New Year's Day walk (3/3)

 Not all of the walk was about urban monuments or urban art. One of the delights of river walks is the edge between the built landscape and the wild. There were quite a few mallards swimming upstream.

 Between the path and the river, scrubby banks with wildflowers.

 One of my favorite flowers in the area (una malva).

 Parrots are an invasive species here, but the are just as charming as the ones in San Francisco.

 I saw quite a few cormorants--Great Cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo)--flying and swimming. This one dove several times, and always emerged upstream.

Looking back from the Stone Bridge, you can see the kind of vegetation on the banks. 

An encounter that included vigorous sniffing.

New Year's Day walk (2/3)

New Year's Day walk (1/3)

The Stone Bridge (Puente de Piedra) stands where the Romans had originally built a wooden bridge. Built again in the 1400s, it has been partially destroyed by floods, and rebuilt over the centuries. A pair of lions stands at either end.

I began my walk by crossing the Puente de la Almozara, from the southern bank to the northern bank. Just a few decades ago, that side of the river was mostly gardens and farm land: we have watched as block after block of apartments have been built.

From the middle of the bridge, looking east and upstream, I could see the Pasarela built during the Expo that leads to the new train/bus station, Delicias. Almost all of the buildings constructed for the Expo are unused, a product of the frenzy of speculation that preceeded the current economic crisis in Spain.

The next bridge down is the Puente de Santiago, and you can see the Stone Bridge in the distance. a flotilla of ducks is hanging out in the shadow. On the other bank one can see the monuments of the various ages of a city that is more than 2000 years old: the Roman walls, the Moorish tower, the Basilica del Pilar, the church towers of San Juan and San Pablo.

The Basilica (above) is an impressive heap, but it's not my favorite church at all. The river is wide and fast as it moves through the city. The water is high now, in the winter, but will get much lower in the summer.