Castell de Ferro, Andalucía, for Winter Solstice and Christmas

16th Dec 2019 – 2nd Jan 2020: back in Castell de Ferro

After our week-long spin along the Andalucían coast, we decided it would do us all good to stay put for a couple of weeks and find our bearings in time for Christmas. We opted to head back to the moho site we had liked, east of La Herradura, and found ourselves a grand little spot there in the sunshine.

Castell de Ferro has a long seafront, a playground/exercise area on the beach, lots of steep streets and great views:

Isla Cristina market

The market in Castell de Ferro is held on Saturdays. Luckily, our new friends, Shaun and Caroline, alerted us to this and we popped into town to see what was what. We bought a gorgeous lunch of olives, bread and rotisserie chicken to take home.

Winter Solstice 2019

Greetings from Andalucía on the Winter Solstice of 2019 🤍 From today, for all of us in the northern hemisphere, the days begin to lengthen, what joy! This turning point has been marked by humans the world over down through the millennia and we follow in their footsteps in paying homage to the sun’s position at its lowest elevation in the sky on this day.

Back at the Summer Solstice in June, we were in the midst of planning for this trip, but a lot remained undecided; work arrangements, what type of vehicle to get, how to rent out our house, what would be need to take with us… Although it all seemed quite overwhelming at that time, I (Caitríona) promised myself that, come the Winter Solstice, we’d be there. Wherever ‘there’ was, we’d be there. And here we are.

We had hoped to mark the day with a seaswim, but the winds said otherwise!

This storm was actually a pretty bad one and it lasted several days. On the first day of the storm, we ventured out to the nearest town, Motril, in search of fresh milk (the children have not yet adapted to UHT). This trip was a bad idea, although we did make it there and back safely, but it was stressful driving a large van in such high winds. Another lesson learned! The main roads in Andalucía are recently built and tend to be up high across the hills, above the towns at sea level; lots of tunnels through hills and viaducts over valleys. We discovered the morning after our trip to Motril that an articulated lorry had been blown over on the road, crashing through the barriers, above La Herradura the evening before, causing the whole road to be closed off. Thankfully the driver survived the crash.

It has shown us that we must keep a closer eye on the weather forecasts, and particularly that for wind. It also impacts on where we might park our van. Do you want to be beside an old wall? Tall trees? Safety issues we had never thought of before!

Making new friends

Shaun and Caroline are from the East Midlands area of England and have been travelling around Europe for the past couple of of years, along with their dog, Georgie. They adopted Georgie as a stray puppy when they were in Greece. Adopting stray dogs and cats is a common thing for travelling families to do. Olwen is campaigning strongly for us to do the same!