Badlands del Guadiana Menor

The area north of Guadiana Menor, between Hinojares and Cabra del Santo Cristo, is part of one of the most desert areas in the province of Jaén, where there is a lack of rainfall, high lithological erodibility and the accelerated process of natural erosion due to the adaptation phase of the river channels to the change in base level that occurred during the Quaternary in the Guadix-Baza Depression.

All these circumstances give rise to a highly degraded and carved landscape that receives the name of bad-land, of enormous beauty and geomorphological interest.

The area described corresponds to a large area of ??land in the southeastern area of ??the province of Jaén, of which we are going to highlight the surroundings of the Cortijo Cherrín, in whose surroundings, in addition, a magnificent example of deformation structures appears. These metric-scale deformation structures are found in turbiditic deposits of the Upper Miocene (Tortonian) age, and are produced by the liquefaction of the sediment due to the sudden sedimentation of turbidity currents. Specifically, these are padded load-bearing structures with asymmetric morphology, the vergence of which indicates the direction of movement of the turbidity current.

Source: Inventory of Georecourses of Andalusia. Ministry of Environment. Junta de Andalucía.