Category Archives: Spain

Ten Years Ago – Northern Spain

Ten years ago today we were staying in the delightful town of Santillana del Mar in Northern Spain.

There is apparently an old saying that Santillana del Mar is The Town of Three Lies, since it is neither a Saint (Santo), nor flat (llana) and has no sea (Mar) as implied by the town’s name. However, the name actually derives from Santa Juliana (or Santa Illana) whose remains are in the kept in the Colegiata, a Romanesque church and former Benedictine monastery.

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Entrance Tickets – Córdoba and the Mezquita

I began this series of posts about Entrance Tickets in April 2014 and this was one of the early ones.  I cannot really explain why but I have always kept my Entrance Tickets and they remain safely stored in a travel memory box.

The series of posts cannot go on much longer however.  I am running out of material, not because I no longer visit places when I am travelling but because so many places no longer issue paper tickets.  Booking is done on line and instead of a ticket there is a QR code on a mobile phone to swipe through a scanner.

I like the feel of a ticket, I like told it between my fingers and judge the quality, this one at Cordoba was especially fine and then I like to carefully put it in between the pages of my guide book to make sure that it doesn’t get creased.

I think that this is rather a shame.  Places generally need to be booked in advance with an allocated time slot.  It is no longer possible to wander up to a entrance booth, hand over cash and  receive a nice shiny Entrance Ticket in exchange.  Somehow it takes the spontaneity out of city break travel, everything has to be done according to a timetable.

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Ten Years Ago – Siguenza in Spain

Leaving the market it occurred to us that we had practically done everything there was to do in Sigüenza and it was only just past lunch time so we walked to the railway station to see if there was any possibility of catching a train to another city on our ‘to visit’ list, Zaragoza.

The station was curiously quiet, there were no staff on duty and the main hall was being used by a group of small boys playing indoor football.  We found a timetable but it revealed a train service so infrequent that it was practically useless so we abandoned that idea and decided to drive to nearby Atienza instead.

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A Virtual Ancient City

On the boat ride back from Delos to Mykonos  I thought it would be fun to recall all of the other ancient sites that I have visited and assemble a near perfect virtual ancient city.

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A to Z of postcards – X is for Eixample in Barcelona

The modern parts of Barcelona are a triumph of urban planning.  We were staying in the Eixample district which was planned and built about one hundred and fifty years ago by a man called Ildefons Cerdà and is characterized by long straight streets, a strict grid pattern crossed by wide avenues and square blocks with chamfered corners all of which means that the traffic always flows freely in a slick one-way system and it is easy to navigate on foot.

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A to Z of Postcards – V is for Valladolid in Spain

“The celebrated plateresque façades of Valladolid strike me as being, when one has recovered from the riotous shock of them, actually edible.”    –   Jan Morris – ‘Spain’

Valladolid is a very crimson city, the reddest that I have ever seen, a sprawling industrial metropolis, the capital of Castilla y León, the tenth largest city in Spain but with its medieval heart ripped out and trodden under foot in the post civil war industrial boom and it does not feature on many tourist itineraries.

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A to Z of Postcards – T is for Tenerife

I visited Tenerife in 1989 and stayed in the tourist resort of Los Christianos near Playa de Los Americas in a hotel complex called the Parque Santiago.  One day I took a coach tour to the Teide National Park.  It wasn’t a long trip in terms of kilometres but the bus left early because it happens to be an awfully long way to climb to the top.

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A to Z of Postcards – O is for Oviedo in Spain

Oviedo is only a small city, only just scraping into the top twenty largest cities in Spain and it isn’t even the largest in Asturias so it didn’t take that long to walk around the historical centre and after a brief stay we continued our drive south.

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A to Z of Postcards – G is for Gran Canaria

Gran Canaria was formed by a volcano that grew out of the sea and continued to spew enough lava onto the surface to break through the ocean and form an island.  It is circular in shape with a mountain peak in the middle which separates the island into two distinct sectors, north and south.  Viewed from above it looks rather like a beached jellyfish.

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A to Z of Postcards – E is for Extremadura

This part of the journey was reminder of just how big Spain is as we motored for mile after mile without meeting any other traffic or without passing through towns or villages.  The road just kept grinding endlessly on in an easterly direction in a way that reminded me of the tortuous journey through Andalusia in a clapped out Ford Escort in 1986.

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