Spain From the Heights

I felt like one of those sailors whom the ship's captain had ordered to remain as a lookout at the very top of the mast. In the distance, beyond the silvery plain of the sea, rose the ochre-colored mass of the bare coastal mountains. It was as if I had arrived at a continent never before discovered, a new world that experience knew very well was not a new world at all, but the familiar land now seen from an unfamiliar angle. Arriving on the Almería coast by helicopter from the open sea gave me such a profound sense of novelty that it made me feel like an ancient traveler, from a time when men could still go to places in the world never before visited by anyone. Looking at the coastal strip, I imagined the immensity of the Peninsula as if, by magic, I could see it all, the old Iberian Peninsula that the Greek Strabo was the first to describe.