Mountain Roads

We awoke late after a hot humid night, breakfasted and headed off. It was again hot and the walk up the hill to the car got the sweat glands going again.

Pretty drive through very mountainous country, we seemed to be going either up or down and the roads were pretty bad. Not just small and narrow, but badly maintained and lumpy. Surely we are not going up there we thought more than once, more than once we were wrong. Gaucin was pretty.....we saw a bit of it because Madge, our GPS, seemed to get very confused in the villages and wanted to take us up and down every narrow laneway. That of course meant we were taking a while more than expected.

Through more really pretty, hilly, oak forest country, again with an appalling road. Almost ran over a couple of baby proto jamones that had got under the fence. The road went through a state park and eventually led us to the town of Ubrique and a morning tea.

We were now through the mountains and in rolling hill, grazing country. The road was now excellent and we sped along to Arcos de la Frontera. Lots of 'de la Frontera' towns around here.....the frontier between the Catholics and the Muslims kept shifting during the Reconquista. Madge again got confused by the city streets.......Arcos is much bigger than our last three places.

We were advised to stay out of the old town and park in a public car park. We did and the walk up had Marjan looking very related to a certain reddish root vegetable. Our hotel, and room were lovely, with a beautiful balcony looking over the agricultural valley below.

Nice lunch, Marjan tried cuttle fish for the first time, and closing her eyes, even managed a couple of tentacles. After a short walk around we decided on a nap....it was 37C, and stifling in the narrow streets, with no breeze.

Arcos is arcos because every second street has arches across the street. Not sure why, it just is....maybe to stop the buildings leaning in even more. Walked around a bit, whilst Marjan read under the air-conditioner.

We decided on a picnic dinner. That proved to be a real treat as the sun set and our balcony was cool with a great show of swifts, and doves and ravens. We are guessing on the birds, but they did put on a show for us.