Las Médulas

Posted on September 14, 2015 by Cindy

the collapsed mountains of Las Médulas

We drove into the mountains on our way from León to Santiago to see Las Médulas, the site of an old Roman gold mine. The Romans had a unique way of mining gold; they’d dig tunnels into the mountainside and flood them with water until the mountains collapsed, then they’d dig through the rubble for the gold. Made for some interesting countryside, but it was too rainy and foggy to see much.

pilgrimage by horse

We did see these pilgrims on El Camino, however. It turns out that Las Médulas is on the The Way to Santiago, at least on the Horse Way.

a marker for El Camino de Santiago (The Way)

Note the marker that marks the trail. We’re seeing them everywhere now as we get closer to Santiago. What looks like the rays of the sun is actually the modern symbol for the scallop shell that represents St. James (Santiago). I feel the anticipation building!

Wandering in León

Posted on September 14, 2015 by Cindy

León’s cathedral

Sometimes you make an itinerary only to ignore it. Yes, you want to have some idea of what to see in a city, but you don’t always feel inclined to follow it to the letter. León is one of those cities that just begs you to wander through it, and this is what we discovered:

Of course the huge cathedral (how can you miss it?), but next to it is a little sign inviting you to please descend the stairs to see the Roman ruins. As recently as 1986, they discovered some Roman artifacts that launched a massive archaeological project.

Roman ruins under the street

While wandering some back alleyways, Marcus noticed the quick-release on a guy’s bike appeared loose. His attempt to help resulted in a dialogue that started with travel and concluded the next day in a small cafe with world politics. It was very insightful to hear a Spaniard’s take on Spain, the European Union, and the world at large. Gracias, Julio.

Cindy & Antoni Gaudí discussing architecture, no doubt

The Casa de Botines, a building designed in his early career by Antoni Gaudí, the Catalan architect we will see much of in Barcelona. I had no idea it was just down the street from our apartment.

A cool shop called Tiger that sells everything from craft supplies to kitchen gadgets. I could have spent all night in there.

The symbol of the Camino de Santiago, to keep pilgrims on the right path

The Camino de Santiago. For those of you who have not seen the movie The Way, find it and watch it and you will understand why we sought out this extraordinary pilgrimage route that extends over 450 miles from across the Pyrenees mountains in France to the cathedral of St. James (Santiago) in Santiago de Compostela. (Thank you, Dorothy Liss!) The 2010 movie stars Martin Sheen and his son, Emilio Estevez; Emilio wrote, directed, and had a small role in it. León is our first contact with El Camino as we head to Santiago. We were intending to seek it out at some point, and it turns out we had been walking on it all night! It runs right through the heart of León, and right past our apartment. The path is marked by bronze scallop shells (the symbol of St. James) imbedded in the cobblestones.

Four Lions Brewery

On our way home, I saw a sign for Four Lions Brewery, one of the few craft breweries in Spain. It makes an honest-to-goodness IPA. I wanted to cry – a beer, made right here in Spain, that tastes of hops! I offered one of our stools to the woman next to me. Too tired to speak Spanish, I spoke in English. She answered back in perfect English, but with a slight Spanish accent. I was surprised but didn’t say anything. Later she stopped to talk. She’s an English professor at the local university and has lived in New York and New Jersey. So warm and welcoming, she offered to help us if we needed anything.

Not bad for a night’s exploring. What a great city! I felt a connection when we first arrived. I sensed it was the type of place that would open up its arms and welcome us in, and it did.

Feria in Salamanca!

Posted on September 12, 2015 by Cindy

concert in the Plaza Mayor

Getting to Salamanca was easy because we are staying across the river from the Old City. This is a university town and I like to sleep at night, so we opted for a hotel away from all the fracas. And what a good decision it was!

To begin with, it was so nice to have a lot where you can park for free. And the accommodations were so clean and spacious – plush linens, a king-size bed, two sinks in the bathroom, and a fantastic view of the old city! Thank you, hotels.com! We were a little concerned about the prospect of breakfast, however, since we couldn’t fix our own and breakfast is often ignored in Spain. We opted out of buying breakfast at the hotel (coffee, tea, and a few rolls for about $20 each). We called room service and asked how much for just coffee and tea: $6 for the both of us. And it came with churros. (More on churros later when I have a chance to try the national drink: hot chocolate, which always comes with churros for dipping.)

It turns out that there is a feria, or festival, going on in Salamanca now. All throughout the Old City food booths sponsored by local restaurants are offering their signature tapas and beverages at a nominal cost. Normally we avoid crowds, but we were hungry, so we headed across the ancient Roman Bridge to get to the old city.

The food booths were everywhere, but most were closed as it was still siesta (yes, they still close most businesses from about 1:30 until 4:00). We explored the city a bit, found the center – the Plaza Mayor – and sat and had a snack while we watch the sound check for a concert setting up on a stage at one end of the plaza. After watching many of Ben’s sound checks, we were amused at this one. It took them forever to check the mics for each instrument, and when they were done with the individual checks and put them all together, there were several instruments you couldn’t hear.

the feria food booths

We got bored with that and took off through the city again. This time most of the food booths were open and we enjoyed several. When we could hear the music start up again in Plaza Mayor, we went back. The music was great, after tweaking the monitors a bit! It was traditional Spanish music (everyone knew all the words) with a bit of Gypsy or flamenco influence – very strong on the fiddle and accordion, as well as acoustic Spanish guitar. People were clapping in the syncopated rhythm that is so characteristically Spanish, and many were dancing. We had a great time, and didn’t get back to the hotel until around 11:00 – the latest we’ve been out so far. Maybe we will adjust to the Spanish clock after all! Regardless, it was wonderful to go back over the river to a hotel where we had the quietest night’s sleep since we’ve been in Spain. zzz….

Two happy travelers

Posted on September 10, 2015 by Cindy

with the walled city of Ávila in the background

La vida dulce

Posted on September 10, 2015 by Cindy

tortilla española with local beer in Ávila

Whenever you sit in a cafe, bar, or restaurant and order a beverage, they always bring you a little snack. It’s included in the cost of the beverage, which is usually very reasonable even without the food. In Sepúlveda they brought us a substantial snack with the first drink order, and another one with a refill. That’s lunch for me!

We’ve been served everything from a bowl of potato chips (that could have fed six people) to Spanish olives (yum!) to garlic mushrooms (Sepúlveda) and grilled peppers and ham sandwiches. Here’s two full servings of tortilla española (like a potato frittata) that came with our beers. Delish!

Parque Natural de las Hoces del Rio Duratón

Posted on September 10, 2015 by Cindy

Hoces del Rio Duratón Natural Park

We thought we’d spend our last day in Segovia at a nearby Natural Park. I had read that there is a beautiful hike down to the Hermitage of San Frutos. From the surface, the land looks just like the rest of Castilla y León, the state we are in: dry, brown, and flat. But then we got to the ridge overlooking the gorges (hoces) cut out of the limestone by the River Duratón.

Rio Duratón

We could see the Hermitage on a point overlooking the river….

Ermita de San Frutos

…and had a picnic lunch in the abandoned monastery. Frutos and his two brothers, from a wealthy family in the 8th century, sold all their family belongings when their parents died, donated the money to the church, and went to the Rio Duratón to live solitary lives (separate even from each other) in the caves of the limestone cliffs. They were later recognized as saints and are the patron saints of Segovia. The Benedictine monks built a monastery here in the 11th century to commemorate San Frutos; they occupied it until the 19th century.

vulture

But the most amazing thing to me were the birds. The land has been declared a natural park to protect a population of vultures who nest here. They flew so close overhead at one point (maybe 40 feet above us) that we could hear the air rushing through the feathers on their wings and see their heads turning from side to side as they looked for food.

Chatting en español

Posted on September 10, 2015 by Cindy

Walked into a shop in Segovia and immediately liked the woman who worked there. We joked about my bad Spanish and her bad English, debated which language we should speak in, and decided on Spanish since I had come to Spain to learn the language. She joked, I got them, she gently corrected my mistakes. Wish I could stay. Would love to chat with this woman over coffee!

This is why I travel

Posted on September 10, 2015 by Cindy

the aqueduct to Old Segovia

Every once in awhile you stumble across a place that’s not at all what you expected. Sometimes your expectations are high, and the place is a dud. And sometimes you visit a place not because the guidebook’s description moved you especially but because you needed a place to stop for the night. You may have chosen to drive right past it in the daylight. But fate stepped in and put an opportunity smack-dab in the middle of your path, and this bit of happenstance turns out to be an unexpected delight. This was the case with Segovia.

Yes, I knew about the Roman aqueduct. I read about it in Fodor’s and saw photos of it in the listing of the apartment we rented. You can see it from our apartment window. But all that only registered in a subliminal way; I was too focused on finding an apartment between Madrid and Santiago de Compostela.

We arrived in Segovia, found the apartment, met our host, got the tour of the apartment, unloaded our bags, the host left, and finally we took a deep breath and looked around us. And there it was – the aqueduct, literally larger than life. At first we observed that it went from our apartment down a few blocks to a remote part of the city where we parked the car and found a restaurant to get a bite to eat. Then we walked back to the apartment, walked round a bend, and – Holy cow! – the thing extends way past the apartment to this fantastic fortress upon a hill – the old, walled city of Segovia. The old city is surrounded by an amazing crenelated wall that encompasses the Plaza Mayor (the main square, an integral social component of any Spanish city), the Cathedral, and, most magnificently, the Alcázar – the Royal Palace/Moorish fortress/Roman outpost at the top of the hill. All of this visible from where we were standing with our mouths wide open.

The ancient city itself would have been jaw-dropping, but that aqueduct! Almost half a mile long, it’s made of over 25,000 granite blocks with no mortar to hold them together. And it’s been standing for over 2000 years! It has more than 170 arches. What we had seen earlier was the short part of the aqueduct, only about 45 feet high with one tier of arches. At the tallest point, the aqueduct is almost 90 feet tall with two large tiers. And did I mention that it’s stunning?

Segovia’s cathedral

Before I go any further I have to explain a bit about Spanish history, as I understand it. To keep it brief, I’ll start with Roman times. The Romans came to Spain around 260 BCE and thrived here for about 600 years, until the Western Roman Empire came to a grinding halt. (The Eastern Roman Empire continued for another thousand years.) About this time the Visigoths (or Goths) and other European tribes came into the Iberian peninsula through France and pushed out the declining Romans. The Goths lasted for about 300 years until one non-Christian splinter tribe, feeling persecuted by the Christian Goths, traveled into North Africa (the Strait of Gibraltar is only nine miles wide) to ask for support. 7000 Berbers (a tribe from North Africa) returned with the Goths to invade Iberia. In a few years they had conquered almost the entire Iberian peninsula beginning an almost 800-year Iberian civilization. These African Muslims, called Moors by the Europeans, tolerated other religions and, unlike the Christians who ruled before them, allowed the indigenous Jews and Christians to remain without conversion to Islam. For 800 years all three religious groups lived together harmoniously, until the Christian king and queen in northern Spain, Fernando and Isabel, decided to reconquer Spain for the Christians in 1492. Yes, they were the king and queen we call Ferdinand and Isabella who sponsored Christopher Columbus’s voyage to the New World. Later the same year, they also “expelled” any Muslims and Jews from Spain who wouldn’t convert to Christianity, otherwise known as the Reconquista, or Reconquest – the polite name for the Inquisition.

a blend of history

Okay, back to Segovia…. The aspect of the city that most intrigues me is the blend of history. The Roman influence is obvious in the aqueduct, but historians believe that the Moorish fortress, the Alcázar, at the highest point on the hill, is built upon an earlier Roman fort. And when los Reyes Católicos (as Fernando and Isabel are known in Spain, as if they were the first or only Catholic monarchs) expelled the Moors, a Catholic palace/church was built on the site. One of the things that excites me most about European history is the layers of history that can be observed in any one location – one civilization built on top of another. Archeologists must have a field day here!

I am thrilled by the history, but I’m also enchanted by what I am seeing. They say that the Disney logo is based on the slate-turreted towers of the Alcázar here in Segovia. (I’ve heard that about other European castles as well.) True or not, the important thing to take away from this is that the fortress is extraordinary, as is the aqueduct, the walled city, and the rest of ancient Segovia.

the Alcázar

Marcus commented within the first few hours that we were in Segovia that he could spend at least three weeks exploring and enjoying the incredibly welcoming people, and so could I. We are so fortunate that this amazing town serendipitously fell into our path as we made our way to Santiago.

Getting out of Madrid

Posted on September 8, 2015 by Cindy

I woke several times during the night before we left Madrid. There were four steps to get through, as I saw it, to make our exit the following day.

Get to the Avis car rental office on time to avoid long lines. It was a path we had walked many times, and we wouldn’t be hauling the luggage with us, thank goodness. We’d drive back to pick it up. As long as we got out of the apartment on time, which meant setting an alarm (ugh!) and not lallygagging around as was our habit (when do you think I write these blogs?), this was the easy part.
Navigate by car (for the first time in Spain, and in a busy metropolis like Madrid) from Avis to the apartment. Only about a mile, but it is in the busy historic center of the city. Luckily it would be a Sunday morning.
Park on our street which has no parking, which means that we will be blocking traffic until we can get all our luggage from the 5th floor apartment down to the street. One of us (me) will have to stay with the car, while the strong one (Marcus) brings down the luggage. Note: when renting a fifth floor apartment, always make sure there’s a working elevator.
Last, but certainly not least, get out of Madrid going in the right direction to San Lorenzo de El Escorial, a phenomenal royal palace/monastery/church in the foothills of the Sierra de Guadarrama mountains.

As expected, no problem with #1. We were third in line when we arrived at Avis; the line was out the door by the time we walked out to collect the car.

Also, driving from Avis to the apartment to load our luggage was not bad. There were very few turns; we were essentially traveling in a partial rectangle, and we were fairly familiar with the streets. (Glad we didn’t have to do this when we first arrived. On Day 1 we were overwhelmed just by walking through the city!)

Just as expected, there was no parking on the street where our apartment was located. Marcus pulled into someone’s driveway and ran upstairs. A few minutes later, a bread truck pulled up wanting to make deliveries to the many tapas restaurants on our street. He pulled alongside and said something unintelligible (to my ear). “Cinco minutos,” was all I could manage. No problem; he pulled forward and parked in the middle of the one-way street – his only other option. While he delivered bread, the cars began to stack up behind him. I sunk lower and lower in my seat, but the drivers didn’t seem to care. I guess this is traffic status quo in the historic center where the streets are narrow and the parking nonexistent.

#4 was a mess. We opted to use the GPS instead of the iPhone’s map program. For those of you who read my Scotland and England & Wales books, you may remember Rita, our GPS with an attitude. She directed us out of the city, presumably toward San Lorenzo, but as we approached the city limits we came to a road that was temporarily closed. Our only option was to bypass it; there was nowhere else to go. She recalculated. (Why does she always have to sound so miffed when she says it: “ReCALculating!”) Yes, Rita, please find an alternate route. Only problem was she kept telling us to make U-turns to get back to the closed road. How do you tell a GPS unit that we didn’t just miss the road; it is closed? Imposible! No se puede usar la calle! You can’t. After the third circuit, we stopped and asked some police officers for an alternate route. They spoke no English, but I was able to communicate our predicament. They spent ten minutes typing various addresses into the GPS (nothing I hadn’t already done); she refused to recognize anything but her originally chosen path. San Lorenzo? El Escorial? Never heard of them.

While the policía were working with Rita, I pulled out my iPhone. Fortunately we had purchased a prepaid SIM card for Spain for my phone, with data plan, so we had access to the internet. I typed San Lorenzo de El Escorial into Google maps, pressed the directions button, and there it was: a detailed listing of driving directions (that avoided the closed road) complete with map. I showed it to the policía, they put their heads together, agreed, and handed the phone back to me. Thumbs up, lots of smiles. Adios, y buen día! An hour later we were at San Lorenzo.

I’m thinking Rita may be of retirement age. I’m thinking her severance package may include a long overdue trip to the bottom of the Stuart electronics recycling bin. Or maybe our son Adam will adopt her; he’s fond of outdated electronics. I think it’s best to let her go before she realizes she’s been replaced by a young upstart with a Spanish SIM card.