Valdepeñas to near Rumblar Reservoir - 83 miles

I’ve been on the go for over ten hours and for the last hour I’ve been looking for a site where I could camp. Unfortunately all the glorious woodland and countryside around me is fenced off from the gravel track that passes as a road and what’s more I’m not on the route as the track I was meant to take was also fenced off. How to get back on the route in this place of hills and few paths - at first glance it may require a bit of a detour - is tomorrow’s problem. For now I have settled myself in a patch of grass and wild flowers between the road and the fence line. It's hardly out of sight but it's the best I’ve found and anyway I’ve hardly seen another person in these beautiful and isolated surroundings.

The day started in a more promising way. From Valdepeñas it was a continuous gentle climb through the beginnings of the Sierra Morena. I pedalled my straight road through fields of straight lines of agriculture: neat rows of vines or olive trees, everything very linear. Despite the climbing it was comfortable riding as I rose through the Morena foothills and towards Andalucía.

As I entered Andalucía everything changed: my route began a long, steady descent and the agricultural was replaced by the more natural surroundings of sparse woodland. Gone too were the long gentle slopes, around me now were small compact hills and valleys, densely packed and covered in those woods. Andalucía may conjure up an image of dry heat and sunburnt landscapes but here and now everything was green.

I stopped in the small Sierra village of Aldeaquemada for coffee, its tiny square hosting four bars which I could not help but compare with those villages earlier in my trip where I could never find one. In reality the ride to get to Aldeaquemada had been nothing more than an appetiser for the main event: the two climbs that would get me over the Sierra Morena. At under 3500 feet at the point where I cross they are small compared to the Sierra Guadarrama but they are still a challenge.

Aldeaquemada 

Aldeaquemada 

The first ascent started soon after leaving the village, a quiet road climbing in sharp hairpin bends upwards through granite, pine and the white and yellow of rockrose flowers which seem to thrive in the dry and stony ground. There were far reaching views through the occasional gap at those sharp bends but otherwise the trees seemed to hold out the world and hold in the silence: the only sounds were my heavy breathing and that of birds. After the enclosed comfort of that woodland the drop after the peak was an exposed and vertiginous winding descent, tight bends requiring control and low speed. I looked down from on high to a motorway, was later zig-zagging beneath it and then began a nondescript second climb on road and near the motorway to the village of Santa Elena. I got away from the traffic for the second descent which was long, beautiful and peaceful, an empty and gentle curving road with streams and brown rocky outcrops among the surrounding woodland and everywhere yellow with celandines. It was too good a landscape to ignore so I stopped halfway down to enjoy the solitude and raid my bag for food. 

Pine woods

Rock Rose

Lunch

The afternoon was a few short sections by motorway and a lot of olives. There were main roads through olive groves, quiet roads through olive groves and tracks through olive groves. On one occasion I had to cycle through the actual trees trying to intersect the route after my track petered out and then again when a deep chasm appeared blocking my path. For much of the afternoon olive groves filled the gently sloping landscape from horizon to horizon, broken only by the appearance of large villages on hilltops and a couple of small olive oil factories.

Chasm…

While the olives may have been repetitive it was the hills that followed and the headwind that frustrated. I had thought that after my two big climbs the rest of the day would be straightforward but I was wrong. Cycling high paths, I was reminded of Galicia as I skirted a reservoir and as I looked out on a rolling, tree covered landscape that I seemed to be continually having to climb over. It was beautiful but it was tiring, made more so by my long day and the loose gravel of the track that I was on. But it is among these hills that I have eventually decided to make my bed for the night.

The fencing may have cut me of from a lot of the surrounding countryside but the countryside is not cut off from me: as I lie here I can hear the wind playing in the grass around me and the call of birds and animals from far afield. They are the sounds of nature that I hope will help lull me into a sleep which for some reason is proving elusive despite the day's exertions and my physical tiredness.