Where’s Bertie? He’s spending a second night at the Aire at Les Coves de Vinromà.
Weather: Another gloriously sunny and warm day. The display outside the pharmacy, in the shade, said 22 degrees at noon, but I think that was about 2 degrees too optimistic.
Another cool night caused a slow start this morning, with neither of us eager to step out into the chilly air. By the time we set out at 0930 the sun was doing its job, although it was still another while before I divested myself of fleece and gloves.
With the nearby fords being underwater, we started out through the town to reach a causeway, then picked our way slowly back along the rocky path on the other side of the river, then on past the caves and on a good track for a distance. More slow terrain followed, but we didn’t mind as the surroundings got more and more impressive.
When the path petered out, the map told me we needed to ford the river which didn’t prove to be too difficult. I got a slightly damp big toe; Mick got a wet foot. The path on the other side then took us to a picnic area at an old mill, where the information sign told us some of its history, all of which I have now forgotten bar the fact that it was in use until 1930.
Other than the building and the semi-dam (which probably has a more technical name), we didn’t notice any of the other infrastructure here, but having crossed the water again (me dry-shod, Mick with a wet foot), we noticed what I’m going to refer to as the ‘mill race’ at the next one before we spotted that we’d just walked straight past the building. We were probably distracted by either path finding, or by the river, which really was quite spectacular at this point.
We’d hoped to reach a cave a distance further along, but the path takes to the river bed by then, which wasn’t feasible today, and we saw no alternative trodden line. What we did see was a big swimming hole, and I couldn’t resist. I wasn’t in it for many seconds, but did enough strokes to say that I went for a swim. It was certainly bracing, but the air was now warm enough that there was no shivering as I got out.
Our return was a retracing of steps, except that I wasn’t feeling inclined to repeat the trickiest ground between the caves and the town causeway, so once again we forded (me dry-shod, Mick got a wet foot). Having done that, we came to realise that we couldn’t then get back downstream to the caves, which in turn caused us to make our way up to the same viewpoint as we had visited yesterday, thence into town. A bonus, I would say, as if we had found a crossing point nearer to the caves, we wouldn’t have found ourselves within a minute’s diversion to a café that we’d seen, but had been shut, yesterday.
When Mick asked “How’s your coffee” a while later, I realised that I’ve become so accustomed to excellent decaf coffee being served at every establishment in Spain, that I’ve now got to the point where I don’t necessarily notice how good it is. The croissant here was big and deliciously fresh too, and the price such that if I hadn’t seen her add up the three items separately, I would have questioned whether she’d forgotten to add something to the bill (€3.90).
It was now afternoon, but we jogged straight past Bertie and went to look at the caves for which the town is no doubt named. How underwhelming! Apparently in 1947 a 10-year-old girl claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary in one of the caves, and reported that she had promised to return on 1 December and, as a sign, would turn day into night at 3 in the afternoon. News spread and an estimated 300,000 came to witness the event – or non-event, as nothing happened.
Our visit was also a non-event, as we’ve seen far more interesting caves elsewhere, and we didn’t find any rock art. I continued further along the precipitous path than Mick did, but returned with nothing more interesting to report. At least the rest of our outing had been excellent – if we had come solely for the caves it would have been disappointing.
Returning again to Bertie, we found there were now 8 motorhomes here (3 in the designated spaces, 5 outside; another has arrived since). Funny how there can be such peaks and troughs when there were only 4 last night.
This afternoon we have put a bit of thought into where we’re heading tomorrow, and it’s possible that we may have reached a conclusion. There are a couple of towns NW of here that I’d like to visit, but they are at 500+ metres, so they’ll no doubt be chillier than we want. We didn’t drive all this way for such a short period to be colder than in the UK!
Enticing pools below the dam
The infrastructure that alerted us that we'd just passed another mill.
I bet those well-dressed women on the table behind us appreciated our aroma!
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