Alfaro

The noise hits first. From two streets away it sounds like castanets amplified through a bad PA system, a wooden clatter that ricochets off the stone arcades of Plaza de España. Look up and the tower of the seventeenth-century Colegiata de San Miguel is fringed with wicker baskets the size of satellite dishes, each one rocking under the weight of a white stork stabbing its bill at the sky. Between February and September more than eighty pairs nest here, making Alfaro’s church roof the densest urban colony in Spain. The birds don’t do cute: they clack, defecate on unwary pedestrians and occasionally evict roof tiles that have stood since Charles II was on the throne. Wildlife television without the buffer zone.

A town that looks the other way

Most travellers barrel down the A-68 Rioja corridor in search of oak-barrel temples around Haro or Laguardia. Alfaro sits forty kilometres east of Logroño, a left-hand turn that the sat-nav reckons adds twelve minutes. The compensation is immediate altitude: the town lies 350 metres above sea level on a limestone bluff that lifts it clear of the Ebro’s flood-plain. That extra height gives Alfaro a climate closer to Navarre’s steppe than to the vine-cushioned hills behind you—frost-laden winters, furnace-dry summers and a wind that whips dust off the vegetable gardens stretching south toward Tudela.

The historic core is small enough to cross in seven uninterested minutes, yet it refuses to behave like a museum. Elderly men still rattle dominoes in the bar under the ayuntamiento’s sixteenth-century façade; the Saturday produce market colonises Calle San Francisco with punnets of artichokes that were irrigated that morning. Tourism exists, but it feels incidental. A painted steel viewing gallery has been bolted to the back of the collegiate church so visitors can meet the storks eye-to-eye; the €3 ticket includes a multilingual board that calmly admits the colony’s success is partly due to a rubbish tip on the edge of town providing year-round food. No green-washing here.

Flat rivers, flat tyres

Below the bluff the Ebro spreads into a braid of gravel islands known locally as the Sotos. Two wooden board-walks, both sign-posted from the N-113 ring-road, let you skirt reed beds where nightingales explode into song after March. Kingfishers dive, purple herons lurk, and the only admission charge is the risk of a puncture from the thorny burnet that lines the path. British birders who’ve done Doñana compare it to “the Guadalquivir without the drive south,” though they also warn that mid-summer water levels can shrink the lagoons to baked mud. Bring insect repellent; the tiger mosquitoes don’t read the guidebooks.

Cyclists can follow the Camino Natural del Ebro westward to Calahorra on a tarmac track that never strays more than two metres in elevation. Hire bikes appear at the tourist office on Plaza de España for €15 a day, helmets thrown in as an afterthought. The same office hands out a leaflet entitled Huerta Riojana which maps a twelve-kilometre loop through asparagus fields; pause at the irrigation sluice by Fuente de la Mora and you’ll see the water divide that keeps the vegetables alive while the vineyards on the skyline rely solely on sky-juice.

When to come, when to stay away

Stork timetable: late March for courtship display, mid-April when chicks are visible above the nest rim, late August for mass flying lessons. Outside those windows the tower reverts to a picturesque bell-tower with delusions of ornithology. Winter can be surprisingly sharp—snow photographs from January 2021 are pinned inside the interpretation centre—and summer afternoons regularly top 38 °C, when sensible birds and humans retreat into shade.

If you must visit in July, arrive before 09:00, park free on Avenida Zaragoza opposite Hotel Palacios, and retreat to the riverside for a menu-del-día lunch by 13:30. Tuesdays complicate everything: the weekly market doubles traffic, fills the car park with vans selling cheap socks, and adds a layer of diesel rumble to the storks’ percussion. Bird-watchers aiming for silence should target Wednesday to Monday.

Food that tastes of mud and river

Alfaro’s restaurants don’t chase Michelin stars; they sell what grows within sight of the church tower. Artichokes appear from November to April, usually charred on a plancha then splashed with olive oil sharp enough to make you cough. Spring brings espárragos trigueros, the thin wild spears gathered from field edges, scrambled with eggs and served in earthenware that retains heat longer than British tableware. Summer menus pivot to piquillo peppers, roasted over beech wood, peeled by hand and packed into jars you’ll later see priced at £5 in Borough Market.

Caracolijas—river snails stewed with chorizo and tomato—split opinion along national lines. Spanish grandparents slurp them like soup; some British visitors detect an earthy undertone reminiscent of the Thames at low tide. Rusos, local short-bread buns flavoured with lemon zest, cost 80 céntimos in the bakery on Calle Mayor and survive the flight home better than bottles of Rioja, of which there is no shortage. The house pour at Bodegas Cacharras on Plaza de la Constitución arrives in a plain glass labelled simply crianza; it costs €2.40 and tastes of Tempranillo left to its own devices for eighteen months.

Honest exit

Alfaro will not change your life. You will leave with stork photographs that look identical to everyone else’s, a faint smell of river silt on your shoes and the realisation that you have spent an hour watching birds mate on a church roof. Yet the memory lodges, resurfacing months later when a heron over the Thames reminds you of that clatter echoing down Spanish stone. If that sounds like a fair swap for a twelve-minute detour, take the left turn.