A strawberry tree

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Lovely walk in the wild limestone massif of the Serra del Garraf just southwest of Barcelona. The strawberry trees (madroño in Spanish, arbocer/arboç in Catalan) were laden with fruit. They have a reputation of being a bit dull – their scientific name Arbutus unedo is Latin for  “I only eat one”) but these were sweet and tasty enough so I had about 30.

Popular knowledge has it that if you eat too many madroños you get drunk. The Portuguese have a prized madroño liquor (medronho) but I haven’t tried it yet.

A bear feeding on a strawberry tree is also the symbol of the city of Madrid.

They’re also known as arbustus trees in English.

Cap de Creus

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Cap de Creus, where the Pyrenees ends, falling into the sea in a riot of schist and fantastical erosion. Last year’s sky swept clean by the Tramuntana wind, crystal clear light. Salvador’s childhood landscape, Dalí’s dreamscape.

Spanish mermaid

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They write from Galicia in Spain that some fishermen lately took on that coast a sort of monster, or merman, five feet and half long from it’s foot to its head, which was like that of a goat. It has a long beard and moustaches, and black skin somewhat hairy, a very long neck, short arms, and hand longer than they ought to be in proportion to the rest of the body: long fingers like those of a man, with nails like claws, very long toes, joined like the feet of a duck, and the heels furnished with fins resembling the winged feet with which painters represent Mercury.

From Scots Magazine 1739.

Ice wells in Fuendetodos

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Impressive ice well in Fuendetodos, birthplace of Goya. One of ~1000 in Aragón, Catalonia, Valencia, Murcia Built during the Little Ice Age (C16-19th) they were big business in Eastern Spain. Ice wae collected over winter in sierras, stored and shipped to the cities until the early C20th when technology rendered them obsolete.

It goes without saying that climate change has rendered them ultra-obsolete. So little snow falls in these places in the heating 21st century.

Frozen Ebro

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The River Ebro frozen at Tortosa, Catalonia, near its mouth. 1891, at the end of the so-called Little Ice Age. You’d have thought not much chance of this happening again for the foreseeable future, although climate sciencists say with heating world in chaos such cold snaps are also very possible.

Brown bear cub

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Esbardu. A lovely Asturian word meaning bear cub.
Some 370 brown bears now live in the Cantabrian mountains, on a steady path to recovery after a a nadir at the turn of the century.
Photo. @fundacion_oso_pardo

The Cantabrian bear population is distributed across the autonomous communities of Asturias, Cantabria, the Castillan regions of León and Palencia, as well as in recent years a small part of Lugo I. Galicia. Historically, the population declined until the late 20th century, but a recovery period began in the mid-1990s and continues to this day.