Day 23: El Rocio to Sevilla

March 12, 2025

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Even though neither the room nor the breakfast is particularly luxurious, I rather like the Donana Palace, with its large courtyard and elegant staircase. I also like the stained glass portrayal of the Virgen of Rocio, which you see again below.

I took the picture again, because I just noticed the background elements, like the Stone pines, the flowers, and the people coming in ox carts.

The ox carts are an interesting touch, though as far as we have seen people only come in horse drawn carts.

The wind had totally died, and the rain held off today, giving as very different feel as we left the Donana Palace and headed out along the lake shore. The lake was very calm, and it seemed we should now see a lot of birds. But this time we were not really looking, as it was truly time to get out of town.

Yesterday Scott identified our flight of birds as Gannets, which we gladly accepted, because these actually added to our Life List! Today there were (not surprisingly) further birds up in the sky. Merlin made these out as Yellow Legged Gulls.

We once again strolled along the lakeside walk, finding it beautiful and enjoyable as always.

Pope Jean Paul II seems to have travelled the most of any recent pope, and we see statues of him all over. There is one at the lake side, and it was touching to see that today it had fresh flowers.

There is also a water source or maybe horse trough by the lake, and this features a brightly painting titled "The Divine Shepherd". It seemed cute enough to put in here:

We set off, at first along the route we had used to come in. This passes by very many greenhouses, of mostly strawberries. I took the trouble this time to have a closer look at them, and found many to be ripe. Dodie vetoed any sampling, citing moral grounds. I agreed, but mostly because of all the workers' cars parked nearby!

Our road at this point was good, and was passing by dehesa type landscape, but with pine rather than oak.

Also enjoying the dehesa were a lot of brown cows. They seemed interested in us, and I did see a spot where I could get close enough to have a chat with them. This time, though, I decided to give them a break.

We also passed some orange groves, where workers were harvesting by hand with ladders. It would seem there could be a faster, machine way to do this, but since the trees have fruit in various stages of ripeness, perhaps a person really has to make a judgement on each one.

See the picking bag? That could be helpful for apple picking back home.

Our first major town along the way was Villamanrique. It was a fairly picturesque, but dusty small town, reminding me a lot of Mexico.

By the church was a digital countdown timer (came out black in the photo) showing the time remaining to the town's major parades by the parade botherhoods.

Looking to avoid a too long slog back to Sevilla, we hoped our precalculated track would offer good enough roads and less traffic. No such luck. Out of Villamanrique we tried our track, but ran into sand.

It would have been 10 km of sand, going forward this way.

We headed instead up near Aznalcazar, where the road was paved and we even picked up a few km of bike path near the town.

Nice bike path, but it didn't last long.

We stopped near the roundabout pictured below and ate some sandwiches, while reading the English bit of an info panel that had been installed there. The panel waxed poetic about Aznalcazar's bond with the Donana region. In fact as you see below, they claim to be the heart of the region. You can also see the linx logo. The linxes here are a real thing, and most roads have linx crossing warnings.

Aznalcazar did make a bit of an effort on bike lanes, as did nearby towns. But more often than not, these would simply stop. Like the one shown below, which does not even offer an exit to the road for abandoned cyclists.

We drew abreast of the spot where we would have come out had we chanced that apparent 10 km of sand, and yes there was sand at this end as well.

The tractor seems like the appropriate vehicle for this bit of our track.

Although from this point forward, sand or mud or flooding was not an issue, we had entered an essentially urban zone. Roads looped around this way and that. We did find quite a few bikeway pieces, but these were on again off again, and frequently changed sides of the street, only to change back. It was stop and go riding, which is actually quite tiring. On the other hand wind was not a factor, and our bikes had plenty of battery.

We arrived at Sevilla, using the passerelle shown, to cross a big highway, and bridges with bike ways to cross the two rivers. This was followed by quite a bit of noodling, first through the Remedios barrio and then our own Santa Cruz barrio, before arriving back at the hotel we had left five days earlier.

This piece of bike infrastructure was quite nice, for crossing a big road.

The hotel, Patio de Santa Cruz, is lacking most things that would have made our homecoming comfortable. The room (same as before) is very tiny and there is no bike storage, so the bikes are in with us. We had to turn the handlebars to make it work. There is no included breakfast, and no window. The only thing going for the place is the location, very close to the cathedral, or in our case, very close to the pickup point that had been part of the Gibraltar tour.

The forecast shows 100% chance of heavy rain for tomorrow, so here we go again! This tour is certainly keeping us on our toes. Where or when will be the lazy pedaling in the sunshine we came to Spain for?

As we now head for Cordoba and Granada, we are launching what might be called the fourth phase of the trip. There was La Plata, then Gibraltar, and then Donana. Each phase has been super interesting, and I guess we are glad we came!

Today's ride: 72 km (45 miles)
Total: 678 km (421 miles)

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