An easter day

Hello, we are Ana and Javier, and together with our three sons (4,7 and 10 years) we have been visiting La Comarca de la Vera for several times. We enjoy to experience new things in this part of the region. For the last times, we have booked canoe rides and activities in a tree-top adventure park, and these were very enjoyable.

Instead of this kind of tourism for our last trip to the region, we found a different option thanks to Carlos. He is in charge of an enterprise that promotes Active Cultural Tourism -a term that we have never heard about before. Carlos told us that is a combination of guided tourism and revisited trekking that he holds in his routes all over the region, either on foot, or by bike, or by 4x4.

No matter what the environment is, the route is always guided by an expert that explains the surroundings including nature and ethnography background. This description had caught our attention and we asked Carlos to send us details about the trekking route in order to take the stroll with our three sons.

Carlos replied us the same afternoon with all kind of details about the route. The route goes through an oak forest, where mosses and lichens grow wildly, and finishes in a very special place chozo de cabreros where having lunchtime based on traditional meals of the region. A “chozo” is the typical housing for goatherds that climbed the highest picks of mountains with their cattle in summer.

He attached pics and tips about the equipment, as well as a schedule of the day journey in the email.

Our expectations were met satisfactorily. The route was suitable in terms of distances and slopes for our children, who enjoyed specially going through one of the so-called canyons of the region.

Along the stroll, we could watch different varieties of trees and plants. Beetles such as “toros del sol” and ants drawn the attention of our children.

Hiking Interpreting with family

Grabbing some food in the chozo located in the mountain landscape gave us an experience that matched perfectly with the whole day, the biscuits of pomelo for dessert delighted us.

  

Active Tourism, an eco-awar family enterprise from Extremadura: Conyegar

The Forgotten Bridge Route (part II)

I have arrived to the lands that my father used to work. They are all fenced. I find it difficult to orient myself and find once more those references that remain nebulous in my memory.

I ask some men I see who are herding cows whether they know Paulino el “menguas”´s house.
“You are menguas’ kid, aren’t you?”, yells the eldest one while looking at me up and down, “wait for my Juliana to see you… damn! she´s not gonna believe it!” he rushes away and, unexpectedly, he turns around in a sudden move shouting: “take a look at your father's house, which is that one over there where we keep the cows!”

He points behind my back; I turn around and see the building that was my home once, quite abandoned, but its structure remains just as I remembered.
I stare at it… my sister and I used to get out of that house every morning at 7:30 to go to the village, along the same path my father used to take the beasts to work the olive grove. We used to leave him in the second curve, taking the way that the goats used, to the left, that soon led to the village along the left side of the “garganta” (wild stream), us walking upstream.

We walked surrounded by oak trees, the leafy ferns caressing our calves; those ferns which play the leading role in the undergrowth of the region whose memory has marked my memory ever since, along with the day we decided to go down to the “forgotten bridge”
“-Pedro, father has told us not to go there”
“-Sister, let's go and you'll see how loaded the ‘garganta’ is, after the rains”
We go up the muddy path and we lie down on the upper platform, leaning over the stark edge where the parapet was supposed to be. “Do you see, sister, how spectacular the waters flowing downstream are? Look at the depth underneath the bridge, it must be three metres at least.”
My sister turning around while lowering her head; an ashlar tearing down under her and her falling down into the air, are the nightmare that still remains in my thought.
My father determined my leaving the village in the early 50s.
First Plasencia and Salamanca were my destinations during the following nine years, and Barreiros, Chrysler, Renault and, currently, Matra factories were my following destinations.
Mother tells me that father was very proud of his son, the industrial engineer. He left his staff on the base of the bridge arch, at the left bank, two days before lying down on his bed, never to stand on his own again.

A strong voice behind my back breaks my thoughts: “It’s Pedrito, my Pedrito, come ‘ere, kid, you are already a man, aren’t you? Now, you are a bit scrawny, don’t you ‘ave enough to eat? How long will you be ‘ere? You staying for lunch? I have that tomato soup you always liked so much...”

-”I am really thankful, Juana; I am having lunch with my mother in the village”.

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Get to know different places and experiences in Extremadura.
Guided tourism and hiking interpretation(/interpretative trekking), along with Extremadura family business’ sensitivity. Contact us: Conyegar

The Forgotten Bridge

The Forgotten Bridge Route (part I)

My 93 Saab circulates smoothly along the A5. I am on my way to meet my origins. I come here to remember the moment when I came into existence, and my experiences in Extremadura.

I was born 63 years ago now in a house with granite stone solid walls, completed with mud bricks. I still remember the dark wooden beams, as I enter the living room, sustenance of nail-covered wooden planks where the roof tiles (tejas de tejado) used to sit.
Those thick beams which were used as pegs for domestic and farm implements, aroused my curiosity about the way these tools had gotten there. How many men and how much strength would have been necessary to place them there? That mysterious thought used to accompany me before falling asleep.

The house was part of a cattle ranch where my parents, as sharecroppers, lived taking care of beef cattle, working a plot of olive grove and gardening a rustic vegetable garden. The abode used to have

Stay, bedrooms; Today

three rooms. The entrance area, where the fireplace used to be at the back of the room, in the posterior wall of the entrance. On its right, two rooms connected to each other and separated by a thin partition wall which was built with homemade mud bricks. A concluded in its lintel with an ash tree branch that supported a heavy piece of fabric instead of a door enabled the passage between rooms. Out of these two, the biggest room, which was closer to the front door, was where my parents and my little brother used to sleep. My sister and I shared the room wich faced the North, where we could, at least, enjoy a larger window than the little one in my parent´s room.

Our dwelling extended to a stable on the right side where a couple of mules used to be; my father was very fond of these animals, which he treated as fellow sufferers. It took me many years to understand a quote that he used to tell me while looking at them with certain amount of resignation: “Whatever people may say, these animals are intelligent: they know it is time to work, not for chatting or other today´s trifles ” As I recall, I was around seven years old when I heard him say it for the first time. It was February, I know because Carnival had just passed and, soon after that, was when my sister and I discovered the forgotten bridge.

Traditional housing sharecroppers, in Extremadura. Spain

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(to be continued: part II and the end)
Relive experiences in Extremadura
Guided tourism and hiking (and environmental) interpretation, with Extremadura family business’ sensitivity. Contact us: Conyegar...

Extremadura, Spain: land of Paths

Extremadura, besides its nature and cultural heritage, is known, as well, for being a prolific land in adventurers.

In my opinion this is one of the first surges of immigration more or less organized in Extremadura and it happens in the Middle Age driven by the events of Cristobal Colon's trips.

In the late XV century due to the tracks stablished by Cristobal Colon, more than 8000 men and women from Extremadura threw themselves in the quest of adventure, fame and money. From all of them, we know barely a dozen of them that have left their names in history.

These persons that left the places that saw them be borned, almost always driven by the search for better life conditions, they were moved for the improvement of their social status.

Ambition and desperation create a great binomia to force the leaving of their confort environment of a reagion hit by the poverty.

Not all of them were lucky in their pesonal challenge and, some of them, have written their names in history because of the actions during their trips under the surname of "Conquerors".

It is very curious that depending on the period, on the way they arrived to the places and the outcome of the events, the naming of the same action takes different names: Conquerors, globetrotter, adventurer or inmigrant.

I consider that there has been always two characterictics that differenciate the motivation of the trip: the restlessness to know or the social neccesity. Today we can add to this the need to buy trips to reassert our social status.

In Extremaduraexperiencias we are focussed in the ones motivated by the first one: the restlessness to know.

Due to this, we prepare experiences that go through the paths of our region, creating the ambient of our ascendants, remembering the difficulties of our ancestors.

In our experiences we transmit the restlessness of living without all the communication media that surrounds us on our day to day life.

Come on let us guide you on your trip to Extremadura.

Paths of adventurers

Ways to travel, another approach

When we hear the phrase "ways to travel", it is usually referred to the means that we will choose to travel and sleep on our route. I won’t talk about that in this post.

What I am going to write is about our mental dispositions, our expectations when we travel.

I’ve choose three words for three different trips: Being, passing or knowing.

Let us see the meaning of the words according to the dictionary:

• Being: Said of a person or a thing: To exist, to be in this or that place, situation, condition or current way of being

• Pass by: Carry, drive from one place to another. Change, move to another place. Cross from one part to another.

• Knowing: To ascertain by the exercise of the intellectual faculties the nature, qualities and relations of things

But according to the culture and concern of each person, the concept of travel is different:

- There are groups of tourists whose motivation is to visit the maximum of monumental sites, shopping areas and shows, indistinctly. They tend to lean more on the fame of the site than on their own personal interest. These are those of the BEING group.

- There are groups of tourists whose objective is to take the photo in front of the most emblematic places that appear in the guides of the places they pass through. These are those of the PASS BY group.

- There are other people who decide to travel to discover from the visited places different customs, unusual meals out of their daily diet and discover a different natural surroundings than they have in their usual comfort living places. These are those of the KNOWING group.

In Conyegar we like to give guided walks and interpreted walking tours that are aimed at the third group. We combine the comments about the species that we find in the nature of the area, with debates about photography and legends of the place, to finish tasting traditional cuisine of the region.

Extremadura, Spain

Guided tour = tour operator?

There are humble projects that are born with the idea of helping to know to the travelers the customs and surroundings that they visit. These simple projects, are very distant of the tourist packages proposed by the big operators.

We are a small family businesses where the workers, encouraged by the desire to collaborate in the knowledge of places and people, offer a close and personalized treatment to our visitors.

The illusion in our proposal and the knowledge of the environment, allow us to transmit our personality giving singularity to the experiences of the traveler.

Neither can we, nor is it our goal to compete with the big bets of multinational companies. The scope of our work is local and often not understood in our own area of influence by people who live in the area:

"... The roads are indicated and signposted ... whoever wants to see them can finds them ..."

Is a phrase we can hear from the locals, and somehow is true.

Guided tourism does not pretend to discover anything hidden; Nature, heritage, peoples, are there for those who want to find them.

Guided tourism linkes the anecdote to the place, the legend to the environment, the didactic explanation of the geological formation of mountains and valleys, as well as the story of the origin of the settlements of towns and their people.

We like to call this guided tourism "active cultural tourism" and it is an ageless tourism, it only requires sensitivity and interest in knowledge.

Sustainable tourism

Family Experience

We have for some time been defining the term "active cultural tourism", differentiating it from "active tourism" witch is related to risk activities.

Going camping with our son is tourism, because we leave the comfortable environment where we usually live, is cultural because we know places, customs or gastronomy and is active because it requires a dynamic attitude.

It is an activity that is frequently declined in third parties for its accomplishment: school, farm educational centers, companies specialized in camps and so on. But when we choose this way to approach our children to nature, parents are not involve, they are not there.

The difficulty to do it ourselves is that usually we don't know the places to do it with guarantees of success, being sure our family will be safe.

If you want to enjoy an adventure experience with your kids, there are companies that give us technical support and safety guarantees.

Your family will have an experience they will always remember because being in an environment far from the usual of our life, always leaves a mark.

Holidays with children