Week 3: Lagos, Portugal y Parque Nacional de Doñana

Lagos, Portugal:

Last weekend, my friends and I rented cars and drove to Portugal for the weekend. Lagos is about 3 hours west by car from Spain. Ever since Spain and Portugal joined the European Union in the mid ´80s, the border checks have been taken down completely. You didn´t need a passport to get accross the border, and to be honest, you couldn´t even tell where the old border checkpoint used to be.

We left Seville at about 2pm and got to Lagos at 5, leaving us plenty of time to hang out on the beach before we ate. The picture of the beach is taken from our hotel parking lot. The hotel we stayed at was on a cliff overlooking one of the most famous beaches in Portugal. The water was pretty cold but felt good because it was really hot and sunny while we were there. While there, we snorkled, climbed big rocks that we shouldn´t have, explored different caves, and basically got toasted in the sun all day. That night we ate at a restaurant that also overlooked the ocean. Very classy. The funny thing is that this was all cheap, a meal was only 6€, or $8.

We went out the first night in Lagos, which was pretty good, but there were also a ton of creeps so we ended up going to Portimao (20 minutes west of Lagos). This town was much more tourist/American friendly and had some really cool bars that were open roof and on the ocean. Good times.

We came back Sunday night and then were supposed to return the cars on Monday morning. The crappy part about the trip is that I got into an accident in Seville about 1km from where I was supposed to drop off the car. I was in the middle of 3 lanes going the same direction, and when didn´t see anyone in the lane to my left I started to change lanes when this guy came flying out of nowhere and cliped the front left bumper. There was no damage done to the car other than to the bumper and the front left headlight, but I still had to pay the deductable because it would cost more than that to get it fixed. All in all, interesting experience... I had to fill out the accident forms and deal with the rental car company, none of whom spoke English...you should have been there, haha.

Parque Nacional de Doñana:

This park is the largest state protected park in Spain (i think)... It covers a lot of the beach, and then back through the dunes and the marshlands. When my class when on the visit, we rode in the giant Mercedez jeep/bus that is in the picture above. It held my whole class and a few others.

To give you an idea of how big this park is, we drove around for 4 hours and only saw a taste of what each of the different terrains are in the park. We started out by driving on the beach, and then made it through the dunes. We got to get out and walk barefoot through some really soft sand and see a lot of wildlife.

The rest of the trip was through the marshlands, which looked almost identical to the everglades in Florida. We almost saw 2 Iberian Lynx cubs, (which are now an endagered species which are only found in Doñana and one other place I don´t know where) but from where I was sitting I couldn´t see them.. But we did get to see the huts of the villiagers who still live on the beach and fish for survival. They don´t have electricity, and only get water from a well next to each hut. All in all, a trip back in time and we saw some pretty amazing wildlife.

Here are some websites if you want to see more about the park, but there aren´t good ones in English, so if you want to see the good one I hope you can read spanish...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doñana_National_Park

http://reddeparquesnacionales.mma.es/parques/donana/index.htm