The only true desert in Europe: Tabernas

Reaching Abla from an unintended and quite uninteresting angle might not have been so stunning, yet I find all the groceries that I wanted in the only shop open on a Sunday morning. Very satisfied pulling the trailer stuffed to its maximum capacity I enter a café to eat scrambled eggs and coffee, the two things I can’t prepare myself.

A red cheeked and Lycra clad overweight guy is plonked down besides his backpack. Another guy, slim and dressed in all the black synthetics he could find, friendly asks me whether I am on the camino. ‘Camino? Is there a camino? Like Camino de Santiago?’ I surprisingly blurt out. Apparantly I have hit the official trail from Almeria to Granada and I tell the friendly Frenchman that I walk on no trail but my own. He looks at my trailer and says: ‘You must walk on roads, is it not so?’ My answer is in alignment with his assumption and I add that I walk mostly on minor roads where is sometimes no traffic. He then sports a look that borders disdain. While his companion, a Dutchman, not in the best state of his fitness, looking inable and blubbery seems at the end of his capacity for today. ‘Why don’t you go to church, there is a mass at 11.00. We are hurrying to Sunday mass now’, says the Frenchman. I decline friendly, telling them I slowly walk to my very own cathedral Desierto de Tabernas, along paved main roads.

While doing so I notice the official trail sliding parralel to where I walk; on a discarded old main road next to the new highway. Sure, uninteresting but so is the trail going through dry riverbeds. I am very satisfied with the route so far and I do not feel I am missing out on anything that the official trail could offer me, not the least other pilgrims.

Another totally secluded camp spot makes it possible to wash myself. It is still below minus and when I am standing in the sun my washed body transmit steam. I feel clean. All my gear is dried while I prepare T-bone steak with wild rice and cashews. I leave cleaned up, filled up and am in such a gratifying mood that no hotel can match with. A feeling of wholesome and awesome washes over me (and it only works because Geo is supportive).

Counting the nights when I reach Desierto de Tabernas makes me excited but also impatient. The sound of the highway is constant and disturbing, like a radio that can’t tune in to any station instead only crackling. I feel I have made a mistake to choose the easy way and got stuck with 1.5 days along the highway. I am in such a hurry to get into the desert that while in it, though unofficial still, I choose the worst of routes. In fact, I need a rest, my pinky toe painful and blue and my right lung is hurting. My back is altogether stiff. I so desperately need a rest that the crackling radio makes me flap in all the wrong directions, as a bird shocked by a gunshot. My desire is so big, of years having missed out on deserst, instead choking closed forests, that I don’t take rest but aim straight at the heart of the labyrinth, an area that covers about 280 km². The heart where I can’t see the desert any longer.

I start ‘baking’ own bread again, as it becomes increasingly more difficult to find bread, also old bread isn’t great but these fresh paratha’s are always a treat.

Desierto de Tabernas hoovers around 400 meters in altitude at it’s lower levels. The highway is destructive, taking along with it all former life and structures and crosses straight through along with lots of traffic. I decide to make a big detour and skirt around and above the official Desierto de Tabernas.

After groceries and laundry in Gérgal I continue away from the official national park and as soon as I reach some height it becomes spectacular. The sound of the highway is gone and utter silence returned. Such a silence that is noticeable in the ears, leaving a vibrating feeling. The views are magnificent.

Unimaginable but so, where I camp are tiny saplings of trees transplanted with a protective casing around them. Some are trampled by hunters or wild goats. I thread careful between them.

Villages such as Castro de Olula are steep, filled with cats and situated fairy tale alike. Landscapes are local and remote and not much is to be had here.

The beauty is all around me, which ever direction I turn myself to. With hardly traffic around I perch myself on top of a hill overlooking Tabernas mid air. Being in need for rest but hardly ever able to accommodate enough food and water is not easy. With a spare tin of tuna fish and water found conveniently along the route, I calculate that with 20 kilometer downhill to Tabernas I am able to fetch food when I’d run out by the time I get there.

Spots always seem level when I arrive tired but they hardly ever are. I can’t lay on the sore part where my right lung is, leaving me less mobile while sleeping.

I have come to find an extremely good sort of tuna fish that doesn’t resemble cat food. It always takes time and luck to hit upon something good when you’re in a country unknown to you.

When you think about it, cooking with small pots, sleeping in a tent, being dirty and stinky, pimples appear and a smell absorbed by all the fabrics that are able to. I even sing out very loud (Elvis is great) and the little dances on the road are seen by no one as there is no one: than it is being the child. To not think, to be absorbed in the beauty, folded in by the surroundings, is not a skill but an essential force that happens. So needed and so treasured especially since I have the benefits of a home too, and foremost, a dear husband.

Is it not so that the places one goes to, the nature that one is in makes it special? Not necessarily because the surroundings are so. Mostly it is one’s mindset and emotions of the moment that beautify a natural surrounding.

Hardly any cars on the route I choose. I count 2 cars in the 11 kilometers I walk that day. They approach me slowed down and check whether I am in need of help. Next day only a few motorbikes drive to the top and turn around.

Being in the desert there’s no swaying of tree branches and therefor even less sounds than in a forest. Rabbits dot the landscape while the sun and the moon are both present in the early morning. It’s warmer already and I can see Tabernas, in between the two consecutive hills that separate me from it. Next morning after a good two nights rest, one I could much longer indulge in, I look forward to get to Tabernas. While breaking up camp the sound of the tentpoles remind me of when I was a child camping. They feel sweet, promising and carefree.

Recipe for paratha’s is in a separate post. More easy touring recipes are here.

‘I don’t like to be among normal people’, says Alex, who shakes my hand when we meet, a soft, hardly touching but extremely clean hand. ‘I like people like you more,’ he says and I wonder how he sees me? He has asked me what I am doing here and I answered that I am in need for sunshine and therefor walking in Spain and now looking for a spot to camp. I could not come up with any thing else than the truth as having reached the desert of Tabernas. Earlier on I managed to wash my hair and feet in an irregation channel and loaded up on food and lots of water to sit out the pain in my back, concluding it as latissimus tendon overuse. It is late in the afternoon and I had expected no one out here, not the least a guy holding a tin of beer and wearing sort of vizor sunglasses that reflect a rainbow of colors while hiding his eyes. Really cheap looking sunglasses for pimp figures. A pimp he is not but a homeless and while we are talking I try to asses him. I mean, we are both in a desolate area where I was certain no one else would be and now I stand here with a guy drinking beer. ‘I have a camp spot a bit further, you may camp there. I have cardboards, that’s softer to sleep on,’ offers Alex. I decline friendly while still thinking about his remark ‘normal’. Not that I feel superior, only more… normal. I wonder at once: does a husband and a home makes me very different than him? I conclude it does in terms of circumstances. Naturally I’d added this information very soon so that I wouldn’t be seen as a lone drifter.

He offers to haul my trailer up the hill since the muscle in my back snapped when I was making a harsh turn while searching for a camp spot. I complained to him about my tiredness and pain as it is always pleasant to complain to a real person. Alex, some years younger than me, is very friendly and he seems genuinely helpful but I am still a small female and aware of my fragile looks. All I have now is my wit and I haven’t even seen his eyes, often the telltale sign if someone is to be trusted. When the chance come I ask him to take his sunglasses off so I can judge his personality. He does so and a pair of lightly intoxicated, burdened eyes appear. While our conversation moves to Orgiva and I mention the many alcoholics and addicts we soon have a more heated talk where I see myself becoming a preacher of how people do not need drugs or alcohol. He confides with me he uses cocaine now and then because he finds that a natural thing to do. He argues cocaine is natural while I remind him that the natural went through a chemical process. Well into half an hour of talking to this stranger I decide I should not let my tiredness and painful back interfere and smoothen the talk to where we can part with a friendly goodbye. The last thing I want is arguing about substances I know nothing about.

Often I change spots when I stay more than 1 night as usually I am laying uncomfortably unlevel.

Of course I did not want Alex to know where I would set up camp and I must have succeeded as I am able to spend 3 nights in the same marvelous spot. Being it slightly a dip I am sheltered, even able to get some stretches in to work on the painful overused muscle. Thanks to Alex his long term being in this area, and his knowledge about which houses that dot the area but aren’t in use, made me feel more at ease.

While searching for a spot I frantically try to capture what I see. I feel I do not succeed, instead I make a wrong move and pain shoots into the already sore latissimus muscle. Being it past 5 o’clock I feel I need to hurry up. My situation is worsened when Alex walks into view, just when I walk the plains, the trailer left on the path.

Alex walked with a small backpack and a plastic bag stuffed with a pillow. He carried an empty 10 liter water bottle and a beer tin, I notice later, that he forgot to take along. He does not own a tent and sleeps on cardboard while having his belongings securely stashed in a spot in the Tabernas desert. All together it adds up to over 70 kilogram, he said and I wonder how he will ever carry that? For now, he is traveling to a job interview, a teacher or translator job that requires Spanish and English. I hope he gets the job, his mom being American and his dad Spanish, Alex speaks both languages fluent. We all have a story, some experiences bad luck due to unstable parents, wrong friends or being uncapable of making sound decisions.

Trespassing is not okay and making fires is very risky (imagine setting the area on fire will make you aware). However, with a bottle of water I attend the small fires at all times and usually start one when I stay in camp for two nights or more. I raise up stones around the pit or dig a well. Afterwards, I pee on the embers to fully extinguish and place the sand back on top. The blackened stones I put back where I found them. I leave no dirt, not a piece of dental floss nor tuna tins.

Being in Tabernas to stock up means first groceries, fill up on water, laundry and getting a few coffees while embroidering. By the time this is done I am over-sensitized and need to retreat to quietness again. Spanish people are LOUD!

The Tabernas desert has served as shooting ground for more than 170 productions, including movies such as Cleopatra and Lawrence of Arabia. I pass them, even though most areas have a signboard not to trespass.

Entering Tabernas wasn’t exactly beautiful, with it’s abandoned little structures, some collapsed, some taken over by optimistic Europeans. Caravans here and there, watchdogs barking, a mishap of things like couches, old cars and land forgotten to work, plastic sheets flap in the wind. Tabernas is filled up with tourists occuping the café’s and cafeteria’s, most of whom give plentiful, according Alex, because he has run low on money and needs to beg.

I walk into the wasteland to search for a spot, which appears much more of a challenge than I expected. Signboards come into view with a prohibition against camping and camp fires. I am now in a truly magical landscape and it makes me instantly delirious, a feeling I keep for the 9 days that I am in Desierto de Tabernas.

Having been to this area before with Geo, I knew what to expect: not a desert of yellow sand and high dunes but a darker colored seemingly hostile soil with greenish shrubs and overlapping mountains that fold into each other. I am simply excited to be under it’s dome of beauty and enveloped by it’s surrounding.

After 3 nights full rest I am off to another camp spot. My injury is a lot better but not at all over, so… off to more rest.

Having seen me embroidering in some photos, these are the makings. Very satisfied with the results, see more in shop Pouch Spanish Slate.

Pouch Spanish Slate came forth from the stones I walked and sat on. It was without thinking things through that this started to form very quickly, more in this post. Two more creations came forth while walking Spain.

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