The Pueblo Blanco of Casares, Andalucia

Zagan the motorhome’s in the shadow of vultures! We’re under a cloud of ’em, maybe 40 Griffin Vultures, huge, graceful things, soaring in circles over the beautiful Andalusian countryside. After almost a week lounging in the Cabopino campsite, we’ve hauled ourselves an hour up into the hills to the pueblo blanco of Casares.

A Griffin Vulture floating past Casares houses

Andalusia must be about 98% slope, and Casares is doing its bit to keep this figure high, built on a series of steep hillsides. The town’s kindly (and incredibly) provided a free motorhome aire, alongside a tourist information office a healthy down-up scrabble from the centre of town (N36.44660, W5.27916). When Ju went in to say hello and ask some questions in her best Spanish, the lady inside was pleased to help, smiling and saying yes, of course we were OK to stay, here’s the WiFi code, here’s the water, here’s the loo emptying point. Just marvellous.

The motorhome aire at Casares (the town’s off out of shot to the right)

Cabopino’s lively bar delivered cold lager and Naples-quality pizza direct to the table, and for not much money. After Richard and Jenny had set off for Cordoba, I discovered Richard’s brother-in-law, who we’d met briefly, was a professional footballer, playing over 100 games for Derby County, Marco Gabbiadini. I know as much about football as I know about flamenco, so it was handy we only found out about this fame afterwards, thus avoiding the acute embarrassment of me trying to engage an expert with my sub-chimp-level knowledge. We weren’t alone for long. Robert, a one-time submariner, long distance lorry driver and ocean-going yachtsman, and his wife Shirley, joined us for an evening of beers and a fascinating discourse about life under and on the waves. Descriptions of practising escape from a sunken sub were especially captivating.

The campsite crammed itself full of Spaniards for the weekend, tents and families obscured the earth and gave noisy, colourful life to the place. It remains hard for me not to look at a foreign populace and match them up with pre-conceived stereotypes, and this weekend offered opportunities for my many sweeping generalisations. Twice fellas reversed their cars into trees, despite the fact they’d spotters shouting and waving arms frantically at them, suggesting perhaps they aught to change tact. My head immediately matched up Spaniard men to (cue some mismatched metaphors) bull fighters, driving cars like they were riding unbroken stallions, macho in tight tops and smoking a cigarette with no hands. They each cast half a glance at a shattered light cluster and crumpled metal, laughing it off. The old documentary Fire in the Blood (free on YouTube) hasn’t done much to shift me away from this wayward path of popping entire peoples into neat little boxes, fascinating though it was.

I’d like to suggest it was an endless thirst for knowledge, an insatiable desire to peer around the next corner, which shifted us from our cool place in the sun. But in all truthfulness it was most likely the €19 a night we were stumping up to be there, coupled with the fact a JCB had appeared the last two days and was busily, noisily and deftly, building a retaining wall from half-tonne blocks of stone dropped off by lorries in events measurable on the Richter Scale. It was time to up-sticks.

Massive chunks of rock being delivered to the campsite.

Along the A7 we rode, eyes wide and rapidly trying to re-adjust to the fast-moving Spanish road network. As a freebie dual carriageway the road did a great job of shifting us, and half a million other folks quickly along the coast, with the added adrenaline boost of 10cm long slip roads and a universal blind eye to the 80kph speed limit. I was relieved when we turned north onto a slow, twisting mountain road, up through an enormous, plush-looking golf course, and into the hills.

The arrival at Casares was magnificent. The road brought us along the top of the village, catching brief views west through a V-shaped valley clustered with white houses topped off with terracotta. It was a heart-lifting sight – the kind of sight I really wanted to find up here, and here it was, right on cue. The road then seemed to go on for another 15 minutes as we rounded a gorge and climbed back up to the town’s aire, alongside another viewpoint circled with the neck-bending silhouettes of vultures.

Magnificent Casares

Casares from the viewpoint near the motorhome aire

After walking Charlie yesterday we let the sun cool its heels behind a mountain, then set off down the shortcut dirt path into the village. A few guard dogs feigned savage attacks from behind rough fences, which we peered over to see shirtless men hacking with mattocks at the Earth. The houses down in the valley seemed true to the old nature of this bit of the globe – poor, flaking paint and tiny rooms, the hands calloused and the work close to the dirt. Everyone had a hola for us, and everyone seemed to know everyone.

You need some serious ramps to work on your motor around here

Following a successful raid on a cash machine, we settled ourselves into seats in the main square, outside a tapas bar recommended by the lady at the tourist office. Ordering food in Spain’s a challenge for us, as we can never quite tell what it is. The bar had three menus up on the walls, only one of which, we slowly gathered, was in use (meaning Ju gathered, while I floundered). No, only part of that one was in use, the one inside shows what’s actually available, so in we trotted and in our newfound toddler Spanish we ordered a few tapas. The lady running the place could have been our granny, a smiling kind soul who only squinted a little at our bad pronunciation of morcilla albondigas – black sausage in the style of meatballs.

We keep forgetting to photo the food, and only remember when we’ve half eaten it, so here’s a photo of the menu instead…

Outside we watched. Peering upwards at the shadow of a huge raptor, the grandfather half of the tapas bar couple laughed and made out, with his hands as claws, that he was being carried off. A minuscule-engined micro-van wheezed its way past us, again having me pointing and catching granddad’s eye. What he couldn’t have seen was the inner sensation of warmth we were feeling. The bar was in a tiny circular ‘square’, half full of an ever-changing selection of people, one family in a sense. Cars would creep in and out, one stopped for a lengthy chat, holding up two others who sat and waited. Back in the campsite an English ‘gent’ came to mind. Having waited for a few seconds for a Dutch fella to position his caravan off the road, he’d opted to shout ‘get a move on, you w**ker’ from his window, before noticing, still in a huff, he could just drive around through the trees. The contrast on the patience scale was startling.

Fancy a penthouse in Casares?

Night falls so we’d better head back – anyone got a torch?

€20 of Mahou lager, a small horde of tapas, a racione and tinto de verano later, and we ambled off up and around the village. In fading light we saw the thick walls of the ruined Moorish castle, peered through locked gates to the manicured graveyard (where folks are interred stacked above one another, like in Venice), and cast sidelong glances into open doorways. The rooms here are TINY. They make our Cooler seem like an ostentatious expanse of open-living space. A few of the houses on the upper level are ruined, all walls and no roof, but on the whole the village looks like it has a solid, enduring core to it. Many holas later, we found the path back here and stumbled up and into bed.

Ju’s morning run is interrupted by a white horse blocking the path!

But it was worth facing down the horse for the view

Today we stay. Si, si, more tapas calls!

Cheers, Jay