Spain 2011, Consuegra, Tembleque and Aranjuez

I realise that this isn’t the correct technical meteorological term but when we woke up the next morning, it was absolutely chucking it down! From outside there was the sound of (very) heavy rain and when the shutters were opened we were confronted with a blanket of thick grey cloud and horizontal precipitation thrashing against the window – it was all a bit dull and dismal and did not look at all promising. But, I have great faith in the expression ‘rain before seven, clear by eleven’ that I was reasonably confident of improvement as we mopped up the wet tiles under the balcony door, dressed and went for breakfast.

After a second equally good three course breakfast we reluctantly packed our bags and checked out of the hotel. It was still hammering down outside and when we emerged from the underground car park we were trying to find our way in driving rain and in some places through flooded streets. For some reason we found it more difficult than it really should have been to find our way out of the labyrinth of one-way streets and with wind screen wipers on double speed I am certain that we did two or three circuits of the town before we found the main road and a filling station and then plotted a course north towards Madrid with a couple of stops planned along the way.

To begin with our route took us along some nerve jangling minor roads but eventually we found some proper highways and the pace picked up as we continued to travel north. The rain was easing and with better weather to the west I was becoming increasingly confident of my eleven o’clock prediction.

After an hour or so we started to get close to Consuegra, famous for its castle and windmills and after getting confused at a motorway junction we eventually began to approach the outskirts of what can only really be described as a town of extreme contrasts. From what we saw of Consuegra it is scruffy and uncared for, the streets are grimy and the roads full of precarious potholes but rising high above all of the disappointment is a line of whitewashed, blue domed windmills standing sentinel over the town and the adjacent plain. Don Quixote’s windmills sit in a line along the top of a steep hill and they look down on the flat red dirt plains of La Mancha, their sails tied down and no longer spun by the wind. They are almost smug in what is now their supremely safe tourist protected environment.

The weather was wild and showing no signs of improvement and as we walked between the black sails and admired the bulk of the castle nearby we drew strange glances from bus tourists who were wrapped up in coats and scarves and gloves that were much more appropriate than our linens and short sleeves.

It was cold so we didn’t stay long and drove back through the untidy town and rejoined the Autovia heading north. Our next stop was the town of Tembleque but when we pulled in and parked, although it had finally stopped raining we were not terribly hopeful. It was dreary and overcast and the Plaza Mayor that we had stopped to see with its balconies, painted colonnades and stone pillars (not unlike Almagro but without the sunshine) looked disappointing and dreary and sadly won’t be going into our top five so after a quick visit to the tourist information museum we were soon back on the road.

We were on our way now to Aranjuez and the site of a Royal Palace of King Juan Carlos but the road passed by the town of Ocaña which is famous for two things, a Peninsular War battle that was the biggest defeat of the war for the defending Spanish army and for having the third largest Plaza Mayor in Spain after Madrid and Salamanca. I am not sure about that because we never actually got there but it might well have the biggest prison in Spain right next door and on account of the dodgy looking men hanging around the gate and the dreary weather we gave it a miss and drove straight by.

And so in mid afternoon we arrived in Aranjuez, parked the car, stopped at a café where we sat near the window and lamented the woeful weather and then walked the short distance to the Royal Palace. King Juan Carlos has eight Royal Palaces to choose from but I suspect he doesn’t stay at this one very often because it didn’t look very ‘lived in’, if you know what I mean; most are close to Madrid and one is on the island of Mallorca. We walked through the gardens and then paid the entrance fee to go inside and take the tour through a succession or rooms (all the same, by the way) and then some exhibits about life at the Royal Spanish court through the ages.

To be honest the day was in danger of becoming a bit of a let-down compared with those that had gone before and I think we were both a bit disappointed when we returned to the car and set off for our final destination, Chinchon, which we knew well on account of visiting there a couple of times previously. However, by some minor miracle as we drove the short distance the grey cloud began to shatter and disperse and by the time we approached one of our favourite places in Spain there was at last some welcome blue sky and although my eleven o’clock prediction was at least four hours overdue we were glad of that!



Spain 2011, The Plaza Mayor

We were staying at the Hotel Retiro del Maestre, a renovated old Spanish nobleman’s house on a street leading to the main square and we found it easily and left the car in the underground car park. It was a friendly family run hotel with spacious and comfortable public rooms, a large outside terrace basking in the sun and was a nice room for us with a view over the garden.

It was late afternoon by this time and with the sun beginning to dip we didn’t linger long but made our way quickly to the Plaza Mayor to find a bar. On the way we passed by the equestrian statue of the Conquistador Diego de Almagro and then entered the rectangular Plaza. At a hundred metres long and forty metres wide and flanked on both sides by arcades of Tuscan columns supporting overhead galleries all painted a uniform shade of green and fully glazed in a central European style this place is truly unique in Spain. These galleries were originally open and used as grandstands for public events, religious festivals and even bullfights that were held here until 1785, when they were finally banned by King Carlos III.

We choose a table on the sunny side of the Plaza, ordered beer and wine and just sat and watched the activity while we nibbled the inevitable olives. The bar owner shooed away some small boys playing football, telling them to play elsewhere and families began to arrive and the bar quickly filled up with chattering customers. Walking around the square was a proud grandmother pushing a young baby in an immaculate pram which matched her pristine outfit and she completed at least a dozen circuits, stopping frequently to chat and to show off the small child to anyone who showed the slightest interest.

The Plaza Mayor is the most important part of a Spanish town or city and I really cannot think of an equivalent in the United Kingdom where we have public squares but use them in an entirely different way. This is the place where people meet, relax and enjoy themselves; it is generally flanked with shops and restaurants and usually has the town hall and the main church somewhere close by. When we arrive somewhere new it is usually the first place we make for because sitting with a glass of wine and a complimentary tapas it is the best place to be to get a feeling for the town and its people.

In the search for real Spain (not the coasts and the Costas), in the past three years we have visited and enjoyed dozens of Plaza Mayors; Madrid, the largest, Salamanca, the second largest, Toledo, next to its towering cathedral and the tiled Plaza de España in Seville. We liked them all and we began now to compile a list with a view to choosing our top five favourites. We considered Ávila, Mérida and Valladolid, Cáceres and Santiago de Compostella in Galicia but after a lively debate weighing up the pros and cons and putting forward the case for each one in turn we finally agreed on the top five but could not reach consensus on the actual order.

So this is our list: Segovia in Castilla y Leon because of the Cathedral and the architecture and the little streets running away from it like spokes from a wheel, Trujillo, where we had been only today, because of its unspoilt medieval charm, the unpretentious and functional Ciudad Rodrigo, Chinchón with its open balconies and bullfights and although we had only just arrived we liked this place so much that we both agreed to include Almagro in the list.

After a second leisurely drink we paid up and left the square and strolled back to our hotel where we asked for some dining recommendations and the receptionist convinced us to go to her favourite just a couple of streets away so after we had rested and changed we took her advice and found the restaurant in a side street off the main square.

It was nice if not conventional and it had a modern menu with some new twists on traditional meals and I have to say that I wasn’t prepared for rare pork. The sight of a pork chop oozing blood really wasn’t to my taste at all and because I have always thought that anything to do with a pig should be cooked right through it almost spoilt the evening for me as I worried about food poisoning and salmonella and trying to remember the location of the immodium tablets in the suitcase!

Although it wasn’t especially late when we finished the meal, we were tired after a long day that had started three hundred kilometres away in Mérida, taken us to Trujillo and then a three hour drive to Almagro and we were ready for bed. We walked back through the Plaza Mayor that was lively in a subdued sort of way (if that makes sense) and then to the street to the hotel. About half way along we heard Spanish guitars and the clack, clack of castanets and we wondered where it was coming from and then through the pavement level window of a cellar we could see a dancing class in full swing. Some local people suggested that we should go inside and watch so we did just that and before the lesson ended we enjoyed fifteen minutes of genuine Spanish music played by a sort of flamenco skiffle group and a group of young people dancing in true Castillian style.

It was a great way to end the evening!

Salamanca and Valladolid

We arrived in the UNESCO World Heritage city of Salamanca just after midday, easily slipped into an underground car park and made our way into the city. On every visit to Spain I seem to be visiting a new World Heritage Site so when I counted them up I was interested to discover that I have now been to sixteen and that is over a third of them. In 2005 I visited Barcelona in Catalonia and saw the works of Antoni Gaudi and Palau de la Música Catalana and the Hospital de Sant Pau. Then in 2008 I saw the Historic Centre of Córdoba, the Caves of Altamira in Cantabria, the Old Town of Santiago de Compostela and the Cathedral, Alcázar and Archivo de Indias in Seville. In 2009 in the motoring holiday around Castilian cities I visited the Old Town of Segovia and its Aqueduct, the Historic Walled Town of Cuenca, the Historic City of Toledo and the Old Town of Ávila.

It was still misty even though the sun was struggling to break through and we walked through cobbled streets and buildings of rich caramel coloured Villamayor stone directly to the centre of the city. Then around the University buildings and visited the public library and after that the centre of the city and the inevitable Plaza Mayor where because it was too chilly to sit at a pavement café groups of men were wandering around deep in conversation discussing the important matters of the day. It was a good Plaza, not the best, but still worth a visit and when we had finished admiring it we left through a stone arch and looked for a bar and somewhere for lunch and we found what we were looking for just outside the square so stopped for tapas and a beer.

As we ate an old lady passed by selling sprigs of rosemary and I didn’t know why until later when I looked it up. Rosemary, apparently, is widely thought to be a powerful guardian and to give power to women and is therefore it is used by many people to ward off evil in the home and bring good guck in family Matters. If I had known this at the time I might have bought some to see if it might improve the weather because the mist wasn’t shifting when we left and went to visit the cathedral.

I should say cathedrals because Salamanca has two, an old one and a new one that are joined together into one massive structure. We paid €3.50 each for tickets to visit and then commenced a tour of the towers and the balconies that involved an awful lot of spiral staircases. It was a spectacular building and well worth the money but it was a pity about the weather because the drab overcast sky and persistent patches of mist spoilt what would certainly have been spectacular views from the top.

After the visit we returned to the streets and walked to the 1st Century Roman Bridge across the River Tormes, which was flowing west towards the Embalse de Almendra that we had visited yesterday and then we abandoned Salamanca to the mist and returned to the car.
Leaving the city we joined the Autovia de Castilla for the one hundred and twenty kilometre journey back to Valladolid. It was too early to go straight back to the airport so shortly after crossing the Douro for the final time and as we were passing it seemed impolite not to visit the city so we left the motorway and headed for the centre. Valladolid is a sprawling industrial city, the tenth largest in Spain and does not feature on many tourist itineraries even though it was the city where Christopher Columbus spent his last years and died. For a big city there was surprisingly little traffic and we followed signs to the centre and the Plaza Mayor and made our way to a convenient underground car park right below the main square.

It was late afternoon and predictably after failing to make an appearance all day the sun was breaking through now and this was good because the expansive Plaza was really very attractive and all decorated and carefully colour coordinated in various complimentary shades of crimson red and the sun settling down low in the west made the whole place feel warm and hospitable. There was just time to walk the main shopping street, admire some fine art nouveau buildings and have a snack and a drink in a café in the Plaza before it was time to go and return to the airport. We felt a bit rude leaving so quickly but if we fly again to Valladolid we shall pay it the courtesy of staying longer.

Back at the airport we returned the car, Kim thrashed me at cards again while we waited for departure, the flight was on time and soon we were back in the United Kingdom and on our way home and as we drove along the M11 and A14 we reflected on what had been three excellent November days in Castilla y Leon.

Sierra de Francia in the Gredos Mountains

Actually as it turned out it would have been a whole lot better if the wind had continued to blow because when we woke in the morning there was a thick mist and the city was completely obscured from view from the hotel windows. It was all rather spooky but above it we could make out pale blue sky so this made us more confident than we really had a right to be about the day.

After breakfast it was still misty so we were forced to abandon our plans to return to Ciudad Rodrigo for blue-sky photographs and set off instead to visit the historical city of Salamanca. Because it was earlier than we had anticipated we decided to take a scenic route rather than the direst Autovia de Castilla. Leaving the city for the last time we took the road signposted towards Béjar in a southeasterly direction towards the Gredos mountains and in particular the Sierra de Francia, one of the ranges belonging to the Sistema Central, the mountain range that separates Spain in two.

At first the road was long and straight as it cut through a flat landscape of livestock farms and woods that were slowly beginning to emerge from the swirling mists of a November morning. As we drove through a succession of quiet towns the sun began to poke through and the sky started to turn blue. After a while we hit the edge of a national park with pine covered mountain slopes and then deciduous woods of alder, oak, pine and ash in splendid autumn finery that made it look like a field of gold. The road became more difficult as we entered a series of hairpin bends with glorious views over the valleys and mountain passes below.

I had miscalculated the driving distance towards our turn for Salamanca and we seemed to keep going forever but the journey and the scenery was magnificent and another valuable Spanish geography lesson. Eventually we reached the road juction we were heading for and turned northeast towards Salamanca. At first the road continued to twist and turn but after a few kilometres we dropped quickly back down to open range and the agricultural plain and started to pick up speed and make good progress.

We drove through fields of grazing avileña negra ibérica cattle, jet black and with nasty looking horns and occassional blanca cacereña, white and apparantly endangered but good meat. Flocks of sheep enjoying good quality grazing grass and oak planations with Black Iberian Pigs gorging themselves on acorns in preparation for being turned into the Spanish gastro speciality Jamón ibérico. We were enjoying good weather now but after about thirty kilometres we ran into a thick bank of fog that blotted out the sun and didn’t shift all the way into Salamanca.

Castilla y Leon – Rivers, Dams and Lakes

After a while it became clear that we were going in the wrong direction so after consulting the map we turned around and took a turning that we had previously missed and suddenly we had found the Embalse de Almendra, a huge cobalt blue reservoir with the waters held back by an enormous concrete dam. The reservoir behind the dam covers eighty six square kilometres and contains two and a half billion cubic metres of water. The dam itself is more than half a kilometre wide and as a height of two hundred metres and was one of General Franco’s major engineering projects. It was strangely quiet and felt almost abandoned and it clearly had not been working for quite some time because the water levels were so low so I suppose that on account of this there was no need to have any staff on duty.

I had begun to suspect that this was not the glacial lake that we had been seeking, firstly because we were still in the Province of Salamanca when we should have been in Zamora and then because the lake we were looking for was a natural feature and this one clearly wasn’t. This didn’t really matter because it was serene and beautiful, the sun was shining and the big white clouds reflected in the lake made the sky look the starting line of a sailing boat regatta and the beauty of this place confirmed that behind the ugly concrete coastal strip Spain is a remarkably diverse and stunning country.

The time was getting on now and we were hungry and thirsty so we started on the way back to Ciudad Rodrigo via Trabanca, Vitigudino and Lumbrales but there was nowhere to stop and this was the first time that I can remember that I have driven three hundred kilometres in one day without finding a single shop, café or bar that was open along the way. Just south of Lumrbrales we stopped at the little village of San Felices de Los Gallegos where there was a castle that predictably wasn’t open but there were some nice views across the open fields and a pleasant walk around the sleepy streets and then we returned directly to Ciudad Rodrigo.

We arrived back at about four o’clock and went straight to the bar Arcos and sat at a pavement table with the first beer of the day and a couple of dishes of tapas and then we walked for a while around those parts of the wall we hadn’t seen two days previously and there was a good finish to the day when the wind dropped away completely, the clouds stopped coming in and the sky turned a luxurious late afternoon blue. That night we ate at the Hotel Conde Rodrigo again and enjoyed another fine meal and when we returned to the hotel the sky was clear and punctuated with stars and we were confident of more sun in the morning.