A small trip down to LEBL, it will be nice even this time of year I thought!

Over some small mountains and...

What a great view!

O well I hope to see latinvfr Barcelona !

On Glide slope!

I loved the way the Ice went away and the runway came into view.

Welcome to sunny Spain and Barcelona.

 

That's pretty common in Spain when you get up over the mountains; there are only two months of the year when the temperature at the Pradollano in the Sierra Nevada goes into double figures and despite the fact that you can be up there in a T-Shirt in summer, it gets very cold up there at night.

For seven months of the year, it averages well below minus figures on the peaks of those mountains, so you don't have to be clearing the mountains by very much at any time of the year to be in what can frequently be icing conditions.

4 hours ago, Chock said:

That's pretty common in Spain when you get up over the mountains; there are only two months of the year when the temperature at the Pradollano in the Sierra Nevada goes into double figures and despite the fact that you can be up there in a T-Shirt in summer, it gets very cold up there at night.

For seven months of the year, it averages well below minus figures on the peaks of those mountains, so you don't have to be clearing the mountains by very much at any time of the year to be in what can frequently be icing conditions.

One of the post I will never forget on these forums was a guy telling us there is only one "Sierra Nevada" and there in the USA. 😵

Edited January 1, 20215 yr by Nyxx

6 minutes ago, Nyxx said:

One of the post I will never forget on these forums was a guy telling us there is only one "Sierra Nevada" and there in the USA. 😵

Yeah, I remember that thread. One of the funniest things of all about that, is that all those iconic Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns, which shape so much of how we think about the old US American West, featuring as they do Clint Eastwood's poncho-wearing man with no name, Lee Van Cleef's bounty hunter 'Angel Eyes', and Eli Wallach's seminal Mexican bandit, Tucco, in movies such as A Fistful of Dollars and The Good the Bad and the Ugly, etc, were all filmed up in the Sierra Nevada in Spain, not the similarly-named range USA. Not only this, they were shot with mostly Italian dialogue for all but the main characters, which was later dubbed into English for a wider cinematic release. For such an influential piece of movie history focusing on what we see as America's past, those movies are actually about as American as Paella or Linguini. 

If if anyone ever gets the chance to go to Almeria in southern Spain (LEAM is Almeria  airport if you want to go there in your flight sim - it has a paved ILS-equipped 10,500 foot long runway which can handle large jets), which is south of the Sierra Nevadas, you can get a coach up to the mountain plateau location where they filmed those western from the town centre, or drive a hire car up there. It's a bit of a long trip up into the mountains - think it's about two and a half hours if I recall correctly, because although it's not that far as the crow flies, the vast majority of the trip is on winding mountain roads as you climb up from the town of Almeria at sea level up to the plateau where the sets were constructed.

But for movie fans, it is definitely worth the trip, the sets for those movies are all still there (and they are well maintained). They do a 'western show' at the place, which is a lot of fun, after the show you can hire horses (actually the same horses they use in the show) and ride these around the sets which look pretty much exactly as they did in those movies all those years ago, being an actual town with complete building which were constructed and not merely prop facades, so it's very cool if you're a big fan of those movies to be riding a horse around the actual town you can recognise from all those movies, with the big bank building, the jail and places such as the gun shop where Eli Wallach's Tucco character makes himself a new revolver from the various gun parts in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and all that cool stuff. I was like a big kid when I went there.

Even if you don't particularly like westerns, it's amazing how much stuff gets filmed up in that place, everything from episodes of Game of Thrones to Doctor Who, some of the Terminator movies, Indiana Jones movies, and of course the terrain is suited to stand in for many biblical epics, or Afghanistan and Iraq etc for war movies and so on. It's no wonder it gets called Mini Hollywood.