|Golden browns in the Villuercas Mountains (Martin Kelsey)|
|Old Mill near Guadalupe (Martin Kelsey)|
From the peak of the Villuercas Mountains, looking north we could see the sweeping series of valleys and ridges, the products of fold and thrust that pushed these slates and quartzites, metamorphized sandstones dating back over 450 million years, into a quite breathtaking panorama of gigantic ripples. Each valley struck a perfect curve, smoothed and rounded, rising to a splinter of ridges, jagged vertical strata, like white horses atop turbulent waves. Breaking the wooded slopes were expanses of broken ground, a litter of rubble, like gigantic scree, boulders that had tumbled from the cracked torn strata as ice over the millenia had pushed open tiny fissures. The landscape before us has been described as one of the finest examples of Appalachian relief this side of the Atlantic and deservedly has been designated as part of the Global Geopark network of UNESCO. Countless times I have paused where I was standing that day and without fail, sought a moment's silence in solemn respect to the poetry of this landform and tried to comprehend the forces that pushed these rocks into these rolling wavescape.
|UNESCO Global Geopark Villuercas-Ibores-Jara (Martin Kelsey)|
|Alpine Accentor on lichen and quartzite (Martin Kelsey)|