El Torcal, Supposedly Unique to Europe

With a few hours to spare in between doing stuff and picking up the little girl from school we decided to go out to a local attraction as it was only 20 Km away. It is a limestone plateau that has these strange eroded strata on the top, this part of Spain is probably the most interesting for scenery as it is so mountainous. We drove up there and found the road pretty difficult to navigate, it took a lot longer than we thought, maybe an hour through narrow roads and villagers, we went through a small village called Conception, what a hideous catholic name for a village, anyway we drove all the way to the top, no walking required and there is a nice tourist centre and some well laid out walkways, we could only spend 45 minutes as we were running out of time, but we saw some Griffon Vultures using the thermals, they are pretty big birds, the government of Spain is looking at changing the law on disposing of dead farm animals as the lack of dead animals is impacting the population of Vultures so hopefully there will be more of these huge birds around in future.

Me walking about




Jenny taking the sun




The view over the cliffs




While walking round we saw a strange animal on a peak, with the binoculars you could see it was a wild goat called An Ibex. They have a huge set of curved horns and it was just laid down taking the sun, then after it while it stood up and was looking more statue than animal, very impressive as these are pretty timid creatures but this one looked confident as it was in the national park. The weather has turned warmer and this may be the start of the summer, all in all it was a nice trip out and one to take the relatives when they come over.

That crazy Ibex if you look hard in the middle, click on it and you will get the bigg picture