标签西班牙下的文章

云下的麦田，西班牙巴利亚多利德 Wheat field against cloudy sky, Valladolid, Castilla y León, Spain (© Carlos Javier García Prieto/EyeEm/Getty Images)

Fields of Castile

What you can see today in our image is a wheat field in the province of Valladolid, northwest Spain, cut out under the Castilian sky. We show you this because now is taking place the harvest season in most of the country. And also because on this day in 1875 was born Spanish poet Antonio Machado, whose master piece is called ‘Campos de Castilla’ (Fields of Castile).

Machado wrote it during his stay in Soria, not in Valladolid (both provinces belong to the same region), and managed to portray with extraordinary fidelity the personality of the rural Castilians, with their weaknesses and virtues, as a metaphor of the whole country. As long as he described dozens of landscapes as the one you can see in the picture.

Las Catedrales beach, Galicia, Spain (© Davide Seddio/Getty Images)

The mystery of As Catredrais

The beach of As Catedrais (The Cathedrals) we show you in our picture is one of the most beautiful and mysterious in northern Spain. It’s on the Way of Saint James (Camino de Santiago), very close from Galician town of Ribadeo, and its real name is Aguas Santas beach (Holy Waters). Everybody calls it The Cathedrals because of the arches growing from the sand tongue, which look like the buttresses of a Catholic church. They’re supposed to be natural carved by the action of salty water and wind over millions of years. And the most superstitious locals belive there’s a door in this place connecting with the beyond.

However, all these theories and legends could collapse like a house of cards If it was not the sea, but the man, who carved the rock long time ago. Or at least, if both, men and nature, worked together to form this landscape. A group of expert geologists maintain from some years now these arches and caves are not natural but the remains of an ancient Roman gold mine. They refer to archaeological studies confirming the presence of this civilization in the area looking for gold, and believe certain capricious forms of the stone suggest the action of men rather than nature or spirits.

La Pertusa教堂，西班牙莱里达 Hermitage of La Pertusa, Lleida province, Spain (© bbsferrari/Getty Images)

A hermitage with a view

If this vivid landscape has you feeling pulled into the photo, take a deep breath before you look right or left. Or maybe just fix your gaze on the medieval brick ruin ahead—the Hermitage of La Pertusa in northern Catalonia, Spain. Glance sideways and you'll be greeted by sheer vertical drops to the basin of the Canelles Reservoir, across which lies the region of Aragon—historically a powerful kingdom that ruled Catalonia and much of the Mediterranean.

An actual visit to this spot would require traversing a steep, rocky trail to the narrow outcrop that hosts the hermitage, once the chapel of a long-collapsed Romanesque castle. But imagine the reward: a vista of the beauty Catalonia offers beyond busy Barcelona.

正在照看花草的孩子和祖父铜雕，西班牙科尔多瓦 (© David M G/Alamy)

拉斯梅德拉斯的古罗马金矿遗址，西班牙莱昂 Ancient Roman gold mining site of Las Médulas, León, Spain (© DEEPOL by plainpicture/David Santiago Garcia)

The largest gold mine of the roman empire

This landscape might look natural, but it is not. At least not at a 100%. What you can see in our picture today is Las Médulas Cultural Park, in León, Spain, an ancient roman gold mining site which was as well the largest open pit one of the whole Empire.

Romans started exploiting it in the 1st century and continued doing so for 150 years at least. They removed more than 500 million cubic meters of earth and transformed the landscape forever. To extract gold they dug a complex system of tunnels inside the hills and then poured water in it to fragment the rock. It is estimated that more than 20.000 people worked in this site.

The exploitation was definitively abandoned in the 3rd century, and from that moment nature recovered what was its own. Oak trees and holm oaks grew again, and hundreds of chestnuts trees were planted. Wildlife includes roe deers, wildcats and boars, among other species.

悬崖边的福门托尔角灯塔，西班牙马略卡岛 Formentor lighthouse at the tip of Cap de Formentor, Mallorca, Spain (© Lasse Eklöf/DEEPOL by plainpicture)

The meeting point of the winds

We're at the northernmost tip of Mallorca's rugged Cap de Formentor, a seven-mile long slab of rock that's home to one of the most picturesque lighthouses on the Mediterranean Sea. Built atop this Spanish island in 1863 at 689 feet above sea level, the beacon still shines (by solar power now), protecting ships from the rocky coastline below. The wild and rugged Cap de Formentor is accessible by a twisty road that offers incomparable views along the way—including several beautiful beaches and, since 1929, the Hotel Formentor, a glamorous icon for Mediterranean jetsetters. During its heyday in the mid-20th century, the hotel was a destination for writers and celebrities such as Charlie Chaplin, Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, and the Prince of Monaco. Today, the cape is less known for its star-studded past and more for protecting and conserving its natural and unspoiled beauty.

大西洋和特内里费山脉上空的流云，西班牙加那利群岛 Flowing clouds over the Atlantic Ocean and Tenerife mountains, Canary Islands, Spain (© MikeMareen/iStock/Getty Images Plus)

Sea of clouds

What you can see in our photo is a sea of clouds over the island of Tenerife, in Spain, a very common atmospheric phenomenon in the Canary archipelago. It is formed when the Trade winds arriving full of humidity from the ocean cannot rise due to a temperature inversion experimented above, so they form stracocumulus between 500 and 1,500 meters high.

Stratocumulus are large round shaped clouds formed in low altitude that cannot develop vertically because the dry and stable atmosphere above prevents them from rising. In addition to this, in north Tenerife they usually get stucked in the skirts of the mountains. That is why this place is one of the best to watch these flowing clouds. Its colour is usually dark, but at certain moments, such as at dawn showed in our image, the clouds acquire a bluish hue similar to the sea.

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