Saldropo wetlands

Saldropo (Vizcaya)

Mon 10 May

This is one for later - a lunch stop that turned out to be an intriguing spot - a wetland fed by the confluence of a whole series of mountain streams. However we didn't really get to see much wetland as we didn't have time to explore it properly.

We'd stopped for a coffee at a truckers' caff on the N240 Bilbao-Vitoria road, and as we drove off we noticed a sign pointing up a track. We followed it, hoping to find an idyllic spot crying out to be picnicked in, and found ourselves drawn further and further into the forest. A thousand shades of green.

Somewhere in there is the wetland.

Saldropo is part of a Natural Park based around the Gorbeia mountain, which forms the boundary between the Basque provinces of Vizcaya and Álava. You can easily imagine an army of Romans getting tangled up in the undergrowth, and the Arabs that came later must have found the territory even less to their taste. No wonder Euskara, the Basque language, shows few signs of being related to any other language on earth.

Happy New Year!

If you've got room for one more card, and you'd like Season's Greetings from me, just:

1) choose an image and click on it to download the front of the card from Box.net
* * NB: I haven't tried this before - I think you will need to sign up for access to my Box.net folder first * *
2) then download the 'back' file
3) print both files onto paper or card of your choice - preferably back-to-back
4) fold down centre and place on display

Happy New Year!

Images:

Synchronised Ducking


Landing and flying


Reflecting


Splashing


Standing and flying


Swimming through stars


Waiting

Technical note:
All pictures are from a set I took at the Charca de Suárez wetland reserve - map, website (Spanish), primary school project wiki (Spanish) - near Motril (Granada, Spain), on 21 December. I cropped a selection of the original images down using iPhoto; you can see a set of the crops on Flickr, and a Synchronised Ducking sequence in the previous post. I chose the ones shown here for the cards. I designed the cards in Pages, printed them onto white card, and gave them to friends and relatives (as you do at this time of year); some I emailed as .jpeg attachments. I have now posted these .jpegs to the file store at Box.net. For this post I have embedded the images from Flickr, and changed the link in the embed code so that it points to the card stored on Box.net, from where you should be able to download them.

I hope it works!

Synchronised Ducking

La Charca de Suárez, Motril (Granada)
Sun 21 Dec

Technical note
This is a sequence of stills which was put into a Slideshow in iPhoto, and then Exported as a .mov file, which was in turn uploaded directly into Blogger.

NB: Season's Greetings, links to more pics, and some info in Spanish, in the following post.