Goats and Dolmen
Bit of poor start to the day after something I ate yesterday kept me up for a chunk of the night. But it’s either passing quickly or the wonders of modern pharmaceuticals is kicking in so we held to our plan for the day in spite of me feeling a bit sorry for myself.
That plan, I have to say, was not entirely our own – we asked ChatGPT for advice. There may be many over-hyped things about AI, but in our experience it does a magical job of suggesting travel itineraries. It was ChtGPT that got the white villages lined up for us. In this case it suggested a visit to El Torcal de Antequera, which is a nature reserve with amazing rock formations. We enjoyed a couple of hours hiking among the rocks and even, to our delight, saw wild mountain goats.
Our main aim for the day was the town of Antequera, which we’d chosen for its dolmens. There are three megalithic sites built during the Neolithic and Bronze Age. There’s always something awe-inspiring in walking into a huge engineering work undertaken 5000 years ago. That said, for a complex that was continuously used for 4,500 years (until medieval times) it all felt like someone had forensically cleaned every surface with a high-pressure water blaster – I would have loved to see some more smoke-stains.
One of the dolmen is aligned with the solstice. Another lines up on a nearby hill that looks like someone’s head lying down looking at the sky. Looks peaceful; but that could just be my sleep-deprived mind reading too much into a hunk of rock.
