Northern Spain

Here are the three 'sketches' I made on my iPod from our trip to Northern Spain. The more I use it, the happier I am about the lack of accuracy of the lines. I think it adds life to the image. The first is a much over-rated, tourist infested village of Santillana, full of honey coloured stone buildings.This was the view from our bedroom window.

Santillana del Mar

The nearby caves at Altamira are famous for the paintings on the roof of the cave, but the visitors were damaging the atmosphere, and therefore the paintings, so the Spanish have built a full-size, faithful recreation of the caves which you can walk through and see how the paintings appeared. There is a whole 'ceiling' of paintings, all jostling for position.  



Cave paintings at Altamira



Along the roadside there was masses and masses of broom in full flower - so here are those accents of yellow colouring a lakeside view.

Our journey took us along the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela. Every day we passed pilgirms with backpacks and walking poles plodding along, sometimes on paths parallel to the road, sometimes just beside the road. It's 800kms from the French border, which is weeks of walking. As we continued towards Santiago my admiration grew for all those people who had the determination to press on, day in, day out making dogged progress under the hot sun, or in the rain. Here's a Santiago cake we bought in town - I loved the decoration; made with a stencil, I assume.



Santiago cake


As we were turning back North to cross the Pyrenees we saw clouds rolling over the tops of the mountains. A strange site above the arid, sun-baked plains.