Tuesday was a Fiesta Day in Castile y León (a Bank Holiday). We awoke to find several caravans arriving, some quite early and others throughout the morning, so we expected a noisy Fiesta night ahead. Wrong! By evening everyone had disappeared, leaving us completely alone, the only campers down in the woods by the lake. We like peace and quiet but I (Vivien) think a noisy Fiesta night might have been better than being completely alone in such an out-of-the-way place; John, however, was quite happy about it and it meant we could let the dogs off the leads for a run. Spanish campers had used the day to “set up” their caravan pitches for the summer ahead, for holidays and weekends. Others who had been here over the weekend also left today. One young couple who John helped placing his van on the next pitch to us said that he was putting it there until October.
We decided to go off for a picnic lunch. We drove to the “Casa del Parque” an impressive information centre where we spent a while learning about the flora and fauna of the region e.g. otters, martins, eagles,
Little waterfall on the Rio Terabuzzards and wolves. We have already seen quite a few golden eagles as well as black and white buzzards flying about. To see the wolves one needs to go higher up country on a guided tour “wolf watching”. There are still quite a few wolves in Northern Spain and also still a limited number of Brown Bears, in León and the Picos de Europa. We watched a film about this most endangered of species at the Casa del Parque. This surprised us. We knew there were wolves but thought that the bears had all been hunted out back in the 1930s when bear hunting was all the rage; not so. There are still some left. We were lucky to see Brown Bears in California in 2008. Who knows, maybe we shall see some when we get to the Picos in May!
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