Tour de Andalucia I: Nerja & Lake Viñuela

As some of you might know Nina has come to visit us for a couple of days. Nina and I haven’t had the opportunity this summer to go away on vacation together so we thought that we’d drive around the countryside in Andalucia for a couple of days exploring the small villages.

We headed off today after school and drove off to drop off Jakob at a medium sized village near the beach called Heradura. Here Jakob was going diving. From here we headed off to Nerja which has one of the largest dripstone caves in the world. This was a breathtaking experience. The caves are inimaginably sized with gigantic stalactites and stalagmites contained in five caves as large as 30 m. high and more than 400 m2  each. Both the size of the caves and the dripstones made it hard to believe as “real stuff” and not just some fake tourist attraction made of plastic and expanded polystyrene. But they are very real indeed and have been so for many thousands of years. We were a bit amazed though, that they hadn’t placed reading boards on the making of dripstones and caves like these. We therefore hope that Ninas friend Mie, who is a talented geologist, might want to drop a comment on the makings of this amazing phenomenom… (Hint hint…)

From Nerja we headed off to an area near a big water resevoir in the vicinity of the village Viñuela. The resevoir lies some 20 km. north-east of Malaga and this small trip became somewhat of an adventure with the main theme “Searching-but-finding-nothing”. Our first goal was to find the lake, which proved a bigger challenge than expected. It wasn’t until we drove into one of the highest located villages that we actually found the lake (far away from where we expected it to be). Finding the lake became biggest achievement that day. Our second goal was to drive there because Nina had found some Bed&Breakfasts in some of the small villages. We hadn’t booked anything because we thought it easy to find them by signs on the road or other indications. But we were proved wrong. There might have been (and there might still be) Bed&Breakfast accomodation in the area, but they do not advertise with it. This drove us onto small mountain roads (some paved, and some definitely not…) in our search for ANY accommodation and into the small village of Períana. Here we asked for accommodation in the local supermarket. After having spoken to a friend of the cash-register-girl (in spanglish…) we found out that the nearest place to sleep would probably be to head down to the coast and find a hotel there. We decided to give up on the place-to-stay hunt for a while and in stead find a place to eat dinner. The nice cash-register-girl gave us directions to a restaurant not far away. And so, believing that we had actually run out of bad luck and misplacement, we comitted our final stupidity. We bought 3 muffins, a beer and 2 sodas and were off to find the restaurant. We drove as directed (or as interpreted, anyways…), but we didn’t find a restaurant. After a couple of kms though, we found a sign saying “Finca La Callejona - Restaurante Casero”. Our mood went up. We followed the signs down more narrow mountain roads only to discover that which once had been a restaurant was nowcompletely deserted. The place is best described as one of those pig-on-a-spid party places for charter tourists. Please look at the pictures in the picture section, to get a better view of this strange, but somewhat very beautifull place.

We were a bit tired after the long drive that day and decided to camp for the night on the terrace of this abandomed restaurant. And so we did, after having a magnificient feast consisting of three muffins and a bottle of beer…