Vilarrube

 A lovely frosty start to the day.

 

Just right for an afternoon walk on Vilarrube beach.

 

The dunes were looking good and totally deserted.

Wherever there was shadow there was frost but apart from that it looked like Summer.

No footprints in the sand looking East

Or West.

Lovely day for a paddle...

...if you are a boy.

And plenty of things to find...

Like hundreds of these.

Back home and the Jabali has been trimming the verges outside our garden.

Our last tomato is still struggling on, we get a few every few days not bad for late Dec.

Flying and a piggywiggy

Returning from the UK recently we caught a glimpse of Valdovino from the air, that is the main beach on the far right and that is the lagoon that you can't quite see bottom middle...I will try harder next time.

 

The nights are colder now, aubergines and peppers are on the compost heap after a well fought season,  there is still warmth in the sun when it shines and the citrus are setting some good new fruit, young and mature leeks are doing well and the first onion sets are in the ground. Brassicas are a sad mess succumbing or suffering grave damage from a multi-species caterpillar invasion however carrots, lettuce, beetroot etc are still growing well.

We had a visitor in the field adjacent to our house, vigorous shaking of sticks and shouting sent him back to the woods... must finish our perimeter fence soon.

As Pontes

About 20 mins drive inland from Valdovino is As Pontes, near As Pontes are two dams and two flooded valleys, the landscape is like this even when you are driving about in the hills looking for the lakes.

I had great fun trying to get at the water by driving along muddy little tracks, I found some great walking country but nowhere I could get at the water with a kayak.

Eventually gave up and went to the dam where there is an easy way in.

It was a lovely day to be on the water despite it being mid October my van was telling me it was 32C as you can see the water level is still very low.

 

10 mins of paddling and an abandoned village came into view.

Abandoned things fascinate me so I had to take a closer look. Someone had spent some time on the stonework, Back in Northumberland this would be a defensive slit for firing arrows through, here it is how they made windows in the bit of the house where the animals lived - at least that is what I have been told...its an awful lot of work for not a lot of ventilation or view in my opinion.

There were a lot of well made old bits and bobs left lying about.

And some nice driftwood.

An outcrop of rock in the village street had been well worn through by old cart/wagon wheels.

You can see the profile of the groove here.

 The view looking out of the window was not great either and that reveal does look like it would give a bit of room to manoeuver with a bow and arrow I don't think it was to let extra sunlight in being on the North side of the house.

This was taken looking vertically down on what appear to be two door pivots with a slate wall dividing them. There was not a lot of wear on the holes so they might have been joints in what used to be taller columns.

Looking back up the main street I was impressed by the amount of stone - somehow it seems to be more when it is all spilled around rather than stacked neatly in walls. Amongst the rubble are bits of lovely carved bowls and troughs.

Another path chipped into the natural stone leads off to a ridge then into the water that would have been a little stream far far below when the houses were in use.

There's my boat more made for the sea than a lake but it goes well enough.

And another boat left high and dry last winder in the gales I would imagine. You prob need to double click to see the boat.

Autumn crocuses growing on the banks.

A few trees to negotiate.

 Some lovely reflections on the way home, I did see a red squirrel pottering about but was too slow to catch it on film. It was very red and the same sort of size as an English red squirrel but had a very black tail.

As I got out of the water I spotted a cloud, in the few mins it took me to load up and set off the whole sky became covered and by the time I got home it was gray every where - great timing.

bit of a glow

Autumn weather is approaching, it is still mostly in the 20s and not much lower at night but it is getting a lot damper after a long dry spell, today was a day where blue skies battled with black clouds and downpours. The bonus is that the sunsets improve with a bit of cloud about.

More misty mornings

Something to bear in mind when looking for a new house anywhere in Galicia is the morning mist that often rolls across the landscape. We did not rent before we bought so we did not have the opportunity to spend time thinking about the local weather but were lucky our house is just above the mist. I don't think I would like to be a few hundred meters down the valley where every misty morning shrouds the houses in  veils of damp, lovely to look at in the distance but less so if you are sitting right in it.

The mist line seems to be about a field below where we are. It tends to clear as the sun rises but those first few hours of damp could be a tad depressing if you are not prepared for it.

Dentists

Another slight difference to the UK is that children do not get free dentistry in Spain three fillings and an x-ray came to over 200 euros today. We were told that in galicia they are not allowed to charge for extractions this does not seem to be the case according to the cost prediction we were given today.  We still have another 500 euros to spend on our 6 year old - something to factor in if you have children and are thinking of moving to Spain...the sunshine is not cheap and lots of the children have rotten teeth - we now know why.

School

Seem to be a bit different to UK schools although we are not fluent enough neither have we been there long enough to be sure that the observations below are absolutely how it is - this is how it seems to be... parents are not allowed to help out in class and teaching assistants seem to be absent too. They do do trips out to good places but they don't get people in for creative workshops only the odd sports display or poet.  Handwriting is in a complex convoluted style not at all good for our dyslexic boys and I struggle to read it myself, they start joined up writing aged 5. If they can't pass the writing test for both Galego and Castilian children are held back a year. No sign of any laptops for pupils either. Parents have to buy the course books, activity books and all pencils, plasticine, folders, files etc.- this cost us a little over 400 euros at the start of this term and we won't be able to claim any of it back although there is a means tested reimbursement scheme. The attitude is generally if you want to live here you and your children should have become fluent in Spanish and Galego before you left England....mostly the teachers seem to just talk to the boys in Spanish and let them get on with not getting the activities right. Our older boy was getting one session of coaching in Castilian per week but this does not seem to be happening yet this term, interestingly in Maths with its  pure universal and unambiguous language he is doing very well..likewise with musica and plastica.  There have been articles in the papers about lack of funding and lack of teachers for supporting the growing number of immigrant and special needs children. There was an organised protest today at the school about this and a few other issues. There are some lovely teachers and some frustrated teachers and they do their best given the poor funding and poor approach to providing support staff and teaching resources. There is no playing field only a small park for the little ones and  concreted outdoor and indoor areas the latter of which is incredibly echoey. Still the boys are settling in, they have some good friendships, are learning a lot about communicating and say they don't want to go back to England so we will push on for a while yet and see where the journey leads us.

Vilarrube

One of our favourite beaches Vilarrube playa, seen here looking down from Vilarrube village, is very sheltered lying on the North Edge of Valdovino, there are 2  rivers one at each end of the beach and a long stretch of sand between them.

There are some lovely trees on the walks from the car park to the beach, there used to be a whole village on the dunes, when the houses were removed many of the trees were left behind so there are apples, lemons, figs, walnuts, grape vines and a range of maturing ornamental trees and palms.

Sun and salt bleached walkways snake across the dunes they are a bit artificial but they take the weight of many feet and consequently the dunes are in good condition along the main routes.

Looking East towards the main estuary the dunes have remnants of wild stocks still flowering, lots of euphorbias, sea holly, a huge range of fine dune grasses and wafting on the wind that curryish aniseedy smell dunes from the North of France down through Spain and all around the Mediterranean have.

The beach is quiet, there are strong currents where the river twists and turns and pushes against the sand bar before it meets the sea and some fairly active sinking sand too. It is all fine as long as you are aware and don't be silly, it can be great fun swimming fast with the current and flying along or swimming against the current and going backwards. There is our stuff in a pile, a couple of people in the far distance and not a lot else looking this way and...

oh dear a few people at the busy end; ah well we managed to cope with the crowds.

Looking back at the town again it is perched on a fairly steep hillside as with most coastal villages here there have been a lot of new builds but most are in character family homes; high rises or rows of chalets are a rare sight outside of large towns.

flores

I planted a few brugmansia seeds from http://www.jungleseeds.co.uk/SeedOrders/index1.html around January, we weren't expecting any flowers this year as they say you have to wait two years for them to flower but one of them is like a small tree already and has been flowering well this week, the scent in the evening is wonderful quite citrusy. There are a fair few established plants in gardens near the coast but I am not sure how well it will survive the frosts up here 200m above the sea.

Misty mornings

We have been living in Valdovino province for just over a year now, we have found that misty mornings usually mean a hot day ahead, we have had a couple of days of much needed rain but this morning there is a lovely misty dawn; in the pic above you should just about be able to see our local church peeping through the mist and below the last of our sunflowers are now bearing seeds for the local finches to breakfast on while the mist slowly slips through the valley below us.

Lat night the landscape was reminiscent of Chinese paintings of misty mountains, I can almost like the eucalyptus trees in the mist they really come into their own.

Some things grow well here especially the weeds - these sunflowers were dwarf ones that should have topped out at 1.2 meters according to the packet - either I have shrunk to Cornish Piskey size or something was not quite right with their test plants...perhaps they used an elastic tape measure. Tomatoes do not seem to do very well we had a lot of plants and most were blighted during the late Spring some are still struggling on but we have no tomatoes yet, no shortage of aubergines, peppers, chilies and squashes though.

This is the view from Valdovino school playground looking out over the lagoon and beach, electricity is still done via overhead cables here so it is hard to see past them in a little photo but if you view it full size the distance is clearer. Beaches here are wonderful and usually very tranquil apart from about 5 weeks late July - August where the bits near parking can be swamped but still many of them are nowhere near as crowded as Sennen used to be when we lived there.