Spain & Portugal TRAVEL
It had been a very strange and wet first few weeks in Spain during March 2022, but here we were, in late April, in the sunshine, frolicking about in the magnificent mountains of the Sierra de Grazalema. Frolicking being a relative term, of course.
However, we were having to ponder the unthinkable. That of going home. For all the usual predictable reasons, really: hippy hair, long grass in Lancashire, that 90-day thing, tea bags nearly gone, and the lack of mushy peas in Spain.
The ferry back to Plymouth left Santander in just under three weeks, or just over a fortnight, as my good lady calculated it. We’d been discussing our retreat, and decided that the journey north should include a diversion into Portugal as we hadn’t been there for many years. The last time we were there the roads were awful, there were no proper shops and the average citizen drove a donkey.
However, there was one last place in Spain that I’ve been lusting after for years, and, for the first time, we were in the right place, at the right time. That place is Rio Tinto, a small town lost in the hills about 80 miles northwest of Sevilla. Its claim to fame is that it was the birthplace of the British mining giant, Rio Tinto-Zinc, and is rumoured to be a mightily interesting place for curious travellers.
It tookimagination for what’s to follow.
