Once Upon A Time In The West...

Sep 21, 20123 min read

Deviation Actions

Published: Sep 21, 2012

1.1K Views

_{...well more precisely the spaghetti west.

You may know by now that I study geology at the University of Leicester, UK. We get to go on field trips all over the world. This summer we went to southern Spain, to the Desierto de Tabernas. Generally, I try and avoid desert areas, especially in summer as I do not do all that well in the heat. The temperatures at midday usually soared to around and over 35*C, and on a night it was a cool 20*C. While I worried about how I would cope with the heat, being a northern person who finds 20*C positively tropical, I found that I adjusted pretty quickly to the heat, although it was still unpleasant sometimes when we had to work.

We stayed at the Urra Field Centre, which is quite like a youth hostel in many respects, except that it is primarily set up for geology field trips and expeditions. Debbie, Pablo and Norma are wonderful. And after a day in the field it was nice to go and sit in The Shady Grove (the field centre has it's own bar) and have a can or two of San Miguel.

The main aim of the trip was to get a rough understanding of the regional geology. It would take years to look at all of it and understand everything. The majority of the geology can be split into cover and basement rocks. The cover is more recent: sandstones, mudstones and conglomerates, deposited by many shifting environments. The basement is much older, made up of heavily metamorphosed rocks such as gneisses and phyllites. There's also the odd bit of volcanic rock, too; we visited the remains of an extinct volcano and surrounding atoll.

The landscape in the Almería region really is quite spectacular. When I first got off the plane, it seemed so strange. There was nothing for miles but sandy desert, broken up only by intermittent shrubbery. By the end of my week there, I had grown to love it's remoteness and difference to places I have already been to. There are many beautiful places in the world, many are captured here on deviantart, and I think Almería with the mountains of the Tabernas desert and the azure blue sky is one of them.

toodles}