Bardenas Reales: The Travel Tips for Spain's Insanity Desert!
The desert Bardenas Reales is located south of San Sebastian. Scenes for “Game of Thrones” and “Bond” were filmed here. BRIGITTE author Stefanie Bisping has wandered through the film-like formations. 3285377520 In the sky a golden eagle circles. Below him are table mountains, dry riverbeds and peculiar clay and sandstone formations. In between, I'm hanging, just before the narrow ridge. Sweating, I climb the last few meters over scree and stand up in the scorching sun, with steep slopes in front and behind me. The Cierzo, a dry northwest wind that sweeps from the north coast of Spain through the river valley of the Ebro to the Mediterranean, has shaped the cinematic formations of the semi-desert Bardenas Reales, the largest in Europe. [0] * However, you have to look closely in the extremely dry summer to see them. Only a very small part of the Bardenas is a true desert without any vegetation.
The rough landscape makes me speechless for a moment to the edge of my consciousness. I look in wonder at Lehmberge, which are shaped like pyramids, others are reminiscent of towers or craters. One looks like a wizard with a long cloak. He wears a big grin on his face. Similar to Javier Val, my guide. "No, there is no other way back," he explains cheerfully to my anxious question. "The Dragon raged through this ravine at 'Game of Thrones,'" he says. This land seems to me so far away from my presence in the (). Century, that I seriously ask for a moment, how I came here. The answer is simple: over the crooked, steep and partly half-crashed steps, full of gaps and holes in the front. The Spanish military put them on in the sixties and seventies. Because the mountain slopes eroded under the steps, they look today as if there had recently been an earthquake here. 11626424 97 30302 ()
, rapidly shrinking to a reasonable size in a monumental landscape. 95954 ( Land, not man. It is very small here, if it exists at all, and follows the dictates of nature: like the shepherds who come here in September with their flocks from the Pyrenees, eighty kilometers north, to hibernate. When snow falls, the bardenas still provide food for the sheep. In April, they set off again, leaving the semi-desert even quieter. For me nature can relativize a lot. What looks like great stress at home, quickly shrinks to a reasonable size in a monumental landscape. That's why the breadth of 11626598Desert always irritated. But Sahara and Namib are wide, not easy to travel, and full of snakes that I'm irrationally afraid of. Although there are also snakes in the Bardenas Reales. But at least not that many, there are four types and only one is poisonous. Javier has sworn in any case, have long seen no snake. And he is here almost every day. He tells me about steppe birds, birds of prey and raptors, of singing skylarks and hoopoes, peregrine and peregrine falcons, barn owls, vultures and eagles. And my hope is fulfilled: Even on the first day, despite the glistening sun and the sweaty ascent from the Pisquerra Gorge, I feel the calming effect of the desert, only two flying hours away from home.
Thirst is a permanent condition here Practice area of NATO are, which is why there are frequent overflights of military aircraft. “The population is against military use, but the Ministry of Defense pays a lot of money for it,” says Javier. This year it is (*) million euros, half of which is used for the park, the rest goes to the 23 communities of the area. Javier shrugs. “These are strong arguments, of course.” He also succumbed to the hypnotic power of this landscape: As a child, he wandered with his father to the Bardenas at every opportunity. “At that time there was no tourism.” First Job abandoned at a solar energy company to make the passion for the landscape a job. Since then, the fifty-year-old tourist goes by jeep into the desert or hikes and bike rides with them. In the 44 () acres Unesco biosphere reserve, there are only a few gravel roads. But 74 kilometers of bike and hiking trails. Whoever is on their way needs one thing above all else: a lot of water, because the sun is burning mercilessly, thirst is a permanent condition here. 30302 One year without rain – one Year without harvest ( Everything goes back to the water, or better: to the lack of water. Three percent of the Bardenas are desert without any vegetation. The rest of the area is made up of resilient plants: rosemary, juniper, thyme. Between hills weighs “Esparto” in the wind, a silvery-green grass, from which the Romans once made ropes. “There are also years without rain”, says Luis Ubago
For the farmer whose grain fields border the park, a year without rain means a year without harvest. He is grateful that the EU will help, because he can not imagine another life: “The work is hard, but I like it, maybe it's masochism,” he says and laughs. “I'm happy here, I love the landscape, even if it's not as lonely as it used to be.” His nephew lives in Berlin, but for Luis, a life in the city would be unthinkable. He is too closely associated with the country where father and grandfather used to work as peasants. 90 3285377520 3285377520
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