A legend is told that one day there was a big storm in the middle of the sea just when all the men from Las Negras were fishing. According to the story, almost all hands where lost living a village of widows. People who visited Las Negras could only find women dressed in black (negro in Spanish), and that’s why it is named Las Negras.
It is one of the privilege sites of the Nature Reserve as it is protected from the strong winds of the West. We depart to La Isleta and visit El Cuervo’s and Las Palomas’ caves, where we can see how the palid swifts fly around their nests built inside. On top, there is La Molata’s path, one of the most beautiful of the Reserve. In these cliffs, you can track the disintegration of the rock, a photograph from a geological movie. Then we see the XVIII century San Ramon’s castle, built, like most of the coastal watchtowers, to protect the coast from the pirates that controlled the waters.
Then we arrive to El Playazo, where the Rodalquilar valley meets the sea. The valley is an ancient volcanic caldera and from its mountain range was extracted the gold that made this place shine and placed it on the map as an important strategic location of the time.The gold ran out and time transformed the clean, desert montain range, touching the crystal-clear waters into gold itself; one that didn’t need explosions.
After El Playazo, the landscape changes again and the dark textured rock reappears, sometimes crystalline and sometimes amorphous and in places whitish coloured. And we find ourselves again under the shadow of more than 200 metres of steep cliffs on which we can see deep crevices where the hydrothermal waters ran and geological gargoyles were shaped by the wind. At the end of the trip, we see La Polacra, eroded by the sea into the form of an anvil.
