White Towns. Jimena de la Frontera

Just like so many other hill villages, Jimena has ruins of an ancient castle up above it.

View of Jimena de la Frontera

Tower without Church

There is a cemetery on the other side of the plateau and water reservoirs between them. There is room also for a couple of horses to feed themselves on lush greens and possibly for construction vehicles to unload their supplies or crew. Visitors would have to walk up the hill: at least a few hundred yards if they were lucky finding a parking spot among the cars of the locals, or more likely all the way from the other end of the town as we did. Neither the magenta colored signs on street corners nor the town's web site hinted that the buildings would be closed off due to the ongoing renovation work. It seemed there were some tourists that, in a case like this, considered it their hard earned right to ignore the temporary barriers and stepped out onto scaffolding to snap their higher vantage point photos of the town below. We settled for the other side: for the unobstructed views of the hills of cork and vultures, and for the sound of a cattle.

Street in Town

Jimena de la Frontera has a population of nine or ten thousand. The town boosts several churches and retirement homes, a library with wireless internet connection, a selection of restaurants and bars, and a number of access spots to natural springs. For some reason the springs and public drinking fountains all run dry. Luckily, we found an unmarked stream at the outskirts of the town near the river and the canal built for a 18th century artillery factory. We did not have time to go check out their cave paintings from around 1000 B.C. but were convinced that the folks are proud of their history as an image of a ship from one of those drawings was turned into sculptures and weather vanes, probably souvenirs, too.

For fellow travelers and as a note for my future self I would recommend taking the riverside path back to the train station only when the weather is summery and the water level is normal or below that and secondly, trying to get some maps or coordinates for going to the Laja Alta cave as the maps provided by local businesses weren't too exact.