Day 17: El Ronquillo to Sevilla

March 6, 2025

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We had another look at our little house, and realized that it is actually a part of a literally block long building. This style of construction creates the possibility that we lead our bikes down a block long corridor, reaching a patio somewhere - as happened the other day.

Looking at first at our blue house, we didn't realize how much additional building was connected to it.

Outside the house, while looking at how big it actually was, we spotted lots of really cute swallows.

The swallows will readily be accepted in our bird list on eBird. But eBird will really choke on the beautiful turkey that lives next door!

Don't listen to eBird, we think you are a good bird!

It was about 10°C when we set off, which is not too cold. But out on the road there was for the first time a lot of mist in the dehesa. Come to think of it, this was probably not related to the temperature exactly, but to the fact that we had entered some quite extensive mountains. We naively thought this was pretty nice, and started taking photos of the road, the hills, and the mists.

We began to smell a rat about these mountains and mists when the road decided to climb some of them.

Our road decided to climb here. That's the newer Autovia over on the left.

Waah, this climbing thing is getting out of hand!

At this point on the road they are only claiming a 6% slope. Trucks are still warned to use low gears for going down.

Despite, or perhaps because of the hills, our road is heavily used by Lycra cyclists. Over some stretches, there were more cyclists than motorists. We, however, were the only loaded touring cyclists.

Despite climbing, we had time to appreciate a nice horse moment.

Portugal became rather famous with us for hills, so we were not surprised to see that it was close by.

Now on the other side of the mountains, we began to see things consistent with warmer and sunnier conditions. Solar farms are an example of this. calling them farms seems right, because there are large fields of panels, covering the landscape.

The panels cover the landscape, just as if they were a field of grass.

Here we see oranges, presumably Seville oranges, for sale by the bag at the roadside.

This next one was unusual - a horse drawn cart. It moved along more slowly than our cycle speed, but we didn't pass, so as not to spook the horses. They did spook with an oncoming bus, and there was almost a collision. We took the lane behind the horses, and lots of cars were behind us. They usually had no way to pass, but there was never an issue of any road rage.

These were definitely not racing horses!

The last time we were at Sevilla we must have entered another way, because we did not remember it as a huge, busy, and basically ugly place. Rather we remember the cathedral, the royal palace, and the old Jewish quarter. So it was a bit of a revelation as we crawled through really a lot of just general, universal, urban roads and buildings. This was not the ring of car dealers thing, but just "city". Have a look:

It's not car dealers here, just roads and apartment buildings, I guess.

One hopeful sign was what looked like the city wall. If we could breach that, we might be out of the traffic!

Yes, we took a turn and suddenly the traffic noise was gone! We had dived into the Santa Cruz barrio - the former Jewish quarter. The streets were gratifyingly narrow. In fact a lady looking at her cell phone and walking down the "street" totally blocked us up. We finally got around her to take this photo:

We have arrived at our hotel. It's called Patio Santa Cruz, which is a reference to the name of the barrio.

Up on the wall by the hotel was an inscription in Hebrew, clearly a remnant from the old days. Google Translate gives the rather inexplicable rendition of this as "He shall shed his head". We have no idea where that might come from. Any real Hebrew scholars out there?

As we might have expected in the tight confines of the neighbourhood, our room was teeny tiny, and the hotel also had no place for the bikes. So, we crammed the bikes into the small room. It was fine.

Our well located but not so luxury spot in Sevilla.

Once we had cleared up the mess on the bed (in the shot above we are already half cleared) we sallied out to make sure we could find the pickup spot for tomorrow's bus tour to Gibraltar.

We are out on the largest street adjacent to the small alleyways.

Mothers and kids are enjoying the park on the way to the pickup point.

The park had some old and impressive trees.

There were five little girls on skates in this troupe, but Dad, in a funny hat. Again, we don't really know what the occasion is for all the fun.

In the park, a statue commemorates 1492, and Fernando, the king that authorized Columbus' journey.

We ran into these Flamenco street performers. It's really dramatic. We think we recognize this dancer from last year.

The Flamenco performance really helped it hit home that we have truly arrived in Sevilla. In coming here, we had the fun of running down part of the Via de la Plata, and passing through some really beautiful countryside. The tour so far has been great!

Epilog. One thing not so great - we opened our computer to find a message from the bank warning of possible fraud in our VISA account. And yes, seven or more charges had been run through today, from some kind of ride sharing services. We phoned the bank, and got to wait 50 minutes on the long distance line to talk to them, and cancel the card. Then we phoned Booking.com, who anyway have to be the source of the problem since Booking is all we use the card for. Booking informed us that we have to go into each of our remaining 75 bookings and manually change the credit card away from the one we have now cancelled. Very nice.

We cut up the old card - demonstrating that for a long trip you need more than one card, from more than one institution..

Today's ride: 50 km (31 miles)
Total: 474 km (294 miles)

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Scott AndersonSorry about the card headache. Where were you carrying it? It might not be Booking’s fault. The last time this happened to us, I’m convinced the number was skimmed from my wallet in my pocket by a card scanner.
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4 weeks ago

Steve Miller/GrampiesTo Scott AndersonDoubtful. We have RDIF blocking wallets/cases which the cards are stored in. This is actually the third time this sort of thing has happened, each time after a month or so of European travel where the only thing the cards are used for is prepayment of Booking reservations. Very aggravating!
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4 weeks ago

Karen PoretIt’s a new ( to us) VISA thing. We had it happen to us twice in one week ( two different bank accounts, but both VISA) and then another neighbor had a APPLE scam on her email which, unfortunately several “friends” chipped in not knowing the email was fraud. Good ol’ AI is my thinking..
Frustrating is not strong enough of a word for this.
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4 weeks ago