Elchè to Lake Negratín

We had quite a good nights sleep last night except for getting battered by the wind. It wasn’t constant and seemed to roll down the mountains in waves once or twice an hour giving us a battering for a couple of minutes at a time and then stop.
The worst thing was the dust, it was like sleeping in a dust bowl and at bedtime Ellie had a coughing fit because it was so dry and I woke up twice to get a drink as I just couldn’t swallow. By the time 7:30am came around we both felt like we had been licking sand off a plate. It took hours to properly rehydrate again.
We had quite a big journey ahead of us today so just before 9am we started moving. We were now cutting inland again away from the coast in a westerly direction towards Granada.
I had planned a stop on route at a viewpoint by a reservoir and plotted the parking spot into TomTom. After 50 miles of driving at 10:30am we were almost there and the sat Nav took us off the mountain road and onto gravel tracks. This wasn’t unusual until we came to a big parking area and the single track split into four different tracks and the one we wanted said something about a danger zone and workers only and the others didn’t appear on TomTom atall.
I went to check google maps but we had no internet so after 10 minutes we decided to leave Wanda and check out the track on foot. We still had 3 miles left to get to the viewpoint.
We walked about a mile down the track and there weee a couple of big lay-bys where we could park or turn around so we then trekked back up the track to get Wanda.
Back in Wanda we drove back down the track we had just walked, this time we passed by the lay-bys as I was confident I could reverse it back to them if needed and as we rounded a bend about a mile and a half down we came to some padlocked gates and our route was blocked. I tried checking google maps again but there was still no signal but TomTom said we had a mile left so I grabbed the drone and my camera gear, locked Wanda up and we started walking.
It started off flat as we walked alongside a canal. The gates were to stop vehicles driving all the way up to the pumping station but we walked passed and then the road veered up and we started climbing. My watch told me we had already walked a mile so I topped the data up on my phone quickly and then connected to 4G as we were now out in the open with signal and google said we had another mile and a half and it would take 30 minutes. It was a nightmare walk in the burning hot sun. The saving grace was it was quite pretty and quiet and we did bring drinks. Finally at 12:15pm we arrived at the Mirador del embalse de Algeciras. This was where we wanted to be and there was our parking spot we couldn’t reach. Obviously TomTom had brought us in the wrong way.
The views were magnificent with white limestone cliffs and turquoise blue waters. Various coloured ring marks had formed around the base of the cliffs showing the water levels over the years. It was beautiful and worth the hike.
We left there at 1:10pm and on the way back to Wanda I decided we would just move further down. Ellie made sandwiches for lunch and at 2pm we started moving again coming off the A7 Mediterranean highway and turning west onto the A91 into cave house country.
At 4:15pm we arrived at a restaurant but it was the wrong one. This restaurant had hot springs which was nice but we needed a parking spot for the night so I checked park4night again, found where we should have been and at 4:45pm after another 160 miles of driving we arrived at Lake Negratín. We had seen this place on A Place In The Sun years ago and Ellie has been scouting out cave houses in the area for a couple of years so we thought we would just come and check out the area. The drive around the lake didn’t fill me with confidence as it looked quite industrial with pump houses scattered here and there and the first town we drove through looked tired and dirty but as we got closer to Freilla it did get prettier.
We found our parking spot by a closed restaurant right at the lake beach with an amazing panoramic view of the whole lake and mountains. This was one of our most scenic park ups so far. We got out to check the restaurant out and sunbathing behind the restaurant were a British couple. We got talking to them and this turned out to be there second time here in there campervan and last time they spoke to a British man who had brought a house in the area and was now selling it because the winters here are proper winters with snow and freezing temperatures. Now we definitely wouldn’t be buying a house here.
As Ellie cooked a late dinner a fox walked past us and into the woods, we sat watching him out of the window for a few minutes until he disappeared, it was the first one we had seen on the trip. After dinner at 8pm we decided we had made enough power to watch TV and watched Netflix for a couple of hours before bed, it felt like it could be a cold night with no clouds and the temperatures dropping from 25°c to just 15°c in the last 2 hours.Read more