Of cows and hiking

One encounters dangers in the real world. Concerns regarding danger are acute when one travels, regardless whether the danger is greater than in normal life or not. We fear the exotic; plenty have asked me how afraid I was of scuba diving or swimming with sharks and orcas. I have never been asked how much I feared dogs or cows – animals which have actually presented threats to my life and bodily integrity.

I have had scary / dangerous encounters with dogs multiple times in Asia and have written about a couple of them. The cow encounters began in the Alps, where they are often given space to roam and graze. My first was during a trip to the Swiss Alps with a friend, when we entered the grazing area of a herd of cows and were chased away by one that was particularly territorial. Getting tired of running, we hid behind a rock and were able to catch our breaths, when the cow appeared to decide we were far enough away from its calves and left us alone.

This story was on my mind when I went hiking with my friend Ibon in the Grazalema mountain range in Spain. We had ridden to the town of Grazalama from Madrid in his Audi. Driving in Spain, one often encounters the Osborne Bull, an outdoor billboard in the shape of a black silhouette of a bull. It turns out to be a brandy advertisement, now granted national heritage status due to how iconic it has become.

Grazalema is a Spanish town with the consistent aesthetics that make Spanish towns charming places to visit. The houses had mostly white-painted walls, black grilles and tiled roofs.

Bullfighting is rightly associated with Spain. Grazalema is in the province of Andalucia, which is particularly famous for bullfighting. Many towns have their own bullfighting-related traditions. Grazalema’s tradition involved bull running. While the bull was allowed to run through the streets, the people would attempt to tie a rope around its head and not get gored in the process.

Ibon and I ate at the restaurant, La Maroma (“The Rope”). There was a taxidermy bull head inside the restaurant, as well as a rope tied to its head below the horns that snaked its way along the walls. A number of photos of bull running events filled the walls, the most prominent of which showed the owner of the restaurant running from a bull, just a few metres ahead of it, in 2009. Ibon and I are both adventurers, but not necessarily adrenaline junkies; I do not recall the photos motivating either of us to share a street with an aggressive bull. The food was good.

On our first full day in the area, we drove to the village of Villaluenga del Rosario for a hike. There was a half-marathon trail run occurring there as we arrived. We checked out the village’s octagonal bullfighting ring, which was the endpoint for the half marathon. 

We hiked along part of the route for the run, along the hiking path on Llanos del Republicano (Republican Plain). It was so named due to a connection to republican fighters during the Spanish Civil War (between the fascists and the republicans). One route of the hike ended in a cavern, Sima del Republicano (Republican Chasm), our destination. During the war, a republican (or his dead body) was thrown into the chasm.

The route started with a paved path and runners kept coming in our direction, in the last kilometre of their run. We passed through hunting grounds with the forest on both sides. There were cork trees whose bark was removed periodically for use as bottle corks.

We emerged from the forest into a plain. Cows grazed here and there. Ibon and I told each other stories of our hiking encounters where we had feared for our lives on account of this “docile” creature. His story involved him and friends, while on a hike, having to climb up trees and jump on bushes, getting cut and scratched in order to escape a herd of angry cows. 

We moved from the plain to an area that was covered with trees and bushes. We saw remnants of the running route, but no more runners. The chasm was a hole in the ground where it looked like a stream would end up. We walked into it the few metres that felt safe to enter without a rope and other equipment. One could certainly dispose off a body in there. We turned around.

We passed a few cows. At one point. A calf, somewhere to our right, jumped over a little stone wall, wailing, apparently to get away from us. For reasons we could not comprehend, it kept moving parallel to us, screaming. Surely, if it was afraid of the humans, all it needed was to stay still and we’d be gone in seconds? Such rationality was not available. About forty metres ahead of us stood a large, horned cow. We decided not to chance walking openly past the big one while the calf was making this racket due to our presence. 

We moved as far to our left as we could, next to a vertical wall, and kept moving forward, breath held at times, ensuring that a good amount of trees and bushes hid us from view of the cow. We passed it and moved ahead another fifty metres, then saw that the cow was turned away from us; we could finally rejoin the normal hiking trail. The calf had rejoined the mother and was no longer a problem. 

Having survived another hike, we had another couple of days of adventure, mountain biking one day and canyoning on another. 

A year later, Ibon invited me to his wedding in Spain. I met his friends, including the guys who had to climb the trees and jump onto bushes to escape the cows in Ibon’s story. I had a few stories of my own with which to entertain them. 

PS In case you were wondering where the pictures of the actually scary cows we encountered were, nobody was focused on taking photos at those times.