Day 15: Villafranca de Los Barros to Monesterio

March 4, 2025

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We got a mostly sunny day today. It started chilly but eventually warmed all the way to 18°C. The church outside Casa Perin looked good in the morning sun:

Dodie had noticed that "Los Barros" occurs in several town names hereabouts. I looked it up, and "barros" means mud. Shortly after setting off, we could see how this particular town could have gotten its name:

We made our way to N630, and at least nearer the town it was not the lonely and impressive route we had come to expect:

However things did clear up, and except for occasional big trucks or small clusters of car traffic, it was fine.

As happened yesterday, we passed few villages, but those were interesting in how they clustered about the church, and how all building were white with red roofs.

We also saw a train. We had been remarking on how few trains we see in Spain. This one was quite short.

Olives and grapes are the main crops here, though more land is probably devoted to dehesa and sheep. Many of the grapes are not pruned to follow along wires, but stand apart at quite some spacing.

Some areas not in grapes or olives were nevertheless not dehesa, making them look like much more generic pasture or hay land. An interesting thing about this shot is that the muddy track visible is actually the "official" Camino route. We'll stay up here on N630, thank you very much!

There were birds along the way, but most were small, flittery, and not inclined to wait around for the camera to come out and focus. One thing, Scott's ZS-70, after a night to think about it, started to work again.

A lot of the birds turned out to be Corn Buntings, like this one.

Or House Sparrows. The fact that this one is so puffy shows that it was still pretty chilly.

We were happy to get a shot of this raptor, high overhead.

And of course the ubiquitous White Storks.

Sparrows of course are extremely common, so I will not often take a shot of them. But we have been looking for the "Spanish Sparrow", and happened to get one in the camera today. The shot was good enough to ID but not really great. The Spanish Sparrow did bring our 2025 total to 115.

Our route brought a few other interesting things, such as an example of the big black bull billboard that is often seen on hills along Spanish roads.

And in the town of Fuente de Cantos, many pig farms, scenting the whole town. The pigs are the black Iberian type, that ideally eat acorns in the dehesa. Here in their enclosure, we are not sure what they do eat. When I first approached the pen, everyone ran away. But they were curious and came back. This allowed me to take out the cell phone and to interview them for a video sent back to the grandkids. We expect that Joe especially will get a kick out of it.

These sheep have a better setup, out in the dehesa.

Not too far from the end of the day's ride, the road -which had been climbing all day - doubled down with a stretch of about 4 km with about 6% grade. The road builders had created a passing lane, in deference to the hill, and you can see that lane about to end in the photo below.

From here we could look far back down to where we had come from.

We had been coping with the general uphill trend of the ride all day, plus a fairly stiff headwind that came up at mid day. Dodie had stopped her bike near the bottom of this hill, and could not find the strength to remount and crank up it. So we walked the 4 km. This turned out to be fortuitous, because with the combination of the headwind and the previous hills, our bikes were almost out of power. We nursed them in to Monesterio, ending with less than one bar on the battery indicator. This is a bit of a bad omen, since there are days coming for us that have more than the 60 km we did here, and more than the 700 m of climb. The bikes are so heavy that pedaling them without assist, even on the flat, is really not practical. Oh well, with an early enough start we can always walk.

Today's ride: 60 km (37 miles)
Total: 374 km (232 miles)

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John FlecknerJust now caught up with your trip. Thanks as always for the running commentary and photography. It is interesting to see the many ways you can manage grape vines. Wishing you both the very best.
Cycling Santa and Mrs C.
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1 week ago

Steve Miller/GrampiesTo John FlecknerIt's great to know you are following along!

It took me a while to understand that grapes fruit on new wood, so that is the basis of all pruning schemes. This is unlike raspberries, for example, that fruit on last year's wood.
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1 week ago