Day 8 — Wednesday 4 May 2011

San Nicolas del Puerto – Fuente Obejuna

This was the hardest day yet. It took me nine hours to get to Fuenta Obejuna, not all of that in the saddle, and the only day of the whole trip that I didn’t find lunch along the way.

In the morning my washing wasn’t dry so I festooned my panniers like a laundry and after eating bread and cheese for breakfast and drinking plenty of water that I’d boiled on my stove I set off back to San Nicolas. Alongside the Vía Verde there was a flatter path with a concrete surface that I had not used the previous evening as it had a ‘walkers only’ sign. But this morning I was early so I ignored the sign and rode along it. It was dead flat and I think that it was a disused railway line.

I had a second breakfast in a bar in San Nicolas and then set off for Alanis where I had to take the A447 to Fuenta Obejuna. Michelin has marked this a road in bad condition, and as soon as I turned out of Alanis there was a warning sign for a degraded road surface. I pressed on undaunted but soon found it to be all too true. The road had not been resurfaced in years and the asphalt was pockmarked and had degenerated to rough grit, worse than the Via Verde that at least was relatively well graded. This road had six inch holes all over it and in places they had been filled in with six inch high dollops of asphalt. It was like riding across an egg carton. This continued for about 50 kilometres and during the pounding one of the rivets securing the bar bag’s clip broke loose, so at lunch time I had to fabricate a new rivet from a spare bolt with my Swiss Army Knife (wonderful things). At that point I removed some of the heavier things from the bar bag and repacked them in the rear pocket of one of the panniers, making room by chucking away my contact lens paraphernalia as I had been wearing my spectacles so far. I made up a strap from a length of string to keep my specs from slipping off my nose in the stream of sweat that was pretty much a constant feature.

In compensation the countryside was extraordinarily attractive, with deep winding valleys off to the sides and a mixture of bare hills, plantations of fruit trees intermixed with pine forests. I sat on the side of the road overlooking a huge palace of a farm house eating bread and cheese and mending my bar bag in the sun. No sound of any car or people, no passing traffic apart from two farm pickups the whole time, peaceful in the extreme. I stopped at approximately hourly intervals for bread and cheese and water, by the end having drunk my way through about six pints.

Quite suddenly a viaduct over a substantial stream (the Rio Bembezar) the poor road was replaced by smooth tarmac where a road from a recycling plant joined. Presumably the waste trucks needed smooth tarmac, and with relief I puffed up to a plateau and rolled along the final seven kilometre stretch of dead straight undulating road looking for all the world like an airport runway into Fuente Obejuna. Here there was definitely a camp site because not only is it on the Michelin map, it is also on Google Maps. I found it but it had been closed for a year! I nearly threw my bicycle over the wire link fence in disgust. I found a restaurant with a waiter who could speak English and he and a lady in the bar directed me to a hotel in the middle of the town. The door was locked so I pounded on it. It opened and I was ushered into an elegant, palatial, run down lobby out of some bygone age. At €25 a night I decided to stay two, and have a rest. I went back to the restaurant and thanked them for guiding me to the hotel, and had entrecôte steak, fresh potatoes and salad. That night I slept like a top.

The following morning I ventured out to find desayuno in a café bar, and wrote up my dairy for yesterday. The rush is at about ten o’clock for half an hour and then it all quietens down again. At this stage I was about one third of my way through Spain and was on the second of four Spanish maps. Changing onto a new map gave a real sense of achievement. The next two days’ riding looked reasonably comfortable so I was beginning to feel more confident. The following night at Belalcazar would have to be under a roof but after that it looked as though I would be under canvas again at Telarrubias, in an area of large lakes.

After breakfast I explored the town and found a striking statue that looked as though it commemorated the fallen in the civil war, but that is a guess and may be wrong. The town museum was locked but the man in the tourist information office let me in and after a while brought me English translations of some of the exhibit texts. He was enthusiastic but I couldn’t tell in detail all that he was telling me. I sat in the sun on the patio outside the museum and read the pages he had brought me. The area had a history of tin and lead mining a bit like Cornwall. The Romans had left extensive ruins with sophisticated irrigation systems and aqueducts, and what appeared to be a syphon system for getting water across valleys, although I was guessing at that.

Another text described a play by Lope de Vega (the central square is named after him) performed by villagers periodically. The play is the subject of an article in Wikipedia that is well worth reading. Written around 1635 it has since been performed once every 100 years, but since 1935 has been performed seven times. The final text I had been given described a villa built in the town (just behind my hotel) called Casa Cardona. It was built in 1905 by Pedro Celestino Romero, but his wife died shortly after it was finished and he never lived in it. It was used by the army during the civil war and is now covered in scaffolding, being renovated at substantial cost for what purpose I didn’t discover. I had a look into the public library this evening and found Spanish translations of Agatha Christie and Richmal Crompton’s Just William books. I also found a novel by John Steinbeck called La Perla, the name of the place we had visited near Arboleas to stay with relations on the way down to Granada. The novel is about a pearl fisher in Mexico but the name struck me.