En Route to Seville

We just arrived in Toledo for a two-night stay.  Same song, fourth, fifth, and sixth verse, it is beautiful!  All over Spain, medieval towns are easily recognizable not only by their city walls and castles but also by the color of the ancient dark sand-colored stone.  To the left of our hotel balcony, the city looks back at us.  It’s as if we are on a stage and the city is a vast audience.  The tile roofs here are not red.  They may have once been brick red but the colors of roofs now blend into the stones of the buildings.  Some are shaded black from age.

Today marks our fifth day traveling by car.  We spent all day en route to Santiago stopping to visit notable towns.  Santillana del Mar, not far from Santander, is another lovely well-preserved town with buildings from the 9^th century.  Its primary attraction is the Altamira Cave where possibly the largest collection of prehistoric cave paintings likely 14,000 years old was found in 1868.  Tourists cannot enter the caves; they were closed in 1979 to preserve the ancient art.  A replica was created for visitors’ viewings.  Stan and I saw a replica of the cave and the drawings in Madrid at the Archeological Museum a few years ago.

We made a quick pass through Cudillero, in my mind, Little Switzerland.  We entered the town and quickly found ourselves traveling sharply downhill through streets barely 8 feet wide, once on one, we could not get off.  We very carefully maneuvered through the paths and crowds of pedestrians until at last, we arrived at the sea.  As we turned to look behind us, the entire little city fit into the steep valley that looked like a colorful liquid gliding down a gulch into the sea.  Quite a sight!!

Before we reached Santiago de Compostela we drove to Oviedo. Again it was another magnificent well-preserved city with huge open-air plazas, churches, art, and a rugged Roman bridge.  Those Romans must have been master engineers! 

The weather was changing!  A cool wind began to blow and the sky turned gray.  By the time we reached our inn in Santiago, rain was coming down sideways.  Our goal in spending time in Santiago de Compostela was to walk just a portion of one of the Caminos de Santiago.  We crossed our fingers that we might be able to do that the next day.  The inn!  Oh, the inn!  A Casa da Torre Branca, once the family farmhouse, the property has been passed from generation to generation since the 1700s. Its stone walls are over two feet thick and the beams supporting the roof were ancient trees.  The owners began restoring the house and attached outbuilding in 2003.  Over five years were involved in the construction applying great care to preserve everything possible and to replace what was gone with as much authenticity as possible.  The Inn has only nine guest rooms but its dining room and sitting room walls and ceiling appear circa 1700s, dark but comfortable and cozy.  It was one of the loveliest places we have ever stayed.  From our shuttered windows, we could see the green valleys made brilliant by the rain and red-roofed cottages in the valley.  We slept like babies in this cozy inn.

The sky was still black, the wind was ferocious and the rain was relentless the next morning.  We decided that if the weather had not cooperated by noon, we’d just put on our rain gear and go ahead.  At 11:30, we saw a blue sky beginning to peek through the dark clouds.  We walked down the road from the inn to find the nearby French Camino, part of Google Maps’ instructions took us through the woods, and then, voila!  We joined in.  We walked the Camino to the Cathedral de Santiago.  Check!  Stan and I fist-bumped!  We hip-bumped!  We did it.  About 300,000 pilgrims primarily from Portugal, France, and Spain make the walk from their homes to the Cathedral de Santiago on one of several Camino paths.  They have been doing this since 1492 when the Pope declared this to be “one of the three great pilgrimages of Christendom.”  In earlier days, a person might do the pilgrimage to be granted an “indulgence” by the Catholic Church—a forgiveness of sins and possible access to Heaven.  People walk today to pay homage to Apostle St. James whose bones are reportedly buried there.  Legend says while being transported to Galicia, the Apostle’s body was lost at sea and when it was found it was covered in scallop shells.  All the Camino paths are marked with a golden or a yellow scallop shell on blue background marking the way to Santiago.  We have seen many of these icons in various cities throughout this trip.  People who walk at least 100 kilometers of the trails for religious purposes can get a coveted Certificate of Completion.  Hikers and tourists performing the walk for any other reason are not eligible to receive the certificate but they can buy a cap or t-shirt.

Amazingly although we wore rain gear, our walk that entire afternoon was dry, but in the evening, we slept to the sound of falling rain once again.

The next morning we left for Salamanca with soft rain still falling.  We stopped to walk through , a tranquil, ancient 11^th-century town with flowers in almost every window box.  We lunched at a very pretty restaurant; it was strange to see hundreds of tables and chairs all closed up on the plaza.  On this day, everyone dined inside.

Salamanca is a lively city with a history dating back to the Celtic era. It has great open-air plazas, like Plaza Mayor, churches, the conjoined New Cathedral and Old Cathedral, and one of the oldest and largest universities in Spain founded in the 1100s. We climbed the 200-step spiral staircase to reach the bell tower for a 360 view of Salamanca. To us, the pièce de résistance was the roman bridge crossing the Tormes River. The Romans built this stone bridge with nine arches topped by a cobblestone road in the first century. Six of the original 15 arches are gone but the rest of the bridge is strong and carries foot traffic across the river from the old town to the new. So pretty and so old! I always wonder . . . what the city and the people were like and what life was like when the bridge was new. I can picture horse and ox carts crossing the bridge loaded with goods for trade, women in drab colored capes and hoods walking across it with their children to reach the market, or maybe even armies marching across to defend the city.

The weather though improved from Santiago, was still wet, windy, and nasty.  We walked until we said enough!

And now . . . Toledo.  Our drive from Salamanca took us through new landscapes.  Green hills were replaced by golden plains.  Like the high plains in our US west, the sky seemed enormous, and we could literally feel the altitude.  This is cattle country.  The land made us think of the West Texas Panhandle or parts of California.  In this drive, we have made an upside-down “L” across Spain, traveling from Santander, in north-central Spain to the west to Santiago, and now south from the northern border to the southern coast.  Spain is about ¾ the size of Texas.  It’s larger than one might imagine.

This area, as well as much of Europe, has been stricken by severe drought.  It could be the worst drought in 500 years.  Lakes are down to almost nothing.  Rivers have shrunken and the smaller rivers have no water at all and show only their rock-filled river beds.  The extreme dryness coupled with extraordinarily high temperatures (104 F) this summer caused rampant wildfires in Portugal, France, and Spain.  Over 700,000 acres in Spain burned so far this year.  We drove past long swaths of blackened plains and hillsides.  In some places, we saw blackened land that came within feet of houses and small towns.

Although many kilometers lie between towns, several times we could hardly believe our eyes when we saw a solitary church in the middle of nowhere.  We thought, “Build it and they will come.”  We saw castle after castle.  If there was a hill with vast visibility, someone built a castle on it.

Sometimes we forget to eat.  We’d left Salamanca with a snack of a piece of cheese and coffee.  We’ve learned that no one eats lunch before 2 pm and if you don’t sit down by 3:30 your next opportunity for a meal is after 8 pm, with 10 pm being the ideal time for dinner here.  It was approaching 3 pm; we needed to eat.  We came upon a petrol station with a good-sized restaurant attached, Restaurant Sol Y Luna.  Lucky us, we had good food, and with our funky Spanish, we connected in a friendly way with the cheerful owner and sweet tiny server, his wife I think.  We complimented the food and told the owner he looked like Mic Fleetwood.  He sang Karaoke for us and invited us back a las diez de la noche para la fiesta.  He treated us to after-dinner sips of liquors that burned like fire water when we tasted them.

Not too far down the road, we pulled into Toledo.  My first thought . . . Jerusalem.  I’ve never been to Jerusalem but all the buildings here are blocky, made of similar materials, and have a distinctive mellow-yellow color and an overwhelming Arab influence in architectural arches and doorways.  Our hotel was on a hill on the south side of the Tagus River overlooking the city.  The view is spectacular and very romantic.  At the highest point in the city across the river is the mighty fortress, El Alcazar originally built by Romans but rebuilt more as it is today in the 11^th century.   El Alcazar is a military museum now.  As we walked into the city the next morning, we crossed the Punte De Alcantara at the foot of the Castle of San Servando.  People were zip-lining across the river.  We saw a father hold a tethered three-year-old on his lap and zip across the river.  I would not have allowed that.

We climbed the hill of the walled city and entered the city gates decorated in that distinctive Moorish style.  The thing that separates Toledo from all other cities is the fully intact medieval wall and its three cultures encompassing Christian, Jewish, and Muslim throughout its history.  We saw the Cathedral of Toledo, Synagogue of Santa Maria La Blanca in the Jewish Quarter, and Mosque of Cristo de la Luz, a former mosque now a Christian Chapel. 

Toledo is Don Quixote’s territory; his route began in Toledo. 

We arrived in Seville last night.  It is certainly not a port city but my first thought was Tel Aviv.