Spain – UNESCO World Heritage Sites

My visit to and post about Alcalá de Henares and the forty-four UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Spain (Second highest to Italy at forty-seven) made me stop and think about the comparison with the list that I reviewed recently of the “Twelve Treasures of the Kingdom of Spain” which was a contest/poll that was conducted by the Spanish Television Company Antena 3 and the radio broadcaster Cope.

I have set out the full list of World Heritage Sites below including links to the twenty-one that I have visited.  The sites are spread across the entire Iberian Peninsula but of the Autonomous Communities, Catalonia, at a crossroads of European culture, and Castilla y Leon, the largest by area, have the most with six sites each.  Aragon, Asturias, Basque Country, La Rioja and Murcia have only one each but of all seventeen regions Navarre in the north of the country is the only one that doesn’t have any at all.  As well as the indignity of having no World Heritage sites poor old Navarre doesn’t have a coastline, no international airport or a direct link to the Spanish high speed rail infrastructure.  Maybe the city of Pamplona needs to start working on a bid to UNESCO for the next round of qualifying.

The full list is:

Alhambra, Generalife and Albayzín, Granada (1984)

Aranjuez Cultural Landscape (2001)

Archaeological Ensemble of Mérida (1993)

Archaeological Ensemble of Tárraco (2000)

Archaeological Site of Atapuerca (2000)

Burgos Cathedral (1984)

Cantabrian Cave of Altamira

Catalan Romanesque Churches of the Vall de Boí (2000)

Cathedral, Alcázar and Archivo de Indias, Seville (1987)

Cultural Landscape of the Serra de Tramuntana (2011)

Doñana National Park (1994)

El Escorial Monastery and Site of the Escurial, (1984)

Garajonay National Park (1986)

Heritage of Mercury. Almadén and Idrija (2012)

Historic Centre of Cordoba (1984)

Historic City of Toledo (1986)

Historic Walled Town of Cuenca (1996)

Ibiza, Biodiversity and Culture (1999)

La Lonja de la Seda de Valencia (1996)

Las Médulas (1997)

Monuments of Oviedo and Kingdom of the Asturias (1985)

Mudejar Architecture of Aragon (1986)

Old City of Salamanca (1988)

Old Town of Ávila with its Extra-Muros Churches (1985)

Old Town of Cáceres (1986)

Old Town of Segovia and its Aqueduct (1985)

Palau de la Música Catalana and Hospital de Sant Pau, Barcelona (1997)

Palmeral of Elche (2000)

Poblet Monastery (1991)

Prehistoric Rock Art Sites in the Côa Valley and Siega Verde (1998)

Pyrénées – Mont Perdu (1997)

Renaissance Monumental Ensembles of Úbeda and Baeza (2003)

Rock Art of the Mediterranean Basin on the Iberian Peninsula (1998)

Roman Walls of Lugo (2000)

Route of Santiago de Compostela (1993)

Royal Monastery of Santa María de Guadalupe (1993)

San Cristóbal de La Laguna (1999)

San Millán Yuso and Suso Monasteries (1997)

Santiago de Compostela (Old Town) (1985)

Teide National Park (2007)

Tower of Hercules (2009)

University and Historic Precinct of Alcalá de Henares (1998)

Vizcaya Bridge (2006)

Works of Antoni Gaudí (1984)

Like UNESCO, the “Twelve Treasures of the Kingdom of Spain” didn’t include any entries from Navarre but had the most (three) from Andalusia.  Interestingly it only included four World Heritage Sites in its list, Cordoba, Seville, Altamira Caves and Santiago de Compostela.

In response to the official list of winners I produced my own alternative list, six of which shared a place on the UNESCO list, Salamanca, Avila, Cuenca, Aranjuez, El Escorial and the works of Antoni Gaudi but also like UNESCO and the Spanish TV viewers I didn’t include anywhere in Navarre.

Can I interest anyone else in compiling a list?

Northern Spain – Alcalá de Henares and the Rain in Spain

In respect of the fire I should not have been so smug because once again at about one o’clock it surged into life, flames started to leap from the grill and fuel pellets started to spew into the combustion area.  We really couldn’t sleep through this so I repeated last night’s switch off routine and eventually it died down and stopped and we slept undisturbed until the next morning.

The sun was shining for the first time when we went for breakfast but by the time we had finished and returned to our room to pack it had stopped and grey clouds had swept in from the mountains and by the time we checked out, paid and left it was beginning to spit with rain.

The plan today was to drive back to Madrid and the airport and stop-over in either Gudalajara or Alcalá de Henares so that we would be close to the airport for the return of the hire car, check in and the late afternoon flight home.  We took the road back to the A2 Autovia through several kilometres of road improvement works and as we drove west the weather just kept on deteriorating until the whole landscape ahead of us was smothered by a cold grey blanket of cloud that obscured the view of the great plain of Castile.

When we arrived at the junction for Guadalajara Kim was asleep in the passenger seat and the weather was awful so even though it seemed rather rude I just kept on driving past the provincial capital and made a decision that we would stop in Alcalá de Henares if for no other reason than this is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and we had visited one yet on this visit to Spain.

Each new trip to Spain seems to inevitably include a visit to World Heritage Site so when I counted them up I was interested to discover that out of the forty-four sites on the UNESCO  list (second only to Italy with forty-seven) and four more had been added since my last visit. I had previously been to twenty and here was an opportunity to add one more.

Modern day Alcalá de Henares is a busy sprawling industrial suburb of Madrid but at its heart is the world’s first planned university city founded in 1293 by King Sancho IV of Castile. It was the original model for the Civitas Dei (City of God), the ideal urban community which Spanish missionaries exported to the New World and it also served as a model for universities in Europe and elsewhere. Alcalá de Henares is Oxford and Cambridge, Harvard and Yale but I wouldn’t have guessed this as we drove towards the city centre through grimy streets, clogged with growling traffic and with unattractive high rise apartment blocks and small industrial units lining the road.

After we parked the car in an underground car park we made for the Centro Historico and started first at the cathedral which as in Sigüenza had the religious floats on display in various side chapels and after the cathedral we walked to the centre of the red brick city to the Plaza de Cervantes so named because the Spanish novelist and author of Don Quixote was born here in this city in 1547 and then it started to rain, gently at first but quite soon it was becoming heavy and we were forced to abandon the open spaces and seek the shelter of the elegant stone colonnaded pavements that surround the plaza and the main street, the Calle Mayor.

Since leaving Sigüenza we had dropped over four hundred metres in altitude and despite the rain there was a more Spring like atmosphere with flowers in the civic park, pink blossom exploding from the trees and storks busy attending to their untidy nests on top of the churches and other tall buildings.  The population of storks in Spain is rising, from six thousand seven hundred pairs thirty years ago to an estimated thirty-five thousand pairs today.  In fact there are now so many White Storks in Spain that it is now second only to Poland who with fifty thousand birds has traditionally been the country with the most pairs in Europe.

All along the Calle Mayor there were shopping distractions for Kim so while she looked at shoes and sparkly things in jewellers shops I made my way to the end of the street to the birthplace museum of Cervantes and waited in the company of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza for her to catch me up.  It was raining steadily now, which was a shame and this being a Monday the museum was closed which was an even bigger shame but I had anticipated this so wasn’t desperately disappointed.

Time was running out now and there was only just over an hour left before we were due to return the hire car so we shared an umbrella as we walked in the rain, stopping for a very short time in a tapas bar that we didn’t especially like and where the prices were high and the staff unnecessarily persistent and then we left the drizzle of Alcalá de Henares and returned directly to Barajas Airport for the late afternoon flight home.

Northern Spain – Sigüenza and the Semana Santa

The first Semana Santa (Holy Week) Parade of Easter 2013 was due to begin somewhere close to the cathedral at eight o’clock and because this was something we didn’t want to miss we left the Posada in good time and made our way to the town centre via the Plaza Mayor.

A modest crowd was beginning to form and a one legged crowd control official was hopping about from one side of the road to the other rather like a man trying to herd cats and trying unsuccessfully to make sure people, who mostly interpreted these crowd control measures to be optional, stayed behind the flimsy pavement barriers.

The Semana Santa is one of the most important traditional events of the Spanish Catholic year; it is celebrated in the week leading up to Easter and features a procession of Pasos which are floats of lifelike wooden sculptures of individual scenes of the events of the Passion.  At the heart of Semana Santa are the brotherhoods, associations of Catholic laypersons organized for the purpose of performing public acts of religious observance and to perform public penance.  They organise the street parades and also undertake many other self-regulated religious activities, charitable and community work.

In Sigüenza the Semana Santa is organised by the Brotherhood of the Vera Cruz which dates from 1536 and whose members carry the heavy wooden sculptures dressed in armour and military uniform from the days of Spanish Empire in Flanders and the Netherlands.

Only a member of the Brotherhood may take part in the Parade and although membership is open to any baptised person there are some complex internal rules that generally limit who can participate in a procession.  Very often these permissions are passed down through families like an heirloom and I have read that in some cases it can take many years to be granted a permission – even longer than getting membership of the Augusta National Golf Club in the USA or the surviving Hereditary Peer’s Club at the House of Lords in London.

The Parade started more or less on time (which is generally rather unusual in Spain) in a dark public park at the bottom of the town and set off slowly in the direction of the cathedral.

First came the men in black cloaks and pointy hats who, although bearing a sinister resemblance to the Ku Klux Klan, in fact precede this rather unpleasant racist organisation by several hundred years, and their robes are meant to depict the Nazareños or people from Nazareth.  After the man who had the responsibility of carrying a rather heavy and unwieldy looking cross came the first of the religious floats, weighing several hundred kilograms each and carried by at least ten strong men who even so had to stop quite frequently to take a breather and rest the floats on wooden poles and on account of these regular stops the progress of the Parade was quite slow.

The theatrical display moved slowly along a straight flat road but soon turned left and had to tackle a long energy sapping climb up a steep street that led to the cathedral and required ever more frequent stops.  Each time the float carriers set the structure down on their stout wooden poles, breathed a well deserved sigh of relief and took a few moments to recover their composure.  One thing was certain – these things were heavy – very heavy indeed.  Eventually some clever person in command, clever because he was not carrying the heavy lump on his shoulders tapped a pole on the ground which meant resume carrying position and then tapped it a second time which meant commence walking.

The magnificently presented floats were punctuated with bands of drummers who beat out a steady pulsing rhythm in time with the marching of the men in military uniform carrying the pasos and then the penitents in cloaks of pristine white and occasionally purple and they all marched, sometimes shuffled, slowly in sombre fashion to the top of the hill and eventually to the cathedral square where one-by-one each of the floats were taken inside the main doors and manoeuvred carefully into position on top of the church pews.  At one point whilst taking pictures we rather over enthusiastically managed to get in the way of proceedings and one of the carriers politely asked us to move away before the structure was set down on our heads.

The whole spectacle was wonderful, a piece of genuine religious theatre and we enjoyed it immensely, this was something that we had travelled to Sigüenza especially to see and we had not been disappointed.

After it was all over the crowd began to disperse and melt into the cobweb of shadowy lanes leading away from the cathedral and the one legged crowd control official started to pick up the overturned and ignored wooden barriers and as the Plaza Mayor emptied we walked away in the direction of the restaurant that had become our preferred choice.  This is silly I know but once we find somewhere we like we get in the habit of going back even though there are many others to choose from.  Once in Barcelona we went to the same place four nights running and I think we had paella every night as well (different varieties of course).

We expected the place to be busier tonight but once again although there were only a handful of customers in the upstairs tapas bar there was no one in the basement restaurant and they had to open it especially for us.  They didn’t seem to mind too much about that and we were glad that we went back again because we enjoyed a third good meal.

Later we returned to the room and were pleased to find that the fire had turned off so we went to bed feeling confident that we (I) hadn’t broken it!

Northern Spain – Sigüenza and the Palm Sunday Parade

I cannot be absolutely sure that it was because of me but I expect that it was because I had been interfering with the controls, but the fire in the room unexpectedly started the ignition process sometime around one o’clock in the morning and immediately woke us up.

The last thing we needed was this thing spitting and hissing and firing up the room while we tried to sleep so after an hour or so I returned to the controls and randomly stabbed at the buttons until it eventually stopped.  I’m not sure that I should have done that because the web site provides the following information:

“The stove technology takes different factors into consideration such as – pellet characteristics, quality, density, moisture, etc. – installation characteristics: total length of the flue pipes, diameter, bends, curves, etc.- ambient characteristics: wind, atmospheric pressure, height above sea level, etc. After detecting and analyzing these factors, the stove automatically self-configures in real time, adjusting technical parameters in order to optimize the pellet combustion and the stove operation.”

So I am fairly certain that I was responsible for its rather curious behaviour but at least it was off now and we could sleep peacefully until morning and it did come back on normally at nine o’clock so I reassured myself that I hadn’t done any permanent or expensive rechargeable damage.

Today was Palm Sunday and the beginning of Holy Week and we were expecting processions in town today so after breakfast we left the Posada with a sense of real anticipation and we walked towards the Alcazar to see if we could spot the first signs of a crowd beginning to form but there was none.  We walked again from the castle to the Plaza Mayor and then to the cathedral and still there was no sign of any real activity and then suddenly and without warning at eleven o’clock the cathedral bells started to ring, gently at first but soon almost uncontrollably and the largest began swinging so violently that I feared that it might come loose and come crashing down into the Plaza so I stood well back.

From the main doors three priests came from inside in full ceremonial regalia and seemed slightly agitated and then it became obvious that they were waiting for someone else to turn up and join them.  They looked at their watches and at each other and then at their watches again and gave each other a “well, is coming or not” sort of look and then suddenly a fourth man turned up, running in from the street, booted and suited and sweating slightly at the forehead.  It was clearly his year to carry the cross ahead of the procession and he had nearly missed the opportunity, he bowed to the clergy and apologised several times and then the four of them set off into the streets.

Well, this didn’t look like much of a procession to us so we went back to the hotel and picked up the car ready to drive off to visit another nearby town but as we drove off out of town we came across the start of the parade so parked up to watch the Palm Sunday Procession representing the entry into Jerusalem.  There was a small float with Jesus on his donkey and this was followed by children and families waving palm leaves in the air as they followed the cross and the priests through the main streets of Sigüenza towards the cathedral and the midday Mass.

When the morning excitement had died away and the crowds had dispersed and the traffic could move freely again we returned to the car and set off in an easterly direction towards the old fortress town of Molina de Aragon.

Weekly Photo Challenge: UP

The Leaning Tower of Pisa:

We were glad of that and purchased a ticket for the trip to the top.  There are two hundred and ninety four steps up a spiral staircase that take visitors up and which due to the absence of windows, and therefore orientation, is reminiscent of a fairground wacky house attraction, especially when although you know that you were ascending sometimes according to the extreme angle of the tilt of the building it feels as though you were going down at the same time, which, believe me, is a very weird experience.

Read the full story…

Northern Spain – Sigüenza, The Cathedral and Don Martín Vázquez de Arce

On account of this being the beginning of holy week there were restricted opening hours for the cathedral so as we were absolutely sure that it was open this lunchtime we made our way along two streets named after heroes of the Reconquest, Calle de Cardenal Mendoza and the Plaza del Obispo Don Bernardo and then to the main doors.

The seven hundred year period between 722 and 1492 has long been known to historians of Spain as the ‘Reconquista’ and the Spanish have subsequently organised their medieval history around the drama of this glorious event which over time has become a cherished feature of the self-image of the Spanish people and has become embellished into a sort of organised Catholic national crusade to remove the Muslims from Iberia.

In legend the focal point of the story of the Reconquista is the heroic tale of Rodrigo Díaz de Bivar or El Cid, the National hero of Spain and revered by many as being single handedly responsible for the victory of the Catholic Kingdoms over the North African Moors but whilst El Cid was undoubtedly a great warrior and soldier he was only one of many who contributed to the Crusade.  There were other equally heroic figures and one of these was Don Martín Vázquez de Arce who is celebrated in Sigüenza cathedral.

Don Martín Vázquez de Arce was born three hundred years or so after El Cid somewhere in Castilla and began at a young age to serve the Mendoza family of Guadalajara, the city where his father worked as a secretary to the family and lived in the city of Henares.  He was the epitome of the gallant and heroic knight, trained in the arts, literature and warfare.  He served as a Page of the first Duke of the Infantry and accompanied the Spanish troops in various campaigns in the Vega of Granada.

He died a young man when in July 1486, only twenty-six years old he fell into an ambush by the Moors at Acequia Gorda and although according to a contemporary chronicler he fought bravely and killed many Arabs the Spanish knights were heavily outnumbered and he was eventually overcome and slain.

Six years later, in the year that Granada fell and the Reconquest was complete his body was recovered by his father and moved to Sigüenza where he was laid to rest in a private chapel and a wonderful monument made in the finest stonemasons workshop in Gudalajara, was placed over his grave in his memory.

For a small town the cathedral is an immense building, built to symbolise the power and authority of Bishop Don Bernardo who began construction in the twelfth century.  It has three naves and a main chapel with an ambulatory and a dome and around the outer walls are a series of commemorative chapels which reads like a who’s who of the local campaigns of the Reconquista. These chapels include particularly San Pedro with a wrought iron grille by Juan Francés, the Anunciación, with Mudejar details, and the San Marcos chapel.

Eventually we came to the jewel of the Cathedral, the Chapel of St. Catherine which houses the sepulchre of Martín Vázquez de Arce where in what is regarded as one of the finest examples of Spanish funerary art is his alabaster statue with his tunic decorated with the red cross of Santiago as he lies gently on his side while reading.  The authors of the Spanish Generation of 1898 (a group of patriotic artists and philosophers) drew national attention to the statue by naming him ‘el doncel de Sigüenza’ – the boy of Sigüenza.

This statue is so important and so valuable that it isn’t possible to just wander unaccompanied into the chapel and there was a forty minute wait and a €4 entry fee so as I could very clearly see the statue through the locked gates I wasn’t inclined to wait around.  And neither was Kim especially as a family of gipsy beggars was following her around the pews with their hands outstretched and the eyes assessing pick-pocketing opportunities so we completed our visit and left the cathedral and Kim handed over our loose change to a stooped and whiskered old lady dressed in black at the door who she declared, in her opinion, to be a genuine hard-luck case.

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More posts about El Cid and the Reconquista:

El Cid and Alvar Fáñez - another hero of the Reconquest

El Cid and his horse Babieca

El Cid and his Wife Ximena

El Cid and La Tizona

El Cid and Saint James

El Cid and Alfonso VI

El Cid and the Castle of Belmonte

El Cid – The Film Fact and Fiction

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Weekly Photo Challenge: UP

Trogir, Croatia and the Tower of Terror!

The first third of the climb was straightforward and uneventful up the sort of staircase that we have negotiated many times but then the stone staircase stopped abruptly at a first level and the next part of the climb was up a set of precarious wooden steps that had a handrail but nothing else to prevent a careless visitor falling through and ending up in a tangle of broken bones on the stone floor at the bottom of the tower.

Worse than that was the prospect of slipping and falling the other way which would have involved a fall through an open stone window and onto the court yard below with little real prospect of survival.  During the fatal fall however there would have been some excellent views because the higher the steps climbed the view over the roof tops towards the sea on one side and the mountains on the other got better and better.

This was more like the Tower of Terror than the Tower of Trogir.  At the top of the hazardous wooden stairs was a second level where the bells were and then some even more dangerous iron stairs to negotiate to complete the climb to the very top of the tower which involved a struggle through a small opening without any handrails at all and which opened out into the final level where there was time to enjoy the spectacular views and to contemplate and reflect on just how perilous this climb was and to worry about getting back down again.

Read the full story…

Northern Spain – Sigüenza, the Alcazar and the Plaza Mayor

The soporific combination of a dark room and a quiet street with only whispered footsteps outside meant that we slept until quite late and were only woken when the fire in the corner of the room cranked into life at nine o’clock.  This didn’t matter however because breakfast wasn’t served until half past.

The breakfast turned out to be quite excellent consisting of tostado con tomate, ham, egg and cheese, pancakes and Madeira cake all served fresh.  The only problem that arose was with the tea and this I concluded was a consequence of the absence of English guests staying at the Posada.  I was offered green, peppermint or a variety of different fruit teas but no English breakfast or simple black.  We eventually established what it was that I wanted and I felt bad about that when the waitress was sent out hurriedly to the shops to buy some.  After she returned I finally got my pot of tea but it was served luke warm and I was forced to conclude that in remote parts of Spain they are not very good at making tea!  It didn’t spoil the breakfast though.

It was mid morning by the time we left the hotel and there was a simple choice – up the hill to the Alcazar or down to the Cathedral.  We decided to start at the top of the town and make our way to the bottom.  Lined on each side with caramel coloured houses with terracotta tiled roofs, the Calle de Valencia followed the line of the old medieval town wall and half way to the castle we passed through the Puerto del Porto Mayor which was once the main gateway into the narrow streets of the old town and from here there was a final twisting climb to the Plaza del Castillo and the Parador Hotel.

The Parador Hotels are classy places well beyond our limited budget and can be found all over Spain.  These were originally a State owned chain and were luxury hotels in old castles, palaces, convents, monasteries and other historic buildings that were established to promote quality tourism, to act as guardian of the national and artistic heritage of Spain and to assist poorer regions to attract more visitors.  They are no longer owned by the State and during the recession have begun to suffer financial difficulties but there didn’t appear to be a drastic shortage of guests this morning.

The present day castle was built in the twelfth century but there has been a fortress here since the Visigoths built the first in the fifth century.  Later as the Northern Kings led the Reconquest of Spain the Moors constructed a new castle on the same site but in 1124, the crusading ecclesiastic knight, Bernardo de Agen took possession of the castle and began the Christian repopulation and the building of the Christian Alcazar.

The castle was extended and remodelled at various times between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries but was partially destroyed in 1811 during the French occupation. It again suffered damage during the Carlist Wars and during the Spanish Civil War when Sigüenza became part of the front line fighting during the Aragon campaign. It had to be almost completely rebuilt after that so although it now suffers the indignity of being a hotel at least we have the Parador initiative to thank for what we see today.

It was possible to walk around parts of the old external areas but there is no getting away from the fact that the interior of the old castle is a hotel so with little or nothing to see except the reception desk and a couple of reproduction suits of armour we didn’t stay long and made our way down a narrow stone street towards the Plaza Mayor.

The weather was proving very inconsistent and there was no way of confidently predicting which way it would go as it changed without warning through intermittent periods of sunshine, cloud, blue sky and then squally showers when rain fell like tiny lead fishing weights and the temperature fluctuated wildly.  To dodge the showers we reached the pedestrianised fifteenth century Plaza Mayor via a number of churches, historic houses and artisans craft shops until we eventually reached the central square of the town which although wouldn’t get into my personal top five Plaza Mayor was very pleasant indeed with renaissance architecture, balconies and covered colonnades, palaces and the magnificent cathedral with history etched into every stone and dripping like honey off the walls.

There was no activity in the Plaza today and it was too cold for the bars to set up their tables outside so it didn’t take us long to wander through the stone pillars and across the cobbles and we left the square and made our way to the cathedral which was where we were going next.

Alternative Twelve Treasures of Spain – Segovia, Aqueduct, Alcazar and Cathedral

“Here were churches, castles, and medieval walls standing sharp in the evening light, but all dwarfed by that extraordinary phenomenon of masonry, the Roman aqueduct, which overshadowed the whole…’The Aqueduct’, said the farmer, pointing with his whip, in case by chance I had failed to notice it.” Laurie Lee - ‘As I walked out one Sunny Morning’

The “Twelve Treasures of the Kingdom of Spain” was a contest/poll that was conducted by the Spanish Television Company Antena 3 and the radio broadcaster Cope.  The final results were announced on 31^st December 2007.  I thought it might be interesting to take a look at the eight out of the twelve that I have visited and having completed that I thought I might come up with a personal alternative twelve.

Top of my personal list is my current favourite city in Spain – Segovia in Castilla y Leon…

On a first visit there we walked out into the sociable main square and followed a street adjacent to the Cathedral and walked in the direction of the Alcázar, which, by some measures, is the most visited castle in Spain.  The route took us through narrow streets, past artisan craft shops and churches and eventually brought us out at the north of the city on the top of a rocky outcrop that was the location of the fortress that was begun in the twelfth century and was subsequently occupied by a succession of Castilian monarchs from Alfonso X to Phillip II and Charles III.  In the nineteenth century it was destroyed by fire but was restored to its present magnificent status soon after.

Segovia and the Spanish tourist board would have us believe that the Alcázar was the inspiration for Walt Disney’s Cinderella’s Castle at Disneyland and Disneyworld but there is no real evidence to support this. In fact it is more likely that the famous icon of the Disney empire was inspired principally by Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria and several picturesque French palaces, most notably Louis XIV’s Versailles although I like to think that it is also quite possible that the Alcázar in Segovia may also have been an important influence as well.

The Alcazar of Segovia above and Walt Disney Castle below…

We purchased tickets to visit the Alcázar and paid a little extra to climb to the top of the Torre de Juan II (total price €6 each). The castle was busy with a coach full of Japanese tourists and several school visits so we had to try and arrange our journey through the rooms and exhibits to try and avoid the busy sections and the crowds.

After visiting the state rooms and the armouries we ended our visit with a climb of three hundred and twenty steps up the spiral staircase to the top of the tower where we were rewarded for our efforts with fabulous views over the city and the surrounding countryside.

Leaving the Alcázar gardens we followed the old city wall along its northern side where there were good views over the river valley below and a barren plain stretching away in infinity towards mountains in the north. The city walls were not so impressive as those in Ávila however and eventually we left the old city through the Puerta de San Cebrián and followed a small road past the Santa Cruz monastery and the City’s bullring to the nearby village of San Lorenzo.

Here there was a splendid church in a main square lined on every side with medieval houses and little shops. I imagine that this pretty little place becomes quite congested in the summer but today it was unhurried and charming and the local people paid no attention to us as they went about their business.

Leaving the village we returned to Segovia through a modern residential development and entered the City at the Plaza de la Artilleria, the bus station underneath the Aqueduct and from where we roamed leisurely through the streets past Romanesque churches and Renaissance palace residencies and older medieval buildings and it was by now time for a beer and a tapas so we selected a bar with tables in the sun and sat and enjoyed watching the residents of Segovia as they went about their business of the day in probably the same way that they have for a thousand years. A walk around the square, a sit down, a chat, a walk around the square, a sit down, a chat and so on and so on.

If the Alcázar isn’t enough for one city the Aqueduct is the most recognised and famous historical symbol of Segovia. It was built at the end of first to early second century AD by the Romans during their occupation of the Iberian Peninsula to bring water from the Río Frío about eighteen kilometres away and requiring an elevated section in its final kilometer from the Sierra de Guadarrama to the walls of the old town. This is supported by an engineering achievement of one hundred and sixty-six arches and one hundred and twenty pillars constructed on two levels. It is twenty eight metres high and constructed with over twenty thousand large, rough-hewn granite blocks, which are joined without mortar or clamps and have remained in place for two thousand years.

We liked the Aqueduct and looked all round it from every possible angle, it is one of those structures that make you appreciate just how brilliant the Romans were. I never tire of visiting these ancient structures, I feel privileged to able to enjoy them and the sense of wonderment is never diminished no matter how many I see.

There was only one more thing to do in Segovia so after a refreshment break we went to the Cathedral to finish off the day. The building was completed in 1577 and is regarded as the World’s last great Gothic Cathedral. There was an admission charge again, which seems to becoming quite normal, so we paid the €3 and then entered what I suggest is quite possibly the coldest cathedral in Spain and probably all of Europe.

We were inappropriately dressed for sub-zero temperatures and although the cathedral was well worth the admission charge and the visit it was too cold to enjoy it so we sprinted around the naves and the chapels with rather indecent haste and were glad to come about again into the sunshine with only seconds to go before hypothermia set in.

Later in the agreeable afternoon sunshine we needed to warm up so we ambled around the pretty little streets, bought some wine from a little shop near to the hotel and then went back to the room to drink it and look out from our balcony over the square at the late afternoon activity. The Sercotel Infanta Isabel was a good hotel in an excellent location and we enjoyed the setting and the atmosphere as we drank our bottle of local Spanish wine and thoughts turned to dining arrangements for the evening.

 

Alternative Twelve Treasures of Spain – Benidorm

“By the end…it was clear that Spain’s spiritual and cultural isolation was at an end, overwhelmed by the great alien invasion from the North of money and freedoms.  Spain became the most visited tourist country in the World, and slowly, as the foreigners poured in, its identity was submerged, its life-style altered more in a single decade than in the previous century.”                      Norman Lewis, ‘Voices of the Old Sea’.

The “Twelve Treasures of the Kingdom of Spain” was a contest/poll that was conducted by the Spanish Television Company Antena 3 and the radio broadcaster Cope. The final results were announced on 31^st December 2007.  I thought it might be interesting to take a look at the eight out of the twelve that I have visited and having completed that I thought I might come up with a personal alternative twelve.  The original twelve included San Sebastián in the Basque Country but my alternative holiday beach city of Benidorm and I include it here at number six.

In the first few years of the 1960s my grandparents visited Benidorm in Spain several times.  For people from London who had lived through the Luftwaffe blitz of the 1940s and the killer smog of the 1950s they applied for passports (which was practically unheard of for ordinary people) and set out with pale complexions on an overseas adventure and returned home with healthy Mediterranean suntans and duty free alcohol and cigarettes.  They brought back exotic stories of exciting overseas adventures and suitcases full of unusual souvenirs, castanets, replica flamenco dancing girls, handsome matador dolls with flaming scarlet capes and velour covered bulls that decorated their living room and collected dust for the next twenty years or so.

In 1950 a Russian émigré called Vladimir Raitz founded a travel company in London called Horizon Holidays and started flying people to Southern Europe and the package tour was born.   In 1957 British European Airways introduced a new route to Valencia and the designation ‘Costa Blanca’ was allegedly conceived as a promotional name when it first launched its new service on Vanguard Vickers airoplanes with four propeller driven engines at the start of the package holiday boom.   

 

The flight took several hours and arrival at Valencia airport some way to the west of the city was not the end of the journey because there was now a one hundred and fifty kilometre, four-hour bus ride south to Benidorm in a vehicle without air conditioning or air suspension seats and in the days before motorways on a long tortuous journey along the old coast road.

Benidorm developed as a tourist location because it enjoys a unique geographical position on the east coast of Spain.  The city faces due south and has two stunningly beautiful beaches on the Mediterranean Sea that stretch for about four kilometres either side of the old town, on the east the Levante, or sunrise, and to the west the Poniente, the sunset, and it enjoys glorious sunshine all day long and for most of the year as well. 

Sixty years ago Benidorm, although not a fishing village as such, was still a modest beach side community, a place of sailors, fishermen and farmers who patiently tended almond, olive, carob and citrus trees – the sort of place that Norman Lewis would have recognised.  Small fishing boats, the tarrafes, each with four large lanterns to attract fish at night bobbed in the water or lay drawn up resting on the sand.  In 1950, Benidorm didn’t attract many visitors and life was difficult, it had no water supply or sewage disposal system and waste was tipped in the sea or simply buried in the earth.

The watershed year was 1954 when the Franco loyalist, Pedro Zaragoza Orts was nominated as town Alcalde and threw himself into his work and set himself an objective of improving the quality of life in the small town.  In terms of economic potential there wasn’t a lot to work with so he decided to concentrate on tourism and he imagined a dream of creating a bourgeois pan-European holiday utopia.  Benidorm had sun, it had beaches, it had sea but what it didn’t have was visitors.

Zaragoza recognised the potential of increased numbers of visitors and quickly created the Plan General de Ordenación, or city building plan, that would exploit that potential.  The plan ensured that every building would have an area of leisure land, guaranteeing a future free of the excesses of cramped construction seen in other areas of Spain and it is the only city in the country that still adheres to this rigid rule.  This vision for the future took six years to come to reality, while he waited he piped in domestic water from Polop, fifteen kilometres to the north in the mountains on the road to Guadalest and he ignited the building boom that followed and the flying start that Benidorm achieved in the package tour boom of the 1960s and 70s.

The vision for Benidorm was simultaneously brilliant and exciting and it gave the modern city its modern unique landscape because Zaragoza encouraged vertical construction of dozens of sky scrapers in a deliberate plan to make efficient use of land and to keep the city at ground level spacious and airy with green parks and open spaces and all of the accommodation relatively close to the beaches.  He explained his plan like this; ‘If you build low, you occupy all the space and have a long walk to the beach. If you build high, you can face the sea, and leave room for gardens, pools and tennis courts’.  This was in contrast to nearby Torrevieja and on the Costa Del Sol in the south, Marbella where excessive horizontal development led to great sprawling ugly urbanisations that have practically destroyed the coast by burying it under concrete and tarmac.  Zaragoza called this urban concentration instead of urban sprawl.

The first developments started at the centre at the rocky outcrop in the twisting narrow streets hemmed in by claustrophobic whitewashed houses, the San Jaime church with its distinctive blue tiled hat roofs, the old town promontory with the Balcon Del Mediterraneo, and pretty Mal Pas beach below and quickly spread east and west along the splendid beaches.  Today Benidorm has some of the tallest buildings not only in Spain but all of Europe but the first were fairly modest by comparison, the tallest reaching only a modest ten floors or so.

If Pedro Zaragoza Orts is remembered for the Beni-York skyscraper he is even more famous for the so called ‘War of the Bikini’.  In the later years of the 1950s the icon of holiday liberty was the saucy two piece swimsuit but in staunchly religious Spain, still held in the firm two-handed grip of church and state, this scanty garment was seen as a threat to the very basis of Catholic society.  

And it certainly had this effect in Spain and although occasionally allowable on the sandy beaches, it had to be covered up in all other areas; on the promenades and in the plazas and in the shops and the bars and cafés for fear of causing any offence.  In one famous incident, a British tourist, sitting in a bar opposite a beach wearing only a bikini, was told by a Guardia Civil officer that she wasn’t allowed to wear it there.  After an argument she hit him, and her strike for social justice cost her a hefty fine of forty thousand pesetas.

Zaragoza needed tourists and tourists wanted the bikini and with more northern European tourists arriving each year in search of an all over suntan the Mayor knew that the banning of the two piece swimsuit simply couldn’t be sustained or allowed to threaten his ambitious plans.

Zaragoza took a gamble and signed a municipal order which permitted the wearing of the bikini in public areas and in this single act he effectively jump-started the Spanish tourist industry.  Zaragoza said: “People had to feel free to be able to wear what they wanted, within reason, if it helped them to enjoy themselves as they would come back and tell their friends about the place.”  In deeply religious Catholic Spain not everyone was so understanding or welcoming of the bikini however and in retaliation the Archbishop of Valencia began the excommunication process against him. 

Excommunication was a serious matter in 1959 and his political supporters began to abandon him so one day he got up early and drove for nine hours on a little Vespa scooter to Madrid to lobby Franco himself.  The Generalissimo was suitably impressed with his determination and gave him his support, Zaragoza returned to Benidorm and the Church backed down and the approval of the bikini became a defining moment in the history of modern Spain ultimately changing the course of Spanish tourism and causing a social revolution in an austere country groaning under the yoke of the National Catholic regime.  Zaragoza went on to become Franco’s Director of Tourism and a Parliamentary Deputy.

For people who had never been abroad before Benidorm must have been an exciting place in the early 1960s.  Palm fringed boulevards, Sangria by the jug full and, unrestrained by optics, generous measures of whiskey and gin, rum and vodka.  Eating outside at a pavement café and ordering drinks and not paying for them until leaving and scattering unfamiliar coins on the table as a tip for the waiter.  There was permanent sunshine, a delightful warm sea and unfamiliar food, although actually I seem to doubt that they would be introduced to traditional Spanish food on these holidays because to be fair anything remotely ethnic may have come as shock because like most English people they weren’t really ready for tortilla and gazpacho, tapas or paella. 

Benidorm is a fascinating place, often unfairly maligned or sneered at but my grandparents liked it and I have been there myself in 1977 for a fortnight’s holiday and then again on a day trip in 2008 just out of curiosity.  It has grown into a mature and unique high rise resort with blue flag beaches and an ambition to achieve UNESCO World Heritage Status and I hope it achieves it. 

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Other posts about Benidorm:

Benidorm c1960

Benidorm, Plan General de Ordinacion

Benidorm, The War of the Bikini

Benidorm 1977 – First impressions and the Hotel Don Juan

Benidorm 1977- Beaches, the Old Town and Peacock Island

Benidorm 1977 – Food Poisoning and Guadalest

Benidorm – The Anticipation

Benidorm – The Surprise

World Heritage Sites

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Thanks to http://www.realbenidorm.net/ for the use of the postcard images