Yesterday we headed north with a detour to visit the Priorat B&D Lab S.L (vermouth producer) in Bellmunt del Priorat, Catalunya to buy some vermouth. Located in Priorat wine region just inland from Tarragona. It was a lovely little village and again very thankful for our very small Ford Fiesta as the streets were narrow. The vermouth we purchased is aged in the whiskey barrels you can see in the photos.

Our destination for the day was Tudela, Navarre Autonomous community and is around 20 minutes from the gateway to the Bardenas Reales Natural Park and Biosphere Reserve or the Badlands as it is often referred to.

The Bardenas Reales is a semi-desert natural region, or badlands, of some 42,000 hectares in southeast Navarre. The soils are made up of clay, chalk, and sandstone and have been eroded by water and wind creating surprising shapes, canyons, plateaus, tabular structures, and isolated hills, called cabezos.

We took about 100 photos of Salvador and I but selfies are not our forte! The others are just not fit for the public but good for a laugh. So this is the best we could do.

What is so surprising about this desert region is you do not feel like you are in Spain. It feels like the wild west or even Australia.

Also it’s amazing that this very large desert region is located just 70kms from the Pyrenees. The Pyrenees mountain range separates the Iberian Peninsula from the rest of Europe, stretching more than 430km between Spain and France and rising higher than 3,400m in elevation. So mountains with snow!

There was a beekeeper selling organic honey (Miel 111.44) which we could taste and then of course buy. The honey, miel flores, comes from hives that are kept in the badlands over winter then in summer he moves them to the mountains, Sierra del Moncayo. He also had an oak honey, roble miel, which comes from the acorns of the oak trees. Apparently there is an acorn weevil (Curculio glandium). This weevil burrows into the acorns which causes them to release a sweet fluid or sap, which the bees collect directly from the acorn and then convert it into honey. It had a very different flavour and we really loved it and figured the Jordans might want to try it when they visit in a few weeks.

The landscape is just astonishing and we had a wonderful day driving the Circuito La Blanca as it is known.

Don’t forget to click on the photos to enlarge them.