Friday

We left El Rocio via a horse bridge over the highway on the other side of town and headed back into the park. The climate was starting to get drier as we moved south and the brush was getting a little scrubby.

I had gotten some kind of sunburn on my eyeball the previous day so was practicing riding with one eye shut and shielding my eye from the sun. It wasn't very fun.

It was at about that time – lunch – that some of us hit the wall. Maybe it was because it came after only about 50 minutes of riding after aperitivo (at which another park ranger showed up and checked Alfonso’s permit to eat in the park. Maria Elena said they had once tried to insist an aperitivo had to be eaten standing up; if you sat down it was lunch) . Maybe it was all these days of steady consuming. Anyway, some had to stop after the lovely tomato and squid salad, missing the ratatouille with fried egg on top. Others, including me, made it through that but gave up before the seafood stew. Still, the table was as lovely as ever. I took a little nap on the grass, using my inflated safety vest as a cushion and my helmet to block the light, and my eye felt much better.

Then we got to enjoy another confrontation with the park authorities. A pair of rangers dropped by and told Alfonso he should stay on the path because there were a lot of lynxes around. Bear in mind we had looked for lynxes the day before with a professional lynx finder, to no avail. And Maria Elena said she’d seen only one in 20 years of riding through the park. I could tell the guy had told Alfonso to stay on the path because as soon as we left he led us off the path.

Which was nice because we came across a little log that some of us jumped.

We put the horses up in a deserted village in the middle of nowhere. Maria Elena said the government had settled poor people there in the 1950s and just a few years later built a highway nearby and moved them back out. The horses, after a little grazing in a portable pen, were tied up in a kind of old stone warehouse and a local guy and his son watched them and the saddles overnight.

Our hotel was the five-star Parador, one of a chain of state-owned (why?) hotels. It was on the beach, actually, far above it, with a beautiful view of the Atlantic Ocean (yes, the Atlantic. I had to really study the map to understand why we weren’t on the Mediterranean.) It also took a while to understand why incredibly loud music was emanating from the swimming pool, where some kind of party seemed to be going on.

So after a delicious dinner of bean soup and local fish, we went to the pool and learned we were attending the Mr. World Andalusia contest. Except  Maria Elena and Alfonso were highly amused to discover that it actually was the Mr. Andalusia West contest (link from local press here). Anyway, some very proud young man won.