Caring for the watercourse

After a good long sleep, Monday began with a walk to Mercadona to shop for groceries. Then came a call about a funeral on Friday, another bereavement in the hamlet of Los Corrascos outside Arboleas, in the early 1990s urbanizacion I was called on to visit about a funeral last week. My tea time bird watching walk was interrupted by a call from Ashley. We spent a long time on the phone which led to me drafting a statement for publication about recent BCRP changes for emailing by Julie to the CBS user base not long before I went to bed. 

Today it's been mainly cloudy and cool, good walking weather. First I went to the nature reserve and saw an egret for the first time this year. Curiously, it was roosting in a waterside reed bed a couple of metres away from the one grey heron I've now seen a couple of times.

I continued walking up the north side track along the bank of rio Aguas. Where the river bed bends at the top of the valley, a large tracked vehicle with a mowing arm was attacking the tall thick forest of reeds and cane that has taken over the surface of the river bed where water runs underground. Last time I walked up here, I noticed that extensive clearance of the watercourse had recently taken place. 

Further up towards the pueblo, the dry river bed seems free of this kind of vegetation. Gravel bedding whether natural or artificial, I don't know, seems only to permit a scattering of small bushes there. It may be that subterranean water runs under bedrock or at least too deep for reed and cane to flourish in that section. It makes sense to clear the watercourse, as dense vegetation would impede the immense if occasional flow of storm water and cause a low lying area to floor. Prevention is better than cure. The marine wetland area will suffer damage any time there's a huge amount of storm water but as I've seen, following last winter's coastal floods, the ecosystem is indeed resilient.

I climbed up to the top of Mojácar Pueblo, right to the mirador on the site of the mediaeval castillo. The imposing 1970s hotel El Moresco dominating the north face of the hill on which the town stands has been 'closed for repairs' for the past seven years, its glass front entrance doors and walls have graffiti on them now. An early victim of recession, refurbishment fund-raising or investment beyond reach, it's slowly turning into an eyesore, in contrast to the rest of the pueblo, which looks well kept and prosperous.

When I was here mid November last, I arrived to find that the huge north facing mirador terrace had been closed and was being excavated. I believe the condition of the car parks underneath the terrace was the reason for this unexpected activity, at the end of the autumn holiday season. Sure enough, the terrace had been restored, and its neighboring restaurants were open for business. It looked, however, as if the car park restoration is still a work in progress. More parking nightmares for locals, sadly.

The walk back down to the apartment took another hour despite taking a shortcut on tracks away from the main road to Mojácar Playa, and I made it before twilight. A walk of about 10km in all. I'll sleep well tonight.

Finally, I got around to remembering to look back at blog entries made during my stay here last year, in an effort to recover the forgotten local Spanish word used to describe the nature reserve's water enclosure. It's charco which translates as 'puddle' rather than pool or pond, perhaps because by nature it may grow or shrink according to weather conditions, so its boundaries may be somewhat fluid. A nice little linguistic curiosity.
    

  

Rivers and the sea

I didn't do much today, though I didn't have much to do, apart from an afternoon walk to the far end of Garrucha Puerto for exercise, and on to Vera Playa. Vera is 10km from here, but I guess the area the Municipality covers stretches down to the sea because the course of the rio Antas touches the town. Come to think of it, a few centuries back a river like this would have been navigable, making up-river trading possible for small coastal trading boats. Only when there's a massive sudden sudden deluge of rain nowadays is there any water above ground in rivers of this kind. Perhaps if I'd walked a few more kilometres I would have come to the river mouth, and who knows maybe discovered a pool of surface water near the beach, like the rio Aguas.

Over the weeks of my stay here I have been obsessing over a suitable word in Spanish that describes the rio Aguas coastal wetland. River water locked in by a sandbar, seeping away to the sea beneath the surface. I wouldn't use the word 'pool' in English, as it translates as piscina, swimming pool. No good. David kindly loaned me for a quick speed read 'Flamingos in the Desert', a book by Kevin Borman, local naturalist, and explorer of trails throughout Almeria Province. A few samples of his narration and I was hooked by his sympathetic style of descriptive writing, with lovingly described detail of the landscape, its history and stories about people and the byways of the region.

Inevitably, I had to select passages, with just an evening's reading before returning the book to him. So naturally I looked for Borman's account of the area I have been exploring during my time here, and in particular his account of following the rio Aguas from source to shore. I learned that as he had passed along the north side of the arroyo, from below Mijas Pueblo within the last few years, he'd been taken with the sight of a flock of serin rising from the bushes along the road. He mentions this once in just the same location where I'd been surprised by the sudden flight of a large flock of very small birds which I didn't recognise. Birds, like humans, are very territorial creatures, so I reckon the flock I saw was most likely another generation of the flock he reported. One more sighting identified!

The Spanish word Borman uses for this sand bar enclosed body of water is 'charco', which translates as 'pond' in English, although it's bigger than what one would usually describe as a pond and smaller than what one would call a lake. He mentions several other similar river outlets along the coast in the vicinity of Carboneras, as all rich in flora and fauna as the one I have come to know the past six weeks.

Word play is such fun in English. Across languages, one might never grow old again. It's nearly fifty years since I last tried to read Joyce's 'Finnegan's Wake'. Perhaps it's time I tried again, during the coming cold and overcast winter months in Cardiff, when it's almost painful to look at the sky.