A short walk for an autumn day

Looking down into the valley of Narila and Cádiar from the terrace of ´El Paraje´, it is a joy to still see the lines of poplar trees with their bright yellow autumn leaves. Before the leaves will all have fallen, we decided to do a walk which would give us a nice ´poplar experience´. This meant we set off from the western limit of Juviles, near the Cerro Macilla. We followed a small path to a poplar grove from where we picked up a path along an irrigation channel, the Acequia de Cástaras. From the large water reservoir Alberca del Cerro, the path down to Nieles is steep and turned out to be quite overgrown, but nevertheless it is well worth the effort. This path was waymarked, but the yellow and white paint marks have faded over the time. From Nieles we followed the Ruta Medieval to Cástaras. The view down into the valley with the poplar lined Barranco de Alberquilla was fabulous. Better still was the view of the village when we got round the corner. On a beautiful sunny autumn day, when enclosed by yellow poplars, Cástaras looks as picturesque as ever. From the high part of the village we followed the ´camino real´ back to Juviles. This old cobbled path passes through the Barranco de Fuente Medina, another enchanting poplar lined valley. It is a circular walk of about seven kilometres that we can definitely recommend on a autumn day. Those who want to start off at ´El Paraje´, need to add another eight kilometres.

Vaya veranillo

We have had a month of quiet weather with above normal temperatures after the rains at the end of September. Most countries have a special term to refer to the calm sunny days with blue skies in autumn. Having experienced a warm weather period with spectacular yellow and red leaves in the United States once, the term that came back to mind is Indian summer. The Dutch have a quite practical word ´nazomer´ translated as ´after summer´, and the Spanish use the diminutive ´short summer´ or ´veranillo´. Having had a look at the forecast this morning, we see that this spell of warm weather is coming to an end this week. With temperatures above twenty degrees in the shade today, it is difficult to imagine that we might have snow at ´El Paraje´ the coming weekend. In the meantime, we are enjoying the Indian Summer while it´s around, because one thing is for certain, it never lasts!
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