la navarrica: Hay Bardenas!

My one rule for my job here is: find a way to get invited on every field trip possible. So far I'm 2/2: I got to go to the Planetarium in Pamplona with my 4th grade Science classes in November, and yesterday, I got to accompany my 2nd grade Science classes to the Bardenas Reales as part of our unit on plants, animals, and landscapes.

The Bardenas Reales are Navarra's only desert and most interesting claim to fame. Living in New Hampshire, deserts are super exotic, the kind of thing you read about in books and associate with scalding heat and certainty of death. So when I first saw pictures of the Bardenas and learned that I would be living one town over from an an honest to goodness desert I almost fell out of my chair. Although it turns out the Bardenas aren't technically a desert, it's a semi-desert, which I guess means that it rains sometimes especially in the spring and there was more water and green than I was expecting to see. Oh well.

The Bardenas are hugely important here in Tudela. You can't walk around the town without seeing pictures of the Castildetierra, the most famous landmark in the Bardenas, EVERYWHERE (for all of you New Hampshire folk out there, it's like their equivalent of the Old Man on the Mountain. The day this thing is eventually worn down by the wind will be tragic). The Bardenas are Tudela's claim to fame, attracting tourists but more importantly a little bit of fame, as the Bardenas are frequently used shooting advertisements, music videos, and even Hollywood movies. Brad Pitt, Cameron Diaz, Penelepe Cruz and Javier Bardem were all here last year to shoot The Counselor and the Bardenas also appears in James Bond movie The World Is Not Enough.

The Bardenas have inspired a number of local legends as well. My students told me one of the most famous ones: Sanchicorrota, a 15th century bandit who hid in a cave within the Bardenas and escaped detection by putting the horseshoes on his horses backwards, so as to confuse anyone who was following him.

The whole field trip felt distinctly Magic School Bus like- a class of 2nd graders taking a guided bus tour through this other-worldly landscape. Unfortunately, once my roommate and I realized this, it was really disappointing that we couldn't actually travel back in time Magic School Bus style to see the formation of the Bardenas instead of just learning about it from ~~Miss Frizzle~~, I mean our guide. The Bardenas' distinctive rock formations and white color (one region is called the Bardenas Blancas) comes from the water that once covered them, when Navarra was once a sea. The white is due to visible salt deposits covering the dry soil in the area. You can also see different colored layers in the rock formations, due to the deposits of different layers of silt. They have found fossils from all kinds of marine animals, including crocodiles and flamingos and the Bardenas are the sight of continued archeological investigations, looking for both fossils and remains from human settlements in the area. *Claim to fame! The Bardenas are also the site of the oldest egg fossil in the world. And home to the heaviest flying bird in the world, the avutarda or Kori bustard, which migrates between Africa and the Bardenas and weighs up to 40 pounds.* And if ten years down the road my career has fizzled, I am absolutely going to be writing a Magic School Bus series in Spanish about a field trip to the Bardenas!