Vagabond: A Hiker's Homage to Rural Spain
- Mark Eveleigh
- May 2
- 5 min read
Updated: Aug 11
It took me ten days from the point where I crossed the Andalucia frontier – over the Arroyo de la Víbora (Ravine of the Viper) – to complete the 350km trek across the shimmering plains of Extremadura.
Now, in two hours more, I’d cross the border into Castilla y León, a province so gigantic that all of Portugal would fit into it with room to spare for the country of Andorra.
Extract:
‘…All that was lacking was a place to shower and somewhere to do my laundry. I hoped that Las Cañadas campsite which, according to my map, lay about an hour farther up the road would satisfy both those requirements. As luck would have it two cyclists, a husband and wife I figured, were pushing their bikes out of the campsite gate just as I approached. I tried to find out if there were washing machines in the camp. My attempts, first in Spanish and then in English, met with incomprehension. Realizing that they were French I racked my memory in an effort to dredge up le mot juste and then spoke up confidently in my best Parisian accent.
The man and the woman looked at each other, thoroughly mystified. With barely a look at me they cycled quickly away.
‘Strange behaviour,’ I muttered to myself. ‘Must be on a very tight schedule.’
It was only later that it dawned on me that I’d confused the French word singe for linge:
‘Excuse me,’ I’d asked them, ‘could you please tell me where I can wash my monkey?’
An hour later I found a bathing spot on the Rio Baños. It was a vast improvement on any campsite shower-block. Baños means ‘baths’ in Spanish and I’d read that in the neighbouring village of Baños de Montemayor there was a thermal spring that had been in use almost constantly for two millennia.
I left my pack propped against the ancient stonework of the elegantly arched Roman bridge and stumbled down the overgrown bank, trying to avoid the nettle leaves that sagged in the heat like the ears of labradors. I wondered how many generations of people had stumbled, cursing, among the brambles and stinging nettles under that bridge over the centuries.
Once you get past the pain there’s something nostalgic about the sting of nettles. I wonder though why the ‘dock leaves’ that were so common when I was a kid appear to be almost extinct these days. Instead I rubbed my red-mottled wrists with damp riverside grass and consoled myself with the thought that nettles are associated more with northern climes. I’d rarely seen them during my walk through the south.
It was one of the pleasures of a slow trek – something that could only really be appreciated at a pace of around 5 kilometres per hour – that I was ever on the alert for little changes in the landscape that testified to a change in latitude. The previous day, for example, I’d started to notice that bulky two-storey barn-like homes (reminding me of communities in the foothills of the Pyrenees) had begun to replace the white-washed single-storey cortijo homesteads of the south. The sparse cork woodlands were now ceding way to denser forests of soaring chestnut trees. That morning too I’d seen my first Basque-style haystack, with the hay forked up high against the tall spindle that formed the peak of the stack.
I stopped for coffee in Baños de Montemayor and, at a table in the plaza, got chatting to a young man called Juan. He offered me a toke on the reefer he was smoking. I refused the offer, joking that I was going to need all the breath I could muster for the climb ahead.
‘It’s one thing walking for enjoyment,’ Juan pointed out, ‘another when you don’t have a choice.’
Apparently, he walked down here every day from his home in La Garganta – a 15-kilometre round-trip. From the way he puffed contentedly down to the roach he certainly didn’t appear to suffer from a shortage of breath. He was evasive, however, when I asked why he made the journey so regularly: ‘Para trabajar uno tiene que manchar las manos’ – To work you have to get your hands dirty.
‘People are very narrow-minded here.’ He drew a horizontal line with his finger across his forehead. ‘Some of them can see through keyholes with both eyes at the same time.’
Juan started rolling another fat one, not going to any pains to keep his vices clandestine. While the cultivation and private use of cannabis had been decriminalized in Spain it was still illegal to sell it or to consume it in public.
I had a long line to walk though and was happy to limit my vices to caffeine.
Juan invited me to join him on the walk back up to his village. I was tempted by his description of an ancient corral de lobos (literally a ‘wolf corral’) on the mountainside near his village. Apparently it consisted of a sunken trap dug into the earth, in the form of a sort of amphitheatre. It was about 15 metres across and 3 metres deep, and overhanging stone slabs formed a lip around the circumference. The trap would have been baited with a live lamb. A traumatic experience for the lamb but apparently rarely fatal: Juan explained that the intelligent wolf would instantly become aware that it was trapped and would devote all its energy to trying to escape. After the farmers had arrived to kill the hapless canine, the lamb would frequently emerge unscathed.
I was morbidly fascinated by these structures and wished I could find the energy to make the 15-kilometre detour.
On my way out of town I passed the ancient thermal baths and a signpost outlining Baños de Montemayor’s history. I was astounded to realize that this little town had been the birthplace of the father of a saint. Gaspar Flores (born here in 1525) had died far from home in Peru having first sired the daughter who became Santa Rosa of Lima. Santa Rosa was the patron saint of gardeners, florists and embroiderers. Also – and this is perhaps thanks to old Gaspar – of ‘people who suffer from family problems’.
Apparently when the old man forbade his daughter from becoming a nun she
retaliated: ‘If Christians are obliged to preach love everywhere,’ she pointed out to her conquistador father, ‘why did they come to America with wars, destruction and hatred?’
It was, after all, a fair question.
