mehmet's

After months of confinement due to the pandemic, I had the first travel with my travelling companion Eric to walk the other part of Camino de Hierro (iron road) of La Fregeneda. You can read the previous part of the route in this post .  Let me give very short information about the route, as I mentioned the route is called "Iron Road", it is also known as Ruta de los túneles (Route of tunnels). It is located on the border of Spain - Portugal, in the Las Arribes natural park [1]. It was built in 1887, a great work of civil engineering consisting of 20 tunnels and 13 bridges. You can notice in the video below, it has a tunnel with a 1593 meters of length. It was used to travel between Oporto and Salamanca. Sadly, in 1984 it was closed on the grounds of lack of profitability. Since 2000, it has been declared as "Bien de Interés Cultural (BIC)" meaning something like Property of Cultural Interest [2] Previously, we had walked from Spanish village - La Fregeneda, to Port

We were outside of coverage area during hiking on Sierra de Gredos. After a few seconds from we had started to get down from the peak, we had network connection and at that moment my friend Eric, nervously, told me that a lockdown has started due to the pandemic. It was time to get back home as soon as possible. The visit to Sierra de Gredos was the last day we were able to freely walk around. Since then we are in lockdown. In this post, I was planning to share both how hiking in Sierra de Gredos was like and my experiences of being in lockdown during this pandemic. But it has been 48 days already in lockdown and there are so many things to talk/write about, so I will leave it for another post.  Let´s start with Sierra de Gredos. I have been there twice, I had not been on the lake the first time. This time, we have walked until the lake, which was half icy. It took an hour and a half to get there from Salamanca, the views along roads are nice. You can get to the start point by

My friend Eric had already walked on this route a few times, and asked me to choose among there routes that he knew and we could do, he said one is 5 km, the other is around 10 and 20 km. Since I was going to travel on the following day, I picked the shortest one and at the end of the day, my legs were trying to declare their dependency, see the Google Fit summary of the day below. We must have a huge difference in defining distance with Eric. Did it worth? Of course. Beautiful nature and the view around the route, the tunnels and the bridges, a lot of prickly pears (higo chumbo in Spanish, we have eaten some and took some with us), changing countries with a few steps and some nostalgy seeing all that infrastructure once used to be at the service for many passengers. Once you are at the Barca D’Alba station, you could see the remaining of the station, the waiting and VIP saloons, cantinas, customs office and a big building for repairing the cars. In a second, it makes you visualize