Sunday. I went hiking with Atanasio, a teacher of Spanish language and literatures at my school. I picked him up at 8.30 am and went to Ocaña, a village at 57 km from Almería near Sierra Nevada. We intended to go to Montenegro (1711m.), the last peak of Sierra Nevada in the province of Almería, which is a range of mountains in the provinces of Granada and Almería.
http://www.mma.es/parques/lared/s_nevada/ The highest peaks are in the province of Granada where Mulhacén (3407m), the highest mountain in mainland Spain is, although the highest mountain in Spain is Teide in Tenerife, Canary islands, which is a little higher.
When we got to Ocaña at 9.20 am the village was deserted. It was sunny but a little windy. A few minutes later we saw a man. We said Buenos días and asked him the way to Montenegro. He was very kind and explained the way to us but later we realised that according to our guide book and map we should have followed another route. We went along a path that took us near the peak with beautiful views of the ranges of mountains called Sierra de los Filabres, Sierra Alhamilla and Sierra de Gádor and unexpectedly we realised that the bay of Almería could be seen from several places. As we understood that getting to Montenegro would take us too long, we decided to get back and take another path which would take us to another village called Nacimiento. From there we could go on along river Nacimiento to Ocaña but after waling for more than half an hour along another path we couldn´t find the path to get to the village so we had to go back to the main path again and turned back to Ocaña. We saw a family of wild boars, a little lizard. There were pine trees, holm oaks, aromatic plants. We enjoyed the trip although we couldn´t get to the summit of Montenegro.
I thought a lot about the people who were running London marathon then, especially Nigel and Liz that I didn´t know if she had got over from her injury and taken part in it. We didn´t see any people outside the village except when we were arriving back that we saw a shepherd with his wife, dogs and a flock of sheet. We spent
seven hours and a half in all although we stopped to have breakfast and lunch. We must have done around
thirty kilometres. When we got to the village, we went to a bar where we had a cold drink and came back at 5.10pm to arrive home at around six pm.
Half an hour later, I saw José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero on TV announcing that the Spanish troops would leave Irak as soon as possible. I´ve never been in favour of that war but I think that he should have waited a little to see if UN take charge of the situation over there waiting at least until 30th June for the soldiers to come back.
