fishydreams

It has been a few years since I visited the National Park at Montfragüe in Extremadura but the chance arose last week and I didn´t let it go begging. Montfragüe is about half an hour´s drive north of Trujillo and runs in an east-west direction. The Río Tajo passes through it on its westward journey, ultimately to the Atlantic close to the city of Lisbon. In the National Park at Montfragüe the Tajo meets one of its major tributaries, the Tietar which joins it from the Northeast.

The Tagus is a hell of a river. It is over 1000km long making it the longest River in the Iberian Peninsula. About two thirds of the river runs through Spain before passing into Portugal. At Montfragüe it is already a very sizeable river although there it is a little constricted by an ancient seam of Ordovician rock at the famous Salto de Gitano. Here the Tajo struggles to push through the unyielding rock which is thrown into vertical cliffs. The skies here are full of vultures. Continue reading →

The ibex is what the locals would call the “cabra de montaña” or mountain goat, which stands to reason because it is a kind of wild goat and the mountains are where you will find them.

I was lucky enough to come close to a female ibex and her kid the other evening as I was paddling around in my float tube casting into the margins. The two ibex showed little alarm and spent a while grazing in the vegetation close to the waters edge and I was lucky enough to get some reasonable photographs. Continue reading →

From time to time I have come across the remains of crayfish on the banks of the Guadalhorce river but had never seen any live specimens until yesterday evening when I chanced upon three individuals which I must have disturbed from the marginal vegetation. They scurried out into the shallow river leaving a trail of disturbed silt in their wakes. Continue reading →

Every now and then my wife tells me off for using bad language. She points out that a blog post is no place for profanities and so I will refrain from using them in describing the tiger mosquitos that are causing a plague on the lower reaches of the Guadalhorce river.

Tiger mosquitos are not endemic. They hail from Southeast Asia but they have become quite widespread as a result of their association with humans. I must confess I did not know very much about them but am now a little wiser having read about them on Wikipedia. The article usefully pointed out that they are not to be confused with tigers which, apparently, are wild mammals! Continue reading →

On the way back from the river the other day I nearly walked on a turtle. At the time I was clambering over some rocks and just before planting my foot I realized that one of the rocks looked odd. It was. It was a turtle that embarked on what, from a turtle´s point of view, would have been a major mountaineering adventure. Continue reading →