Spain Nature

I must confess I have no idea what type of mushroom this is, but I thought the photo was cool, I took it a few years ago, I don't even remember where, but the colour and mottled top are fantastic. And offset with the dark background makes the mushroom literally leap out of the screen.

Summer 2011 seemed to drag on forever, and even now in winter it feels more like autumn, I hope it doesn't mean we're going to have a cold wet summer this year. Here's a photo I took a while back of what things should look like here, but everything is green instead. I miss not having a proper autumn.

Yes, sunrise in Spain can be spectacular, and this is a photo I took in spring showing how incredible the sun can be. In real life this scene was even more golden than the camera is able to capture, it was like the gods themselves painted the sky with gold filament.

One of the delightful things about Ronda, and many other Spanish cities, is that the outskirts of town are often home to half-completed parks where I guess someone once thought it would be nice for kids and families to play. In Ronda, this is next to the abandoned swimming pool at the bottom of town.

Nobody ever goes to the pool anymore, it's been shut for a couple of years or more, so the park surrounding it is now only used by the local farmers to graze their animals, unfortunately nobody ever emptied the rubbish bins when the swimming pool closed, so vandals have trashed them (pardon the pun).

It's a sad indictment of our society that I can take a picture of a horse grazing amongst garbage, although to be fair to the horse it only wants to eat the grass, but why hasn't someone cleaned this up yet?

Yesterday saw us get up early for a walk in the Ronda countryside, there are some attractive wild flowers growing along the side of the road about 5km from where we live. Sadly most of them had gone, they won't be back until next year, but on the way home I stopped and took this photo. Believe it or not, we were walking along this very road and where it hits the base of that mountain is where we were headed. Hope you like it, summer in Spain can be gorgeous if you take the time to see the beauty around you.