We bid Katherine and Andrew hasta luego in Seville, as they headed to Lisbon by plane while we biked southeast to Montellano, our first Pueblo Blanco of this little tour of Andalusia.
Getting out of Seville took a bit of time with lots of twists and turns, but the route thankfully was mostly bike paths, like 95% or more. Seville has done a great job on promoting non-car travel with all the paths and we saw them used a lot. Electric scooters probably are 50% of the traffic, and that all seems to work well.
Today, we headed to Montellano, about 42 miles away, which seemed like a relatively easy day but for the (unpredicted) unceasing 15-25 mph headwind on a generally uphill day. It ended up being a hard day.
The landscape as we headed south is drier, and we rode about 20 miles on small paths and remote dirt roads without any traffic but also absent pretty much everything else too.
We stopped in the town of Utrera to admire its Carmelite church and had some lunch on the church steps. We had noticed a Camino symbol earlier and there was one near the church too, right under a poster celebrating the anniversary of the Virgin of Tears.
Leaving Utrera, we didn’t see a soul for quite a while, and the landscape was kind of desolate with rolling hills of freshly tilled, dry and empty soil waiting for rain. With nothing to stop it, the south wind was strong and hot, sometimes filled with blowing dirt and grit. Grapes of Wrath entered my mind. The weather forecast had been for rain and cooler temperatures, but we didn’t get either.
Getting closer to Montellano, we could see low mountains rising in the distance and the landscape getting perceptibly greener. We could also see the white edge of the town of Montellano on the horizon, and we only had one more steep climb to get there! And so we arrived, wanting only a cold beer and a nice hotel and we got both! And the owner is French, and it was such a delight to have a smiling chatty French person to deal with. Spanish people are often cold and distant at best and it’s lovely to get a warm smile welcome and cold beers! He’s even cute, as Chris noted!
Chris got a shower and installed herself at the pool for a couple hours before we headed into town for dinner.
Restaurants open about 9PM in this part of Spain, and we picked one that had high ratings after the one we had been told about did not seem open. And so we ate in a Michelin rated Bib Gourmand restaurant – our first Michelin rated restaurant on a bike tour ever! And was good and not even that expensive…a tiny traditional restaurant with only 4 tables in the main dining room and only 2 sets of diners that night.
The other diners were a Dutch couple who have owned a finca (an olive estate) in Andalusia for 25 years and who naturally speak English and Spanish and probably French and also ride bikes. Lucky to have them share the dining room. We had a lovely conversation.
And then near midnight, it was time for bed…we were both tired and tomorrow we will ride the Via Verde from Puerto Serrano to Olvera, which multiple people have told us is amazing. While my initial maps indicated gruesome climbs, there are no less than 32 tunnels that pass through all the hills and so it should be more than manageable.
Leave a Reply