Day 2 - Puerta Real to Jerez de la Frontera (15 miles)

Yesterday evening, after relaxing from my walk, I headed out to investigate the town. Puerto Real is a place of neat, tidy streets and interesting ironwork on the building's windows; maybe this harks back to the days when it was a shipbuilding centre (although it doesn’t give the impression of industrialisation), days long since past. Now it might have a different claim to fame: I read that it is the only place in Europe where you can find chameleons. 

Another fifteen miles down and I am now in Jerez de la Frontera - a large city in a region famous for its wine - having left Puerta Real in darkness at 6.30am in an effort to avoid the worst of the day’s heat. Apart from one narrow street full of traffic, I assumed heading towards the main road and bridge to Cadiz, the town was deserted. Within an hour I was on a wide track cutting through trees and shrub in the Torunos National park with urban Andalucia seemingly a world away; the rhythmic crunch of my boots on gravel and various bird song and calls were my only accompaniment, while ahead I watched the sky change from steel grey to ribbons of pink and finally to a glass-clear blue and the promise of sun and heat later in the day. It was an agreeable way to start the morning.

For two hours I enjoyed this rural tranquility, crossing the San Pedro river on a rickety wooden bridge, looking downstream to the estuary - Cadiz port, its suspension bridge and a couple of cruise liners small and distant - and then heading to where the park's edge met the urban region of the town of Puerto Santa Maria (from where Columbus started his first voyage to the New World). An uninspiring hour followed, walking the road that skirted the town, busy with traffic and nothing but commercial buildings; soulless, concrete and utilitarian. The fact that breakfast was the highlight sums up that particular stretch, a breakfast eaten by the side of another busy roadside after crossing the river Guadalete into Puerto Santa Maria.

Once out of town, a steady three hundred foot climb alongside a forest of stunted and scrappy pines took me over the high ground that separated Santa Maria from my destination. I was met with a cooling breeze and views of industrial Andalucia in the distance on one side, farmland the other, while ahead on the horizon I could see the white, heat-hazed scar of Jerez de la Frontera some six miles distant.

Those last six miles were on a dusty track paralleling the region's main north-south motorway. Fortunately for the most part it was on an embankment, slightly above me and out of sight, although sadly not earshot. By 11.30am I had reached the very outskirts of the city but it was to be another disheartening hour of street walking before I made the centre and my hotel for the night. I am now rested and fed and my accommodation for tomorrow night is sorted. Having checked tomorrow’s forecast and noted temperatures of 27 degrees later in the afternoon I think my morning start will be even earlier than today’s.