Tarifa to Ecija

Saturday 21st November.
Tarifa to Ecija
What we really want to do is get back on our bikes and experience a bit of Spain at a snail’s pace. So far this has been absolutely impossible as the coast is all terribly built up, and anyway the coastline and most of the country itself is crisscrossed with mountains. So we left Tarifa and the coast and headed toward Cadiz and Seville but soon turned inland for Cordoba. The countryside is vast- wind farms the size of English counties stretch over the horizon (Spain produces 34% of its electrical requirement from renewable energy!) We saw many eagles and storks circling, hundreds of partridge and behind the tractors you see rows of egrets, instead of seagulls. The day got hotter and hotter and we stopped in Medina Sedonia for a coffee and a plate of rustic hamon – delicious. The bar was full of stuffed partridges and cages with parakeets and skylarks. The parakeets were allowed out so we felt rather sorry for the poor little skylarks and on seeing so many later flying above the fields had to wonder what those ones had done to deserve being kept in a cage and in a ‘smoking is permitted’ bar. Eventually all that golf caught up with me and we pulled into Moron to find somewhere to stay but it had an industrial feel to it and a lack of accommodation so we came on to Ecija where from a distance we counted eight churches. Ecija has a very different feel. The Romans came here in 200BC (only they called it Astigi) and the remains of their work can be seen in an exposed part of the Plaza about 20ft lower than the current level of the town.