{"id":27508,"date":"2017-05-31T11:26:21","date_gmt":"2017-05-31T10:26:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ourtour.co.uk\/home\/?p=27508"},"modified":"2019-04-11T16:48:36","modified_gmt":"2019-04-11T15:48:36","slug":"the-pueblo-blanco-of-casares","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ourtour.co.uk\/home\/the-pueblo-blanco-of-casares\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pueblo Blanco of Casares, Andalucia"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/em> of Casares.<\/p>\n

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A Griffin Vulture floating past Casares houses<\/p><\/div>\n

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\u00a0the centre of town (N36.44660, W5.27916<\/a>). 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.<\/p>\n

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The motorhome aire at Casares (the town’s off out of shot to the right)<\/p><\/div>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0smoking a cigarette with no hands. They each cast half a glance at a shattered light cluster and\u00a0crumpled metal, laughing it off. The old documentary Fire in the Blood\u00a0(free on YouTube<\/a>) hasn’t done much to shift me away from this wayward path of popping entire peoples into neat little boxes, fascinating though it was.<\/p>\n

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 \u20ac19 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.<\/p>\n

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Massive chunks of rock being delivered to the campsite.<\/p><\/div>\n