A body of water, about 1200 yards long and 600 across,
surrounded by hills, just south of the village of Caracuel. There’s water
around here if you look for it. Not enough, or not the right kind to irrigate
the crops and provide drinking water everywhere without a great deal of
infrastructure, but I leave the engineering to those who understand how to do
it, pay my taxes (rather grudgingly) to pay for it, and thus have the luxury of
seeing water aesthetically rather than functionally. Only the farmers worry
about it these days, since the engineers and the taxpayers have done their job
well enough for the rest of us.
Caracuel is a tiny village with no apparent purpose, except
that it’s at just the right distance from here to do a bit of cycling to. Now
it’s like many such villages, a good place to come from, or better still, for
your parents to come from. That way you get to grow up somewhere more
interesting, but you have a house in the country to go to for quiet weekends.
Once you’ve passed 30 you appreciate that.
There is a castle on a hill above the village, a small Moorish
construction that is mostly ruined. It’s probably worth the climb up a least
once, but is probably visited mostly at night by the young who can doubtless find
a number of uses for it. As did the Arabs, I expect.
The lake was covered with coots. Hundreds, probably
thousands. Ducks of several kinds, small white herons which are very common
here, and a few hawks of the kind that like voles and fish and are often found
near water, but mostly coots. The photo shows this clearly.
We take what we can get here, so collections of waterfowl
have good entertainment value. And the road is hard on the knees, but sweet on
the eyes.
No comments:
Post a Comment