The Muddy Banks of the Manzanares
On Madrid’s south-eastern periphery is a bleak, dusty landscape of decaying building sites and vast quarries: the scars of Spain’s construction-boom mania of digging up, concreting over and building on anything that didn’t move. It’s hard to imagine that hidden in this environmental wasteland is the Parque Regional del Sureste, an ecological oasis where the confluence of the Manzanares and Jarama rivers forms one of the country’s most important wetlands.
Mely and I visited the area last Sunday on the recommendation of one of Mely’s Amnesty colleagues. I must say, the approach to the park was far from promising. The signs from the metro station in Madrid overspill town of Rivas Vaciamadrid led us across the exit lanes of a busy motorway junction to a dirt car park strewn with litter and the detritus of recent late-night parking lot orgies (I won’t go into details). We would have had serious doubts that we had come to the right place, were it not for some cheerful fellows from the Spanish Ornithological Society, who assured us that we were indeed at the entrance to the park, handed us an illustrated list of flora and fauna that could be found in the area, and gave us directions to some birdwatching hides where we could observe the aforementioned wildlife.
List in hand, we promptly forgot the directions and set about getting lost, with the vague idea of crossing the Manzanares and trying to find a way up the exciting-looking escarpments on the other side.
The park is a mixed-use area, where agriculture, industry and urban development are in theory strictly regulated (although according to the environmental organisation Asociacion Ecologica del Jarama these regulations aren’t so strictly enforced), and as we walked among marshlands and birch woods, reminders of human activity were ever present.
Sections of the path we were following were composed of crumbling bricks, roofing materials and broken kitchen tiles, the rubble of old farmhouses torn down, perhaps, to make way for the quarries and urban sprawl. In a pond we encountered the rusting roof of a car who’s driver took a wrong turn many years ago.
Further on, there was a semi-submerged concrete structure poking out of the water like the head of a giant swamp monster. It looked like some sort of military bunker, possibly a civil war relic left over from the Battle of Jarama.
We even found the wooden hides the birders told us about, nestled among the reeds, but alas, no signs to show us where we were going, and after a while we realised that the path we’d chosen to follow was taking us along a spit of land surrounded on all sides by wetlands and branches of the river.
With no way across the water, we decided it was time for lunch, and settled down on the shores of a pond to eat our sandwiches. We sat in the warmth of the gentle winter sun and half dozing, listened to the sounds of the swamp. In the bushes beside us, an inquisitive robin chirped as it hopped closer to investigate the two picnickers who had invaded his patch. On the pond, squabbling coots defended their territories with much splashing and running across the water. Every now and then cormorants flew in with ungainly crash landings. Cute little chestnut-headed ducks, porron europeo according to our list, bobbed around timidly and cutely next to the shore, out the way of all the splashing and crashing. Nesting storks clacka-clacka-clackad in the treetops, and not far from our feet a pond turtle swam by with a gurgling noise that, I’m pretty sure, was a little turtle fart.
The Vulture and The Goat
Actually, there are two goats. Can you see the second?
Last Sunday, Mely and I spent a happy day hiking up in La Pedriza, a short bus drive north of Madrid in the Sierra de Guadarama. La Pedriza gets its name from the word piedra, or rock, and ‘rocky place’ is a good no-nonsense description of this vast outcrop of wonderfully eroded granite.
We were looking for a good picnic spot amongst a jumble of rounded, pinkish coloured rocks which looked sort of like enormous petrified marshmallows. I was insisting that we would have a better view from Over There, which was a good 5 minutes hike away, and Mely was firm of the opinion that Right Here was was plenty scenic, when a pair of mountain goats ran across our path and made us forget all about our picnic dilemma for a few moments. We held our breath and watched. The goats trotted up the rock and just as the lead goat was silhouetted against the sky at the top of the ridge, a passing vulture answered my photographer’s prayers and soared into frame. Then the moment passed, the vulture glided off, the goats disappeared down the far side of the rock and we set about eating those sandwiches.
White Horse, Dark Forest
On the Camino Schmidt near Navacerrada, Sierra de Guadarrama, Madrid. The horse crossed the path in front of us, stopped momentarily in a patch of sunlight to munch on some tasty foliage, and disappeared back into the shadows of the forest.
Starting Again (or Back on the Blog)
Doves at Dusk, Jardines de Sabatini, Madrid
It’s a new year (more or less). New decade too. Time to get back on the blog…
