Today we drove from Villanueva del Rosario up to Llano del Hondonero in the Sierra de Camarolos. Parked up and walked up the track past the massive buttress of El Corral which contains the stunning cave of Chilam Balam.
El Corral buttres
Beautiful to look at but climbing was not for us today, we stuck to walking which was hard enough as we climbed over 500 metres during the walk climbing up to almost 1300 metres. We took our time as it was getting hot even at 10:15 start. I had described the walk as very undulating but was not very popular with most of the people on the walk as they thought it was just uphill.
view on the way up
Scoobie was good as we kept her on the lead, otherwise she would have disappeared as there were some cattle which are very rare in this part of Spain.
approaching our high point
There were lots of other animal scents, we
spotted a couple of Ibex on the horizon which we managed to get on camera as they were watching us closely. On the way down one of the group decided to do some exploration by himself, so went off to see the view from one of the ridges he was gone about 15 minutes and then we heard him shout from one of the hills that we were passing, he had gone up to the ridge and found another route back but joined up with us on the way down. He had done some scrambling and had been bitten by a snake as he pulled himself up on a rock,
but luckily the snakes in Spain are not poisonous (so they say). Nothing else happened on the way down apart from a couple of people slipping over on the steep descent. A nice 3 hour walk was enjoyed by all I think.
