Our itinerary, and that of Polo Polo on his Viaje a España.

At Giseno, Lago di Como.

Birdies that ain’t.

The pros of walking to Barcelona Airport.

But here are a couple of photos from the day after the great storm

Ah, he was a party man! David says that Africa stops in Murcia. It’s all relative, I guess.

When the original cathedral was consecrated in 1058, it was dedicated to the Holy Cross and to St Eulalia, who on February 12 303 was put in a barrel lined with knives or glass, rolled down the hill out of Roman Barcelona, and unbreasted, crucified and decapitated near one of my favourite bars, whereupon a [...]

“Spanish climatological records reveal that in the Cold Triangle [ie Teruel, Molina de Aragón and Calamocha] there have been numerous episodes … with temperatures below -25ºC at less than 200km from the mild Mediterranean as the crow flies. [This is one demonstration of the fact] that Spain has climates, not a climate.” (Aupí, Guía del [...]

On Thursday February 29 1912, the 300-tonne Restless Rock of Tandil, Buenos Aires plunged from its extraordinary state of hillside equilibrium to a granite trinity below. The residents rebuilt it last year, and it now pulls almost as many tourists as Swanmore Pond. Unfortunately, Cairo’s cliff-edgers built on sand.

Re the War of Jackson’s Sneer, Colin Davies notes the presence of trolls in Spain but suggests they have still not discovered the woods and grottoes of the Royal Academy. Not so: it’s just that the RAE, for reasons that are logical but probably doomed, calls them trol.
If their behaviour is anything like that [...]

Recalling this, oranges weighing a kilo in Salamanca and 4-metre sunflowers in the mutant garden of Riba-Roja.

Dido and Hengist are remembered as early heroes of isoperimetry for having solved the challenge of maximising the area of a land grant made to them by stringing together strips of oxhide and using the resulting closed superthong to trace, respectively, a semi-circle at Carthage and a full circle at Kaercorrei.
What was news to [...]

This has been on the back burner for a while, but, following the fine example of Untergunther, it is hoped that work will soon be resumed on recladding all those farmhouses whose profitable stripped-stone effect is unauthentic and causes them to fall down sooner. Sheep-dyeing (thanks MM) is not done, although if they have just [...]

James Howell, Epistolae Ho-Elianae: Familiar Letters, Domestic and Forren (1688, on GBS):
There is a Tradition, that there were divers Mines of Gold in Ages pass’d amongst those Mountains; and the Shepherds kept Goats then, having made a small Fire of Rosemary-Shrubs with other combustible stuff, to warm themselves, this Fire grew along, and grew so [...]

From the baldie:

Some unusual Neolithic rock paintings. Apparently the locals used to take tourists to visit them and, to improve their colour and line, throw buckets of water over them. Once almost everything had been washed away, the authorities acted with characteristic firmness, building a 4m wall-with-spikes around the complex. The locals now explain to [...]

Pascual Boronat y Barrachina, Los moriscos españoles y su expulsión (1901): “su admirable sistema de irrigación por medio de acequias y canales.” There are few sights and sounds more satisfying than this system of horizontal soaks and vertical sluices in action.

Giant Haystacks would be more accurate but disrespectful to the memory of the great wrestler. This ain’t Barcelona, so no lonely farmers bumping themselves off at the sight of Heidi’s mountains.

On cultivating our garden.

Brief report on carnival, goat à l’africaine, and a night out with the Belarussian putimafia.

I caught the first train out of town this morning to go and inspect what a certain farmer has in the fields round the the back (large sections of horse skeleton) before the man rose from his slumbers. Sitting across the carriage from me was an attractive woman, and at the next stop a drunk [...]