A walk to the Albir lighthouse in the Serra Gelada natural park

About halfway through our trip, we stayed three nights in L’Albir, which is at the other end of the bay from busier Altea. Altea however has a very pretty old town and I have lots of photos from that visit, which I’ll sort out when home. So for now, I’ll take you along this 5km there and back walk to the lighthouse of Albir, which looks back over the whole bay area. 

The path was fantastic, nice flat even concrete so you can walk along admiring the scenery without having to watch for rocks or roots which invariably trip me if I’m not careful on most walks! The downside was that it was part cloudy and very hazy the morning that we walked here. It seemed very humid in L’Albir, so we wanted to get our exercise out of the way in the cooler morning! It did clear a bit along the way, so we were hugging the shady side on the way back. 

Altea zoomed in above, and K at the beginning of the walk with L’Albir in the background below.

Below, Mediterranean Heather (pink flowers) and Rosemary flowering everywhere on the rocky garrigue.

(A side note: I don’t know what’s going on here but since all the insects in my first post there have been very few, and south of Valencia I have barely seen a bee or hoverfly on all these flowers (between the native plants and the foreign species in bloom in people's gardens/campsites) - only a few wasps, flies and mossies. Crickets have been making their summery noise at night when we pass wasteland on the way to a restaurant but apart from that, and a few Red Admirals and White butterflies, virtually nothing! OK, it’s late October, but it’s about 28C during the day and mild at night. It’s just very weird - and disappointing!)

You can just see the lighthouse at the top middle of the photo below. If you click to view larger, it will be clearer.

There used to be an ochre mine here in the 19thC through to early 20thC. Info is given in English in the following photo on the info board (click to view larger if you can’t read it).

There was a good photographic display about the families who worked at the lighthouse, which was difficult to access back in the olden days. Two families would live in this building, with the two lighthouse keepers.

You can see the path running left to right through the middle section of the photo.

Lavandula dentata, which PlantNet calls French Lavender; however I always thought that was the Papillon Lavender, which is L. stoechas. I haven’t seen this species of Lavender growing wild before.

We are enjoying our last week and started heading back north today, first stop the Ebro Delta for a couple of nights and some birding around the lagoons and rice paddies. 😄