Southern Andalucia
30 October – 9 November, 2007
Mike Kilburn
Just back from a wonderful 10-day honeymoon in which my wife Carrie and I ate our way across Andalucia from Malaga to Cadiz . . . and then ate our way back again. Since Carrie is not a birder this was not a birding trip, I birded only around the places we visited, from the buses between the town we stayed in, and on some early morning walks. I did not go to specific birding places, but anyone who does would see many more birds in a trip of the same duration.
This account will differ from many others because (this being a honeymoon and things like comfort, ensuite bathrooms and hair dryers being of the utmost importance to the fairer sex) we stayed in several of the excellent Parador chain of hotels (hence the dismal pun in the title), many of which are housed in beautiful historical buildings, in prime locations, or both. Indeed, because of their wonderful locations each also provided at least one memorable birding moment.
We mixed these stops in the decadent lap of luxury with other hotels of varying standards, but generally found that we got what we paid for, with the last hotel we stayed in being a wonderful place that I would recommend to anyone.
I've not heard much good said of Malaga, either before or since my trip, but the welcoming if almost unpronounceable Parador del Gibralfaro that sits up on the hill with the castle and overlooks the bay, the city and the mountains behind served as a lovely introduction to our first day in Spain (although seeing the tops of the mountains in Morocco across the Mediterranean, and a plunge-diving Gannet as the plane approached Malaga airport boded well even before we arrived!)
The most interesting birds for me in Malaga were the Red Crossbills, which showed superbly in the conifers right next to the Parador's terrace. It’s probably entirely my problem, but I've struggled for Crossbills throughout 20+years of birding. I had to go to the ends of Asia to see them previously (only easternmost Hokkaido and northernmost Xinjiang in far NW China) - so to see a pair feeding, causal as you please, right next to the terrace of a posh urban hotel was something of a shock.
An early morning stroll round the old site of the lighthouse and the pine-clad hilltop also produced Long-tailed, Coal and the wonderful Crested Tit, plus numerous Black Redstarts, a Robin, a growling Sardinian Warbler and my first Firecrest for 20 years. A Blue Rock Thrush hopping about on the hotel and the battlements of the castle looked very similar to the pandoo birds we see in Hong Kong. I also had frustratingly brief views of a pale phase Booted Eagle which fled its roosting perch as I came too fast round the corner. Chiffchaffs, Blackcaps, Goldfinches, Greenfinches, Chaffinches and Crag Martins were everywhere, and a too-distant Short-toed Treecreeper was a somewhat underwhelming new species for me.
It was also here that we enjoyed one of the best meals of the trip. The Paradores serve a superb breakfast buffet, which we were able to enjoy from the restaurant’s wonderful terrace. Although the choice was excellent, the smoked salmon dipped in an amazing almond-strewn rendering of the local “ajo blanco” chilled soup, washed down with wonderful fresh orange juice, and a glass of cava (Spain’s very good sparkling wine), was an amazing introduction to Spanish cuisine – and the decadence yu can nly really justify on a honeymoon!
We moved the next day to Granada, where we stayed two nights in other hotels. The first, Los Tilos in the Plaza Bib-Rambla was remarkable only for the shouting trees in front of it! Similar to the trees next to the Bank of America Tower in Central (where hundreds of Crested Mynas and Black-collared Starlings go noisily to roost each day) they were being used as a roost site by several hundred starlings, all shrieking away at each other before settling down for the night. Try as I might I could not see into the tree well enough to identify a single one, but I would love to think that they were all Spotless Starlings, which I have only ever seen once before in Spain.
Next morning I got up early to go and buy tickets for the Alhambra Palace – famous as the finest example of Moorish art/architecture in Europe. Built inside the walls of a huge castle, and rubbing shoulders with another large palace built around a vast circular courtyard it was probably the cultural highlight of our trip. The top birds here were at least 50 Blackcaps in the forested approach to the castle, along with several Hawfinches and, from a tangle of brambles on the river on the other side, my first Cetti’s Warbler for a very long time. I also saw my first Magpies, a Grey Wagtail, and confirmed that at least some of the starlings in the city were Spotless Starlings. A rather dark, but pale–bellied Red Squirrel was my only mammal of the trip.
Fleeing the cholesterol-laden bakeries of Granada we took a four-hour bus ride across the agricultural heartland of Andalucia, via Seville to the historic port city of Cadiz. I struggled to identify many birds en route, but saw at least ten Kestrel sp., a couple of hundred Cattle Egrets and 20-odd Grey Herons in a field, and an unidentified grey shrike sp. Arriving well after dark we checked into the Parador knowing only that it was right by the sea at the northernmost tip of the city. When we got up it was to find the Atlantic Ocean stretching across the horizon in a huge sweep of deep blue! I was excited to find the blue was flecked with little brown and white dots – seabirds!
These were mostly Gannets, Sandwich Terns, Lesser Black-backed and Yellow-legged Gulls, but I also noticed a number of clearly smaller brown birds which were tilting from side to side as they glided by – classic shearwater flight! While these were much too distant to sort out with binoculars, a little later in the morning a party of 25 came and loafed just a couple of hundred metres offshore, giving me good enough views to tentatively identify them as Balearic Shearwaters (easier said than done without a field guide!). Happily Peter Jones of BF and Spanish Nature (www.spanishnature.com) agreed that these were the most likely, and an internet search produced photos that confirmed they were not the rather similar and closely-related Yelkouan Shearwater.
Other good birds here included exotic Monk Parakeets nesting in the palms at the door of the hotel, and a Ring-necked Parakeet in the same area, a Northern Wheatear and Thekla Lark in the car-park just to the right of the hotel, and few each of Whimbrel, Turnstone, and Sanderling on the rocks offshore. While the Balearic Shearwaters were also a new bird, my favourites in Cadiz were a group of seven Mediterranean Gulls flying gentle laps around an outfall close to the giant cathedral. I counted three different first winter birds, three gleaming white adults, and one second winter bird with the most elegant of black tips to a couple of crisp white primaries. I was surprised how few Black-headed Gulls there were here.
The culinary highlight was El Faro – a wonderful old-style seafood restaurant that served so good a paella and with such excellent old world service that it was like a trip back in time to a different era.
In fact we enjoyed Cadiz so much that having checked out of the hotel to go to Arcos, we decided it would be too much of a rush . . . and checked back in again – relishing another chance to wake up to the same wonderful ocean view.
The next day we did finally tear ourselves away and caught a bus to Arcos de la Frontera – one of the famous “white villages” up in the mountains beyond Jerez (the home of sherry). The best thing about this journey was seeing my first Eurasian Griffons of the trip just outside Jerez, some distant Greater Flamingoes just to the east of Cadiz and, as we approached Arcos, close but quick views of a party of Red-legged Partridges waddling away from the roadside at high speed!
Unfortunately the bus dropped us at the bottom of the town and being in the prime location the Parador was - of course - at the highest point of the ridge on which Arcos perches! So a 20 minute drag later we arrived into a glorious cobbled square with a C15th church on one side, a C14th castle on the other, the Parador – a C16th judge’s house in front of us and a view out over the plains from an elegantly-sculpted viewpoint on the fourth side. We were shown to a fabulous room overlooking this amazing combination of heritage and as I opened the windows for a look outside, two more Eurasian Griffons drifted over the battlements of the castle and an unidentified Kestrel slid round the back of a tower.
When Carrie had a look out the window she looked down, ignored the centuries of history and declared she did not want to spend the night overlooking a carpark! The blind men with the elephant had nothing on us! Anyway we did move to a room with a terrace and stupendous views across the countryside for which this Parador is justly famous – and it was well worth the extra cost – a male Lesser Kestrel, the first of several here, drifted past below us at the moment I stepped onto the terrace, and a short while later I was transfixed by a Booted Eagle hanging on the wind, again just below eye-level! This same room provided fine views of a Little Owl perched on the battlements of the castle, and the sound of a Cetti’s Warbler singing in the riverbed 150 metres below.
The one failure of our trip was Sanlucar de Barrameda – another famous sherry town on the banks of the Guadalquivir Estuary, and jumping-off point for visits to the world famous Donana National Park. It was here that the restaurants were shut, the mosquitoes were biting, the seafront was made ugly by development and with the exception of the typically elegant Andalusian hotel and two passable meals it was clearly a place to leave – so we did - and headed off to stay in El Bosque, another white village in the mountains on the edge of the Sierra de Grazalema National Park. A White Stork soaring over the road and hovering Black-shouldered Kite were the best birds of the journey, although numerous raptors perched on telegraph poles were probably not all Booted Eagles, but went by too fast for a secure identification.
Here our hotel was the friendly, family-run Hotel el Tabanco, which also had a very good adjoining restaurant, where we had excellent prawns and wild boar, both done to a turn, along with a chilled glass of Manzanilla from Sanlucar, and some good red wine. One of the joys of Spain is that “house wine” is half the price and several times better than the acrid drizzle served as “house wine” in Hong Kong!
An early start the next day added few new birds. After scrabbling up a slope which I subsequently discovered was in a zone reserved for hunting with dogs (gulp!) another Firecrest and more Crested Tits were a joy as ever. The best birds were a pair of Jays, and the first Blue Tit, Song Thrush and female Sardinian Warbler of the trip. More interesting was the drive to Ronda, which produced 20 Eurasian Griffons over Ubrique, and two very brief views of Black Wheatears flashing white tails as they flicked away after a hapless insect from their perches atop a couple of boulders.
In Ronda we were back in Paradorland – again in a spectacular clifftop location close to the famous bullring and overlooking the El Tajo gorge and its spectacular bridges. Better still for me were the four Lesser Kestrels, and a flock of 50+ Red-billed Choughs that went to roost in a cleft in the rocks just below the Parador.
The next morning we followed breakfast at the excellent Chocolat café with a move across to our favourite hotel of the trip – Jardin de la Muralla. Situated in the shadow of the oldest church in Ronda, and with a fabulous, but homely terraced garden bounded at it slower edge by the city walls, and offering terrific views over the countryside, it was a delightful refuge from the rather imposing architecture and scenery of Ronda. The owner told us that 19 bird species had nested in the garden, including four at different levels in the tall cypress. I was delighted to see a Blue Rock Thrush duck off the city wall as it caught me watching it.
My morning walk produced Winter Wren, a flock of 100-odd Corn Buntings, several Meadow Pipits, and best of all a group of 4 Rock Buntings near the riding stables on the west side of the town. More was to come later as we walked down to take the appropriate tourist photo of the Tajo bridge and a female Black Wheatear gave me views that made ticking this species a much more respectable proposition than the drive-by males of the day before. A Zitting Cisticola in the long grass nearby was about as far away as it could possibly be from what is supposedly the same species in Hong Kong.
Ronda also produced good food – an excellent pig’s knuckle the night we arrived, and in Almocabar, close to the Jardin de la Muralla we had a superb, but sadly rushed final meal that took an age to arrive before we had to make a run to the bus station or we would have missed our flight back to London. The fried egg with cured ham and truffle shavings was amazing – no description could possibly do it justice!
All told I saw about 70 species, which served as an enticing introduction to birding in southern Spain, and added an extra dimension - and no arguments - to a wonderful honeymoon!
Warmest congratulations to you both on your marriage. Congratulations too for having the sense to honeymoon in SW Andalucia - it's a fantastic area both for birding and culture. Not surprised that you liked Cadiz as its a fabulous city. Having done it myself I sympathise with you regarding the long haul up to the top of Arcos from the bus station (although I'd have stayed round the corner at a charming little hotel with equally good views at a lower price!) The Alhambra complex is without question the most beautiful set of buildings I've ever seen and in a wonderful setting too.
All in all I very much enjoyed reading the account of you stay. What a wonderful way to start a marriage! All the best,
John