Volcanoes!

Yesterday we went to La Garrotxa Natural Park, home to the biggest volcano in all of the Iberian Peninsula, called Croscat.  The whole area is a volcanic zone and is classified as active.  They're expecting the volcano to erupt next in about 7,000 years.  It is a cool place since it's a beech forest.  There aren't many forests around here and beech forests grow in cool, humid places so there are almost no beech forests near here.  But there is a microclimate in La Garrotxa area so there is a beech forest.

We also went to a dairy farm called La Fageda.  It is a cooperative that was founded as a place where people with learning disabilities could work.  There are now 500 cows and about 300 workers, 150 who have learning disabilities.  They make about 150,000 containers of yogurt a day!  They can only sell their yogurt in Catalunya since the dairy farm is located in the natural park and there are limits to what you can do there.

Here are some pictures.  I do have one of me and Sarah but my eyes are shut... as always.

This is the sign for the dairy farm.  We had chocolate yogurt... delicious!!

Pregnant dairy cows.

Very picturesque.  There's a little wooden train going by in the center-left of the picture and the snow-capped mountains in the background.

A cross-section of the volcano.

Looks like Mars! (With trees, of course!)

That big rock is actually a volcanic bomb.  They're bits of rock from the volcanic explosion.