El Rocio - Definately NOT a One Horse Town!

After a few lovely days in Sevilla, the New Year brought along with it a new place to discover, namely La Aldea campground to pitch a tent and see the town of El Rocio and hopefully Donana National Park. El Rocio is located in the southwestern part of Huelva province, far away from the Costa del Sol resorts on the Mediterranean Sea. El Rocio is only 15 km from the water, but its the Atlantic Ocean and the area called Costa de la Luz. Its not an area frequented by tourists so...just the reason to go.

Arriving in El Rocio on New Years Day, after the longest 2-hour bus ride of my life (so far :-), it seemed not only did we end up in a completely different landscape and atmosphere but perhaps also another era. With the exception of the main road for traffic running between Almonte and Matalascanas - the town had no paved roads! Not a single one. Instead there were red/orange clay textured dirt roads, with a lot of puddles from the recent rains and, therefore, lots of pot holes too. I mean, there were ruts in the road that you could loose your car in! (Kind of reminded me of the roads outside Tblisi Meg :-). This pic was after a few days without too much rain, and still BIG puddles!
















Now now, I know my Dad is already thinking, that must be a terrible place to drive a car - you could easily loose your transmission in a puddle. Well Daddy-o, you are right! So what alternatives are there? Bikes? No. Scooters? No. Horses? Yep! Yes, the answer is horses! I never thought I would be in a town where you have to look both ways for horses before you cross the street (seriously, I forgot one night after a few Cruz Campo (beers) and nearly paid the price!).

And since there are lots of horses (and cars too, I am being a bit dramatic here) there are lots of places to park (is that the right word?) them - as you can see in this photo, Reserved for Horses.

















The 2 most impressionable images I have of this many-horse-town were:
1. A guy galloping down the road with a cowboy hat through town and talking on his cellphone
2. A family composed of what looked like grandpa, a few kiddos, and mom in a cart with a horse pulling them along the way. Grandpa was driving and singing some happy sounding song and the kiddos had big smiles on their faces

This photo isn't nearly as precious as #2 above but it was amusing, this one was blaring local music out a built in speaker in the back!















Aside from the monumental gift shop at the famous church (details in the post "El Rocio and its Famous Virgin) there were also far too many shops selling Flamenco dresses and cheap souvenirs mostly related to horses. We didn't buy any of it, well except for some postcards and a liter of locally made Manzanilla sherry. When I walked into this shop called "Sacristia de Donana", from the name of it I didn't know I would walk out with sherry, I thought it was a shop of religious artifacts or something.





















When we tried a sample of the manzanilla straight from a barrel and decided to buy some, we thought we'd get a bottle of it (in glass). This is what we got instead....














The good thing is that the sherry still tasted fine and (most of) it made it back safely to Copenhagen.