Halfway down the Danube

The Road to the End of Europe

The road to the end of Europe is called the E90. It goes south and west from Madrid, through Castile and Extremadura to Badajoz and the Portuguese border.

(The end of Europe, as everyone knows, is Cabo de San Vicente, in Portugal. That's the farthest you can go to the west, without crossing salt water. And to get to Cabo de San Vicente from pretty much anywhere else in Europe, you have to take the E90.)

What I found interesting about the road to the end of Europe was how American it looked. Western Castile and Extremadura are some of the least densely populated parts of western Europe; once you leave the suburbs of Madrid, there are no big cities and few towns of any size. The land is rather dry and empty; the Castilian part could easily be Oklahoma, and Extremadura looks like Wyoming.

(And the road itself looked and felt like an American highway. It was new, and wide, and not too crowded. Comfortable.)

In Castile, the road stays on a broad flat plateau between two mountain ranges. I hadn't realized what a mountainous country Spain is, but we were never out of sight of the mountains -- big ones, with snow still on their peaks in April. It makes for a drive that is... not beautiful, exactly, the mountains are too far away for that... but impressive. Grand, maybe, is the word.

As we moved into Extremadura, the land gradually got higher and dryer. Although at that particular moment it wasn't actually dry. It was green. Extremadura had been having an unusually cool and wet spring, so there were leaves and flowers everywhere. But if you looked closely, you could see that this wasn't the normal state of affairs. The plants that grew wild by the road might be blooming, but they all had that dryland look, either pulpy or spiky. Trees grew short and far apart. The soil was thin, and here and there the red bones of the earth poked through. It looked like a hard land that just happened to be having a rare good spell.

At about km 180 we stopped at a rest stop by the side of the road. It wasn't a voluntary stop. Rather, it was because Alan -- after an hour and a half of peaceful sleeping -- woke up, and promptly was explosively carsick.

We won't go into detail about this part of the trip, except to say that the rest stop had a rather nice sculpture of storks rising up from a little hill beside it, with the sculpted storks seemingly about to take flight across the highway. I didn't understand the significance of the storks just then. But I would later. We cleaned up as best we could and drove on.

Meanwhile the mountains had reached an arm around to block our path. Or to try. At first the road curved gently away from the heights; but bout 250 km southwest of Madrid, not far from the small town of Trujillo, the E90 suddenly turned and charged the mountains head on. It rose up and then dove down into a 1200 m long tunnel. When it came out, we were in a different country -- still Extremadura, still dry and tough, but higher and a little bit greener. We were close to the Portuguese border here, and the Atlantic, we realized, was just a couple of hundred kilometers away.

The land was still empty, though; few towns, few houses, just great open ranches and occasional flocks of sheep.

At this point we turned off the highway and took the side road to Caceres. We didn't follow the road to the end of Europe -- this time. But we'll be back. Next time, we'll bring a camera. And Dramamine.

Posted by douglas at April 7, 2004 04:31 AM