Spain Again 6, Laguna de Fuente de Piedra (The Stone Spring)

Well I’m going to try and make this simple. Geology is not my strong point and visiting it was much simpler.

Basically it’s a shallow lagoon in a geological basin (so surrounded by mountains and hills where, water flows in and evaporates leaving salt deposits which have been exploited by ancient people, Romans, Moors and generally right up to the last century. There is a Spring in the nearby town (probably 16th century) of the same name (we didn’t know this at the time) that water had been used over centuries to cure kidney ailments. This all said, our kidneys were complaining about the lack of toilets and coffee shops in this ‘one horse town’. After a one and half hour drive, it all seemed rather shut.

That’s not why we visited though, we went to see the Lagoon and it’s most famous migrants, Flamingos.

Between 1930 and 1951 attempts were made to eradicate the flamingos which were believed to be preventing the salt from crystallising. In 1951, salt extraction was stopped.

Even the visitor center was shut! Anyway after a packed lunch and a short walk to a fairly dried up lagoon we saw a huge noisy flock. These pictures were through my binoculars.

It was glorious! The sun shining flowers, birds of all types, waders, ducks and songbirds. The latter we were able to identify with the Merlin App (definitely recommend it!). The ducks were identified by some birdwatchers as I was mystified, Marbled ducks and ruddy Pochard. We saw some very bright dragonflies too.

It was quite magical!

There were a series of smaller and some deeper pools and I was surprised to see flamingos sitting on the water like swans (they may have actually been standing of course) and one very comical one upended with it head and neck in the water and spindly legs bent out of the water.

Margaret took this video of feeding, watch till the end.

I think we could have watched the Flamingos all day it was that special.

Our day didn’t end there. After this we drove to the town of Antequera and to some ancient burial mounds, Dolmens. A UNESCO  world heritage site. It is free to enter but you still need to enter a very modern building to get a ticket. Then you walk around a Teletubbiesque hill which was full of wild flowers and then enter quite an impressive stone doorway into a very underwhelming room. After 5 seconds we moved to the next mound that looks over a sacred mountain resembling a face ‘Pena de los Enamorados’ this is a much larger chamber which was impressive just for the size of the megaliths alone and the way it was constructed.

These Dolmens are about 2500 to 6000 years old and although I sound dismissive I’m really not. They are neolithic and bronze age and part of the spectacular area including El Torcal that I visited this year with Alison’s family.

Antequera looks an interesting town but we only stopped a short while for dinner in the Square. Two Euro glass of wine (very good Chris informs me)and ice-cream before heading back to Nerja To get ready for an early start the next day!!!