4 September 2016 Pico Lopera

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Phew! It’s hot, my newly cleaned and polished crystal balls were right in predicting dry sunny weather. I am sorry for the misunderstanding in last weeks email, it should have read “Olwyn has spent the last few days cleaning and polishing my crystal balls”. Some folks thought I had had a very good week, and that I had also found a new way to forecast the weather, neither of them were correct.
 Anyway we are having a heatwave, not an English heatwave of 22 degrees, this is a full on 44 degree Spanish heatwave.
 Because of the heat we had a short walk planned to Pico Lopera. We had an early 8.30 start from Cozvijar and stopped off in Padul to pick the Granada contingent up.
 There were 21 of us and a puppy for what is an easy walk in spectacular countryside.  The walk starts from the Mesón de los Prados, the little bar on the carretera de Cabra, and it follows a farm track through rolling countryside. We were lucky to see a family of Jabali out for their morning stroll, fortunately they did not appear too keen on getting to know us.
 There is only one short easy climb up to the fire lookout point at the top, it was still early and there was a nice breeze blowing and keeping the temperature down when we arrived. We stopped for our break and to enjoy the views which were superb. Reluctantly we had to leave, we had to get to the bar before the temperature climbed too high.  
 The bar is always changing hands, you never know what the service will be like. Sometimes they only have English style beer on offer. I don’t know about you but warm San Miguel just does not taste right, especially when it’s 35 degrees in the shade.  This time the staff were on the ball, delivering ice cold beer and vegetarian tapas, there were a few comments about this from the committed carnivores, but hey, who wants to eat the little piggys we saw running around.
 A good walk, just far enough for a hot day, and in the afternoon we went round to Frank and Jellie’s for tapas.

We walked 9.2 km and climbed 313 metres

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