En esta casa no se fia

A day in the Alcornocales Natural Park, an hour west in Cadiz Province; it's one of Europe's largest and oldest native Mediterranean forests, chock-full of cork oaks.

A magical place where the Atlantic and Mediterranean meet and where Europe touches Africa; the park is a place to hike and enjoy the wildlife. Just as we arrived I managed to take the wrong road but it took us up to the hilltop village of Alcalá de los Gazules. This is no sanitised Andalusian village with boutique hotels and organic grocers run by worthy, arty foreign residents - no, this is a little more straightforward.

Look up and before you're dazzled by the winter sun, you catch glimpses of wives and mothers dressed in house coats hanging out the laundry on crumbling balconies; their husbands and sons are talking sport in the main square, in the shadow of the 16th Century church.
Here cork harvesting, and cattle farming don't provide enough work for everyone; this is the harsh reality of rural life here in the south.
I quickly snapped this bar; although hard to read, the sign above the reflective tobacco box reads, 'en esta casa no se fia' which roughly translates as 'in this establishment, there's no credit'.

Only last night during our posh supper a guest suggested, 'What crisis? We're not really feeling the crisis.' Ithen bit my lip, took a gulp of fancy red wine and thought maybe we all need to open our eyes and see the reality of life for many in Southern Mediterranean Europe.

(Made me think of my blip here)