El Barranco de Los Molinos walk

Yesterday I went for a nice longish walk organized by the center for adult education where I take spanish lessons. There was a goodish group of us going, mostly spanish-speaking students who are taking subject other than spanish (well, for sure). Unfortunately, our own classes shrank dramatically by the end of the year.

Anyway. It's a nice, mostly level and very easy walk, starting at a small hamlet of Las Parselas. From there you first go to the dam and reservoir of the barranco (ravine). From there you go to the bottom of barranco and proceed to the sea level at Los Molinos, even smaller place of about two buildings; one of them being a restaurant. Once you located the dam it's impossible to get lost.

 The barranco is supposed to catch the rain water and the reservoir to hold it; unfortunately, this winter there was no rain to speak of and the water level looks very low. Below the level of the dam, what water there is in the bottom of the ravine is the one that filters through the earth from the ditches that come from the reservoir. There was very little of this water yesterday, which was good from a walker's point of view. Probably not that great for anybody else though.

 Those horses observed with no interest whatsoever as we started on our walk, unlike the dog from the same farm. It barked and barked, but funnily, stayed beyond the symbolic line of his territory provided by the low earth barriers. The pic is somewhat overprocessed; the original taken against the light.

More pictures below; including one of a dead goat. You've been warned.

 I love those cloud shadows on smooth mountains.

 The live goats stare at you from the edges of the ravine; and there are few dead ones along the way. None of them was too gross, they look like they've been there forever, skin  dried to parchment.

 At one point the bottom of the barranco really start to resemble a canyon.

 A pair of egyptian vultures (guirre) was taken quite a lot of interest in our group. Poor things are probably tired of all this goat meat.

There is quite a bit of water closer to the sea. Although the water is originally rainwater, it carries so much stuff in it that you can see thick layer of salt  on the edges of the stream.

 That's probably the largest amount of fresh(ish) water I saw in one place of Fuerteventura so far. There are even tiny fishies in there; but I have no clue if they are freshwater, or saltwater, of  brackish water fish.

Apparently buses can't turn in the Los Molinos little dirt car park, so we went up this nice curve to meet our bus.

Now, the funny bit. Yesterday, almost at the very end of the walk, I spotted one of the organizers standing in front of a sign facing the opposite direction (i.e aimed at people who enter the ravine from the sea level), scratching his head. I stopped by him; he said that apparently the access was forbidden till the end of July, presumably for the nesting period. Since there was nothing we could do about it by then, and there was no sign on the end we entered, we just shrugged and walked the remaining hundred meters or so. Before going, I dutifully photographed the sign (as I do), without paying mush attention to what it actually said.

Well, when I was processing the pictures, I realized that there was two parts to it, one in spanish, saying "acceso cerrado al publico a traves del barranco" ("access closed for the public", unless I am badly mistaken), and one in english, saying "you are now entering area for protected birds. please remain quiet along this path". Is that odd or what? Kirill's interpretation, perhaps somewhat stereotypical,  was that maybe whoever issued that sign didn't believe that spaniards could possibly stay quiet. He might be right.

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inland Fuerteventura at shutterstock