Turkey – Preparation and Arrival

One day in January when the temperature was hovering around zero and icy rain was lashing at the windows my daughter Sally called me with a travel proposal.  She had booked a holiday and the arrangements had fallen through which meant there was a spare place available that needed filling and crucially – paying for and I was being called up as first reserve.

“You will enjoy it dad, you can spend time with the grandchildren and it’s only for a week.”  I gave in quickly and asked the obvious questions of where, when and how much? “May,Torquay, only £900”. Actually I thought £900 for a week in Torquay in May was rather expensive but I agreed to it all the same and the deal was done and I started to research what there might be to do with three very young children in south Devon in early summer.

A couple of weeks or so later Sally phoned me again and said that she was applying for a passport for her new son William and although I appreciate that we are from the north I wasn’t yet aware that there were visa requirements for British citizens who wanted to travel south within the United Kingdom.  I telephoned her. “Why do we need a passport for William? I asked, “For the holiday, obviously”, she replied, “But we don’t need a passport for Torquay”, I smugly informed her, “Torquay? Torquay?”, she said, “who said anything about Torquay? We are going to TURKEY!”

TURKEY!

Well, after the news had sunk in – that I would be in Asia with three young grand children I began to immediately get used to the idea and began to look forward to it, after all, I went to Bodrum last year and really enjoyed it so I was sure that this would be just as good and then in a subsequent conversation Sally dropped another bombshell – we were going to an ALL INCLUSIVE resort in Sarigerme near Dalaman.

ALL INCLUSIVE! – I have always vowed never to go ALL INCLUSIVE!

I was committed by now of course and I told myself that if I want to call myself a traveller then I have to open my mind and try everything – at least once, so I set about preparing for the experience.  Normally before travelling I would carry out research by reading books, consulting maps and catching up on the history of the area but I quickly realised that in this case this was completely pointless so instead I watched a boxed set of DVDs of the comedy series Benidorm instead.

On the day of travel we booked in for an early morning flight from East Midlands Airport and by midday the pilot of the Thomson Airlines plane announced that we were beginning our descent into Dalaman.  There was some turbulence and thick towering storm clouds to negotiate on the way down but as we broke through these below us was a blue sea as calm as a mountain lake with just the occasional gullet carving its way through the surf and leaving just a faint trail of disturbed vapour in its wake.  A gnarled rocky landscape and grey cliffs, corrugated like cardboard were rising from the sea and a crescent of golden sand swept out into the water like a Saracen’s sword and as we dropped towards the airport we caught our first glimpse of Sarigerme baking in the sunshine below.

The plane landed and taxied to a standstill and after everyone had barged their way off the aircraft there was passport control to negotiate but before we could pass we had to acquire an entry visa which cost £10 each.  They called this a visa procedure but there were no forms to complete and no checks to establish our suitability for visiting the country because this is not a formal visa in any way whatsoever but rather a crude Robin Hood tourist tax and the uniformed official might as well have held a pistol to our heads as we handed over and he added our cash to a wad of money in his hairy hands and nicotine stained fingers and then he let us proceed to passport control where they checked the rip-off visa and stamped it with an authorative thump which I interpreted rather loosely as ‘Welcome to Turkey’.

Now we had to find our transport to the Suntopia Topical Hotel and we dutifully made our way to the transport coach and it was at that point that I first realised that this would not really be my first choice type of holiday as I walked down the aisle looking for a seat past tattooed bodies, football shirts and Geordie facelifts and then was forced to settle in just in front of a family of gypsies who had no manners, no awareness of other people and were clearly exactly the sort of people that we didn’t want to find as next door neighbours at the hotel but fortunately I didn’t have to deal with his issue because after arrival and the check-in procedure we were allocated a room well away from them and after we had been branded with our All Inclusive wrist band and got our first drink we set about the process of making ourselves at home!

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 Cervantes, The World’s Greatest Novelist!

On returning home I did as I promised and bought a copy of Cervantes’ ‘Don Quixote’.  I found it on Amazon for the bargain price of £1.99, I ordered it together with a book on the history of Spain and it arrived three days later.

Since publication in 1605 it is reputed to be the most widely read and translated book on the planet after the Bible. I tried to read it once but found it a bit heavy going so gave up quite quickly but as we walked along I resolved to give it another go upon returning home.

I opened the package and then I remembered why I didn’t finish it at the last attempt.  The book has nearly eight hundred pages and I estimate about four hundred and forty thousand words long and it has that tiny squashed up typeface that makes a book sometimes difficult to read.

It is the story of a man who believes that he is a knight, and recounts his adventures as he rights wrongs, mistakes peasants for princesses, and  “tilts at windmills,” mistakenly believing them to be evil giants.  As one of the earliest works of modern western literature, it regularly appears high on lists of the greatest works of fiction ever published.  In 2002 a panel of one hundred leading world authors declared Don Quixote to be the best work of fiction ever written, ahead even of works by Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.  Cervantes has also been credited with shaping modern literary style, and Don Quixote has been acclaimed as “the first great novel of world literature”.

So, just in case I start it and abandon it again I have decided to carry out some research and do some preparation to try and understand exactly why this is such a good book and why I should enjoy reading it.

According to one reviewer Don Quixote is “so conspicuous and void of difficulty that children may handle him, youths may read him, men may understand him and old men may celebrate him”.  I hope that I am at that “men may understand him” part of life whereas previously I was only at the “youths may read him” stage and that this might make a difference.  I think it will also help that I have now visited La Mancha and have some small understanding of the place and the people and this will explain the book when I begin to read it.

The novel begins with :

 ”Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing…

…His fantasy filled with everything he had read in his books, enchantments as well as combats, battles, challenges, wounds, courtings, loves, torments, and other impossible foolishness, and he became so convinced in his imagination of the truth of all the countless grandiloquent and false inventions he read that for him no history in the world was truer.”

 I have read that first page a couple of times but have not yet felt completely ready to carry on so perhaps I will keep it for a holiday read?  I am determined to do it soon and I will let you know how I get on but for now I have got to finish my Bill Bryson book, which isn’t quite such an important work in the history of World literature but has the advantage of being very easy to read.

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 – Vultures, Paella and Gaudi

It was still rather overcast and dreary as we drove out of Sigüenza through a rather dull landscape the colour of modern armies – buff, khaki, olive green and mule grey, all rather harsh with saw edged escarpments, limestone boulders rising through the earth like skeletal bones and just now and then some cultivated land close to the infrequent villages every few kilometres along the highway, it reminded me of the sheer immensity of La Mancha in such contrast to the topography of the United Kingdom.

After a short distance some activity quite close to the road caught our eye and I slowed the car down.  At first I thought it was some Emu or Rhea and maybe an alternative sort of meat farm but as we got closer this was clearly not the case.  These were Griffon Vultures, three of them finishing a feast of something they had either killed or found already dead in the field.  They were absolutely huge, over a metre long from beak to tail feathers and looked like ragged and untidy brigands with shabby jackets of hanging wing feathers and scrawny pink necks but our approach alarmed them, I think they had finished their lunch anyway, and they took to the sky and transformed themselves from ungainly beasts to graceful birds and they departed on their huge three metre wingspans and began to effortlessly climb into the thermal currents above us.

The road continued over the barren landscape until it came to the unremarkable town of Alcolea del Pinar and then we crossed the A2 Autovia and entered a flat windswept plateau of moorland and occasional forest and home to the Maranchon Wind Farm which when it was completed in 2006 was the largest wind farm in Europe but today has to settle for being only the fourth biggest.

Spain provides more than 12% of its energy from wind farms and we drove past hundreds, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of turbines, certainly too many to count for kilometre after kilometre after kilometre.  There were enough windmills here to give objectors in the UK a real orgasm of disapproval and protest and certainly more than enough to put Don Quixote in a spin!

After a drive of eighty kilometres we arrived in Molina de Aragon just twenty kilometres or so from the Autonomous Community of Aragon where we are still yet to visit and we pulled the car into an empty car park below the castle which stood high above us on a steep hill.  We walked towards the main gate but it was cold, bitterly cold, which should not have been surprising because (and this is interesting) Molina de Aragon holds the record for the lowest temperature ever recorded in mainland Spain so we pulled our jackets tight and wrapped our scarves around our heads and after we had been inside and satisfied ourselves that there wasn’t anything especially thrilling to see we quickly returned to the car and drove to the shelter of the small town centre.

I would like to be able to tell you that the place was spectacular but I am afraid that I can’t – it was dull and lifeless and the streets were empty because most sensible people were sitting inside in the warm.  We followed a map which cost me 80c at the Tourist Information Office and which showed all of the old town highlights but we didn’t find anything to take our breath away so we started to walk back and then heard some lively conversation from a bodega so we pushed the doors opened, spotted an empty table and went inside.  It was wonderful and made the long drive absolutely worthwhile – a traditional bar with local Spanish wine and a plate of sticky paella as complimentary tapas – and after we had finished we were very reluctant to leave!

And so we left Molina de Aragon and headed back and the first village that we came to was Rillo de Gallo and there staring out over the main road was an unusual house built in the style of Antoni Gaudi and looking completely out of place with its surroundings. This it turns out was the Capricho Rillano built by Juan Antonio Martinez Moreno and substantially unfinished which made me wonder if it had the necessary planning or development consents?

Now we drove back the way that we had come but now the sky was a vibrant cobalt blue with an armada of sail like clouds racing across the horizon in front of us but the break in the weather was only temporary and soon after we arrived back in Sigüenza the rain swept in like a dripping lace curtain in the wind and closed in around the town like a cloak and we surveyed the scene from the balcony of our room, opened a bottle of rioja, sat back and waited for the fire to burst into life.

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

Riga from the Church Tower:

Next stop was a trip to the top of a church tower to see the city from an elevated perspective and from here we could better appreciate the patchwork quilt of coloured roofs and pastel facades looking even more attractive under the snowy mantle that decorated them.  Luckily we didn’t have to climb to the top and there was an attended lift that raised us to the summit. 

We had ten minutes at the viewing platform which was about nine more than we really needed considering how cold it was with a bitter wind that felt like icy needles being driven into our faces; so we were careful therefore that we didn’t miss the descent when the lift came back to collect us and return us to the ground floor and back to the street.

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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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.