Wild camping gets even better

It’s a great time of year to be here. This was always the plan but still, it’s good to have got it right. Now the sky is blue from dawn till dusk and the temperature is in the low 20Cs. The evenings are cool and so shorts are put to one side and the jeans and fleece are back on but shorts are on straightaway in the morning. I’m sure that as we leave these mountains and go to the coast it will be warmer but also our first port of call is the southern most point of Spain at Tarifa where the wind is famously always strong.

First though we want more of the Andalucian mountains and we decide to drive slowly towards Tarifa by way of Ronda and some more villages. We arrive in Ronda mid Sunday morning, now two weeks since we left home. It’s fairly busy with various languages heard, including English which hasn’t been heard much at all.

We park at the side of the old town, roadside, again feeling far safer about leaving the Defender than I ever would in the UK. Ronda has a brutal past and some of that involves the bridge linking old and new Ronda that spans a narrow deep gorge. It was a bitter end for those prisoners who walked in front of townsfolk only to then be marched to the fearsome drop and thrown over.

We can’t imagine this as we pose for selfies and try to capture all the angles ‘on film’. Good job I have more than a roll of Kodak now.

As we walk back towards the New Town, there’s the sound of a brass band that is getting louder and that’s not just because we are walking towards it. 

Just when we thought that we’d seen enough tradition yesterday, with the roped bull in Grazalema, we now find ourselves being enveloped by a religious procession, Procesión Virgin de la Paz. This is the Patron Saint of Ronda, “Our Lady of Peace” and it takes place yearly on the second Sunday in May.

So that’s today. Not yesterday or in few weeks when we have gone home. It’s today!

Two ‘images’ of The Virgin are carried around, one by people who’s feet were the only signs of human motive force and the other, presumably a very heavy one, by a large group of men, who were clearly shouldering an enormous physical weight.

Several bands, young children dressed as if for their First Communion, lots of dignitaries and others joined the cross bearer, acolytes and other altar boys and girls.

The procession moved through the streets for several hours, although we just watched it in one place for 30 minutes. It’s a centuries-old tradition.

We left town having completed an unplanned but specific Sunday morning shop. First we Google Map Searched for a Panaderia where we bought a 1Kg loaf and the Head of Unexpected Purchases carefully selected a lovely sugary piece of flan. Then we stumbled across a fruit and veg shop where we bought at least a dozen different items and some UHT milk in a Tetra Pak carton that I know so well.

We escaped the town and ate picnic lunch high in the hills at the side of a country road and then headed for a campsite in a deep valley. Camping San Juan is accessed behind a restaurant of the same name that was full to bursting in an open plan outdoor charcoal grill bamboo roof sort of way. The steep approach is also very narrow but scratches on the Landy are kudos and we drove up, only to be stopped by a teenager on a motorbike who said the “camping is closed”. Undeterred we ignored him and drove in and around the terraces, making full use of low ratio. It was heaven - but clearly closed, even though the gate had been open at the bottom.

At the restaurant the full might of Google Translate was used but the poor guy was so busy he grabbed a punter to decode and he grabbed a campsite owner family member, another English speaking teenager, who told us exactly what the first one had said!

So we left!

We drove up the valley side and then down a gravel road to a river crossing downstream. This is an overnight stop on the Park4night app and it is a great place. The river water was warm but quite fast, tested by a quick paddle.

As we prepared to spend the night here a car arrived with a couple and their two dogs. The dogs freely roamed and the couple setup on one of the picnic tables. Then a truck drove down the bumpy track and more dreadlocks and dogs and kids arrived and others arrived too, seeming to have walked-in. One woman lay down and started to practice twirling a hoola-hoop with her feet in the air. Maybe they all lived together in one of the two lovely villas nearby. It was a dreadlocks gathering of various nationalities but perhaps naturalised Spanish! They were in our space or maybe we were in theirs and whilst I have nothing against dreadlocks, kids roaming freely, dogs roaming freely, hoola-hoops, the mix of all this together sort of killed the ambience.

So we left and a Good Thing Happened. We drove up the other side, another bumpy gravel road but there was a turning along a track marked as a path and we decided to explore.

There was no way of knowing what would happen to the track but after getting narrower it skirted the side of the hill, high above the river and then there was a glade and we parked here, out of sight.

We could peer over the edge and down to the villas near the riverside stop but no one could see us.

We had beer and ice water in the fridge, we had bought half of the contents of the fruit and veg shop, a Kg loaf of bread, nice jamón and milk and muesli for breakfast.

We stayed here for two nights.