Atlantic and in the wetlands.

The other unique thing about El Rocio is the pilgrimage/commemoration that takes place here every May. A commemoration of the miracle of seeing the Virgin Mary in a drop of water, which happened here at some time in the past. Evidently, thousands of people come here at that time each year. Two of the Spaniards in Vaughan Town last week told me about it. I haven’t researched it myself, so take that story with a grain of salt.