Flamingo watch

Another warmer than usual for the end of October, bright sunny day to get us started with breakfast on the terrace, and then a bus trip to Gran Playa beach on the west side Santa Pola port. From here we walked inland, crossed the southbound road out of town and headed up a dirt road into a section of the local nature reserve. The 'Salinas' of Santa Pola is an area of several square miles of salt water ponds, at lead level, rich in wildlife and the unusual vegetation which thrives in a harsh saline environment.

The Romans may have been the first to extract salt from seawater in this flat marshy area. For centuries it was a nobleman's hunting domain, but over the past two centuries, salt production has been industrialised, with a series of ponds connected by channels directing the flow of seawater through sluices. When collected seawater has evaporated into a more concentrated brine, it is moved into other ponds and concentrated further, before the final evaporation and collection of the residue for storage, somewhat nearer the place from which it is transported for refinement and extraction of valuable trace mineral content elsewhere. There are big white hills of salt in the storage area alongside the road going south just before it crosses a causeway in between evaporation ponds.

Anyway, our aim this morning was an hour of birdwatching before the sun got uncomfortably hot. At first the high reed beds along the path seemed very quiet. In the larger industrial ponds we could see flocks of large grey gulls, and smaller back backed stilts. The other side of the track, on the town side are a series of older ponds which are now part of the conservation area, where indigenous vegetation is allowed to flourish, and there's a throughput of fresh water, helping maintain the level of salinity naturally associated with this ecosystem. Best thing of all about this domain is its perennial colony of flamingos, hundreds of them, rising to eight thousand during migration periods.

The town side landscape beyond the Salinas is typical of a marginal enterprise zone, warehouses, small factories, public cemetery and funeral centre, football stadium, with a few high rise social housing blocks behind them. The rich autumnal coloured wilderness of the nature reserve starts abruptly, incongruously, the other side of a main road out of town. It makes for some unusual photographs. My Sony HX5 has given me some super flamingo landscapes, although its ten times zoom isn't good enough to give decent closeups at 350m, that's just too far.

We walked back to the port via Grand Playa beach, and ate a superb seafood lunch in a small bar- restaurant right on the Playa de Levante. Then we visited the Mercadona sueprmarket on our way home to obtain things we hadn't been able to carry yesterday, and walked laden with goods the last couple of kilomtres home. Yet again, we both slept soundly for an hour or so, to recover from our exertions.