Our initial aim when we began travelling long term - to visit places we had never been to before - proved much more tricky than we imagined for a number of reasons. We ended up visiting Spain and Portugal far more than we planned. Partly this was to do with how well connected Iberia is to the UK by air. With Gill's dad in his nineties, living alone in his house but requiring daily support from carers, we had the sense we were always one moment away from a crisis that might require us to fly home. Then our daughter and her partner relocated to Lisbon for two years so we tended to include a visit there during our winter trips. Now the Schengen visa regulations present further limitations on our desire to wander about when and where we please.
The result is we find ourselves returning to places as much as visiting new ones. I have given up seeing this as 'mission drift' and suspect I have to simply accept it as part of the much vaunted 'new normal', a term that I suspect is a right-wing euphenism for deteriorating circumstances.
So for the third time here we are searching the Sherry Triangle for its lost hypothenuse like Livingston seeking the source of the Nile. As you might expect, each time we return places become a little more familiar, nevertheless we still have unfinished business. For example, today we arrived in Sanlucar de Barrameda. On both our previous visits we promised ourselves lunch at Casa Balbino, the place to go for excellent tapas according to both TripAdvisor and our Lonely Planet guidebook. We failed, once it was closed, the other time impossibly busy.
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This time we made it, arriving a few minutes before the weekend tapas rush that occurs without fail a little after 1.00pm.
To be a visitor surrounded by scores of Spanish families eating lunch together on a Saturday afternoon feels like an honour. It's a profoundly civilised social ritual, couples, old and young, same sex and mixed, families, some extended with grandparents and cousins and uncles in tow, others just a young mum and dad fussing over a toddler in a buggy - everyone eating and drinking together, a rising hubbub filling the square, a happy murmur, almost euphoric but never raucous - magic.
As for us, we've got past the stage of tapas bewilderment, but are still rookies. There must be classic combinations, things that the Spanish habitually choose to eat together. We have no idea, the dishes we choose could be as weird as black pudding with mint sauce for all we know.
If you are in Sanlucar one drink is a must - Manzanilla - the dry sherry unique to the place. It's what people hereabouts drink at lunchtime. It seemed impolite not to embrace the local culture .
We had locked our bikes at a cycle rack opposite the Bodegas Hidalgo "La Gitana". It would have been equally ill-mannered not to buy a bottle from their shop. We chose something a bit more expensive than their bog standard 'La Gitana' brand, it should be nice, we haven't tried it yet.
On the way here Google maps took us straight through the modern part of the town. The traffic was a tad tricky. We remembered a quieter route from the previous time we were here using a bike track along the sea front. It was less frenetic.
The area autocaravanas where we are staying is about 3km east of the town, a few hundred metres from the one we stayed in last time. It's new and a little more professionally managed than the other one, but either are perfectly acceptable for a night or two. Don't believe the reviewer who likened the older one to a travellers camp, it's not, and the comment is snarky about the place and insulting to Roma culture. Sadly there is nothing to prevent boneheads from buying motorhomes.
Sanlucar is situated at the mouth of Guadalquivir but only occupies the west bank of the river. To the east stretches an enormous, unpopulated tract of salt marshes and pine forests. This former royal game reserve was designated as the Parque Nacional de Donana in 1969. It is one of Europe's most important wetlands providing an important refuge for migrating birds as well as a habitat for endangered species such as European lynx.
Roads are few through this lonely landscape, the A483 connecting Ayemonte with the small resort of Matalascañas is the only one to cross the park entirely. Half way between these two places, in the heart of the national park, you find el Rocio. It is unique.
As I said, generally speaking the more often you visit a place the more familiar it becomes. However, el Rocio is an exception, a rare place that becomes stranger the more often you visit it, familiarity breeding bewilderment rather than contempt.
The town is built beside a large lake, a gathering point for migrating birds, especially flamingos. It is an important haven for endangered species.
Likewise its campsite, one of the few in Huelva province open all year, has a similar magnetic effect on the grey haired European motorhomer, attracting particularly a species migrating from Holland, who unlike the bird life do not appear to be endangered at all. In fact they are thriving, but like their feathered friends often arrive in flocks, thirty or more at a time.
It gives the campsite a certain scout-camp ambience, however it has to be said this is the least peculiar thing about el Rocio. The place is so profoundly odd it is difficult to know where to begin. El Rocio's profound strangeness has dawned upon us gradually. On our first visit we agreed the place was a bit weird; then on our second visit we decided it was definitely the strangest place we had come across in Spain; this time we wondered if there is anywhere else on the planet we have visited quite as odd as here, stranger even than Las Vegas, a Burns supper, or our paragon of the peculiar, the liver coloured bowling alley and breakfast bar in the cellar of the Best Western in Pahrump, Nevada.
Undoubtedly el Rocio looks peculiar, resembling a vast film set. Post pictures of the place on social media and you get comments like 'Are you in the Wild West?' or more astutely, 'Where's Clint?'
The place is very photogenic. The Wild West it resembles is not the High Noon, bar room brawl variety but Spaghetti Westerns, with clear blue desert skies, white Mexican inspired haciendas and dusty streets, empty but for a lone rider and drifting tumble weed.
It's no coincidence they look Spanish since the landscapes of Sergio Leone's films are Andalusian, shot in the Tabernas desert near Almeria. However, if El Rocio was a film set it would not be not a ramshackle pueblo blanco full of impoverished peasants in thrall to a mustachioed Mexican bandit awaiting Clint to save them, it is much grander than that.
The sandy streets are wide - broad avenues lead off from big squares shaded by tall eucalyptus trees.
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The place abounds with large hostels with extensive stabling, each topped with an open belfry and a mosaic of the Virgin Mary in majesty.
The church is cathedral sized, brilliant white and decorated like an over elaborate wedding cake.
You could easily believe it was all something dreamed up in the back lot of MGM as a vision of nineteenth century Mexico. The backdrop to some epic on the scale of El Cid or Lawrence of Arabia, but an imaginary Sergio Leone masterpiece featuring the Mexican/American war, starring Clint Eastwood as the young Robert E Lee . The actual truth is stranger than this fiction, but in a way equally theatrical.
I think this piece from the Andalusian tourist board is best account I have found of how el Rocio developed over the centuries from a local place of pilgrimage to be the biggest 'romeria' in Spain.
It attracts over a million participants, many arriving on decorated horse drawn carts, to celebrate the miracle of 'the virgin of the white dove'.
What remains unexplained is why, sometime during the mid twentieth century, what had previously been a large, but temporary event (think Glastonbury) developed its own permanent municipality, barely occupied for most of the year. Who planned it, arranged the infrastructure, raised the capital, enforced the strict planning rules, and to what sociopolitical purpose?
It struck me that its development over two decades from the late fifties to the mid seventies mirrored the rise of Benidorm. Maybe the two are non-identical twins: the latter extrovert and brash, tasked by General Franco to fill Madrid's coffers with much needed foreign cash, the former introverted and devout, there to encourage the diverse regions of Spain to sign-up to a common identity that was autocratic, espoused deep seated Roman Catholic orthodoxy, social conservatism and Castillian supremacy.
El Rocio's romeria is undoubtedly a popular festival with a history stretching back over five centuries, but the town itself is a 'mid-century' concoction, a theatrical arena that feels distinctively fascist in its conception.
However it is so striking visually it is impossible not to take scores of photos. This time - firstly I became fascinated by variations on the theme of the open belfry...
then the doorways..
and finally variations in the way the Virgin Mary was depicted.
Decked out in all her garish finery she reminded me of a Hindi goddess, but to even hint at her divinity would certainly have had the Inquisition knocking on your door back in the day. However, her image to an unbeliever seems ambiguous, a goddess purporting to be a saint or vice versa.
Women generally are maltreated by the world's 'great religions', particularly so in monotheistic ones; whether they are venerated, vilified or made invisible, God's gaze is always a male one deified. No wonder feminists use the term 'patriarchy' to describe the way most societies are designed around the needs of men, there is something 'scriptural' about how these myths are woven into the fabric of our cultural narratives.
The climax of el Rocio's romeria ends up as a scrum in the church between various confraternities fighting for the honour of parading the statue of the Virgin. In practice the outcome is prescribed, it is always the 'the local lads from Ayemonte who win the prize' as one website I read about the event put it.
I have not witnessed the event, but we did watch a similar if smaller romeria in Bolneuvo in 2014. They are boisterous and joyous occasions and as a spectacle exciting to watch, but in the end it does come down to a bunch of burly blokes making off with the statue of a woman. So far as Spanish festivals go I prefer the more secular ones, carnivals, Real versus Barca at the Nou Camp, a Mediterranean sunset with an Ibiza trance soundtrack or The xx headlining Primavera's main stage. It's today's Spain I admire, the country's past is dark, often tragic; I like how it has re-invented itself over the past fifty years, found a way to come to terms with its difficult history and embrace a more progressive future. If we weren't quite so enamoured by our glorious past we could learn a lot from Spain's recent history.
We agreed we probably won't come back to el Rocio, to us it feels oppressive, it lowers our spirits. I can appreciate how others see it quite differently and it certainly is worth coming at least once for there is nowhere quite like it.
There is another reason to visit here. About three kilometres south of the town on the road to Matalascañas is one of the few access points to the Donana national park. You can't drive through the protected area, the only way to visit it is either to book a safari style tour in a 4x4 bus, walk or cycle. If you wish to do the latter there is a safer alternative than chancing being flattened by the traffic hurtling down the main road, but it is a bit tricky to find. A rough unmetalled road runs parallel to the A483 and a footpath leads from it to the back entrance of the National Park visitor centre through a low underpass beneath the main road. It was only when I checked the route on Google maps that I realised why this sandy track existed. It is called the Veranda de Sanlucar de Barrameda, one of the traditional pilgrimage routes used by the horse drawn carriages heading for the romeria. It is fascinating how the event has shaped the landscape, a classic example of cultural geography.
However, our aim was to swap culture for nature, easy once you are within the national park. It is very empty, largely uninhabited and on this weekday in January almost unvisited.
In the two hours we pedalled around we were passed by a couple of park rangers' vehicles and a lone hiker.
This is big country, flat or gently undulating, a marshy grassland stretching to the horizon, partially covered by a forest of umbrella pines. Though it feels like a wilderness it is in fact a man-made space, the pines planted to prevent the sandy soil shifting and inundating the rich alluvial farmland to the north.
It has remained undeveloped because the area served as a royal hunting reserve, a function which continued through most of the Franco era.
About eight kilometres into the park the flora changes into something more manicured, with specimen trees and planned vistas.
Suddenly you see a big white house, a small palace really. The Palace Acebrón looks older than it actually is, built a little over a hundred years ago as a large hunting lodge.
Now it hosts an exhibition about the history of the park, we gave it a miss this time, happy just to mooch about the grounds.
The way you just happen upon the place suddenly, lost in a wilderness, has a magical quality. At the very least you expect some lost princess to be imprisoned in it, instead you get interactive displays and a PowerPoint presentation.
The last few days have been fascinating. El Rocio is thought provoking. I was left pondering about the way culture can never be neutral, it always has some designs upon you, how it demands your attention, tries to shape you. Nature on the other hand doesn't give a toss and just gets on with stuff. We inhabit nature whereas culture inhabits us. We need the natural world to give us perspective.
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