Deserd Avenue

One for the Correctors Union’s hunt-the-error day today. This torrent lined with Andalusian auto-construction on the edge of Planas de Vallvidrera is gradually being overrun by wild boar: I imagine things got rather like this when the Romans left Britain.

Archaeological highlights of walk along old Hispanic military frontier

From the baldie: Some unusual Neolithic rock paintings. Apparently the locals used to take tourists to visit them and, to improve their colour and line, throw buckets of water over them. Once almost everything had been washed away, the authorities acted with characteristic firmness, building a 4m wall-with-spikes around the complex. The locals now explain…

Inventing al-Andalus

MM has kindly mailed the story of an illegal from Mali found climbing one of the Sierra Nevada’s major peaks in flipflops. Jorge Rodríguez’z story in El País, plagiarised by Elizabeth Nash for The Independent, has Anthony Braxton Tony Brascons making the same journey in reverse undertaken in sandals by Judar Pasha, who they describe…

Unchartered territory

I didn’t know you could charter bits of Morocco (via Felix@Morocco Time), but then, unlike Isabel Choat, I’m not on a Grauniad account ;-) More on Moroccan vices and prices from Cat in Rabat, who ain’t got a cook neither.

Spot the donkey

Spot is a dog. (Dear agent, I also do other barnyard animals, as well as goldfinches, linnets and horny pussycats.)

Communal herding arrangements in the Pyrenees

The sheep and goats above have just arrived back in Plan from low pastures to spend the summer in the mountains, rather like schoolchildren coming back from a language exchange. Joaquí­n Costa’s Colectivismo agrario en España (1898), available in full on Corde, contains a number of accounts of communal herding arrangements in the Pyrenees: The…
The sheep and goats above have just arrived back in Plan from low pastures to spend the summer in the mountains, rather like schoolchildren coming back from a language exchange. Joaquín Costa's Colectivismo agrario en España (1898), available in full on Corde, contains a number of accounts of communal herding arrangements in the Pyrenees:

Gerald Brenan’s children

Unusually, the Spanish entry is more complete than the English one, mentioning the numerous illegitimates he fathered in Yegen, so numerous, in fact, that it is said that he resisted returning for fear of finding more. Was their omission from South from Granada an editorial decision, or was that just the way the upper classes…