The Long Anticipated Archipielago De Cabrera

Cabrera was designated a National Park on April 29, 1991. It is south of Mallorca and has a semi-arid climate which means very little rainfall. There are actually 19 islands in the archipielago. Cabrera Castle (photo) towers over the harbour and was built in the late 14th century. The Park can only be reached by sea and runs a tourist boat from April 1st to October 30th. In order to take your personal boat there you must apply for a sailing permit and if you want to stay overnight you must apply for the mooring permit. The permit is all in Spanish and it asks for which dates you want to go. You must fax it in and wait two days for an answer. After submitting two applications and being denied ("Completo...which means Full) we were getting frustrated and had one of the marina employees write on our third application...give us the next two nights available...instead of us specifying dates and being denied. So we got our permit for a week later. You can see JaySeaDee in the front of the harbour photo. The only history we could find about it was that the castle was used to hold about 9,000 prisoners of war during the Napoleonic War and only 3,600 survived. If you take one of the hikes (we did) you can view the Memorial to the Frenchmen that died here. One of the other photos shows one of the prisoners inscription into the castle walls of his name and the date. You can also see from one of the photos how deep the walls are. The walls are very wide and the stairs VERY NARROW as you can see from a couple of the other photos (one is of John in the stairwell, the other is of the stairwell railing looking down from the top of the castle). Because there are few people on the islands, nature flourishes. Apparently there are turtles, dolphins, sperm and pilot whales although we saw none of those. We did, however, get a glimpse of the "Balearic" Lizard who is indigenous to the islands (photo).

And one of the best parts of this journey was we met new friends, Franc and Andrea from S/V Can Drac, from NYC...yes Americans...finally. We are meeting up with them in Barcelona too. They sailed for a year for a charity that builds wells with CLEAN water in Africa. Visit the website at SailForWater.com.