When it comes to taking pictures I like doors, statues, balconies and washing lines, Kim on the other hand likes people pictures so I thought I might share a few of them with you.
This one was taken in the delightful Spanish town of Almagro in Andalusia. Two ladies taking an evening stroll and had clearly forgotten their sunglasses…
Posted in Europe, History, Spain, Travel, World Heritage
Tagged Almagro, Avila, Caceres, Chinchon, Ciudad Rodrigo, Cuenca, Flamenco Dancing, Madrid, Mérida, Plaza Mayor, Salamanca, Santiago de Compostella, Segovia, Seville, Spain, Toledo, Trujillo
“We are in the Spanish south. The castanets click from coast to coast, the cicada hum through the night, the air is heavy with jasmine and orange blossom… the girls have black eyes and undulating carriages.” – Jan Morris, ‘Spain’
We were staying at the Hotel Retiro del Maestre, a renovated old Spanish nobleman’s house on a dusty street leading to the main square of Almagro. It was a friendly family run hotel with spacious and comfortable public rooms, a large outside terrace basking in the pleasant sun and was a nice room for us with a view over the garden.
It was late afternoon by this time and with the sun beginning to dip we didn’t linger long but made our way quickly to the Plaza Mayor to find a bar. On the way we passed by the equestrian statue of the Conquistador Diego de Almagro and then entered the rectangular Plaza.
At a hundred metres long and forty metres wide it is flanked on both sides by arcades of cream Tuscan columns, weathered by the years, supporting overhead galleries all painted a uniform shade of botella verde and fully glazed in a central European style that makes this place truly unique in all of Spain. These galleries were originally open and used as grandstands for public events, religious festivals and even bullfights that were held here until 1785, when they were finally banned by King Carlos III.
We choose a table on the sunny side of the Plaza, ordered beer and wine and just sat and watched the activity while we nibbled the inevitable olives. The bar owner shooed away some small boys playing football, telling them to play elsewhere as families began to arrive and the bar quickly filled up with chattering customers enjoying the late afternoon sunshine.
The Plaza Mayor is the most important part of a Spanish town or city and I really cannot think of an equivalent in the United Kingdom where we have public squares but use them in an entirely different way. This is the place where people meet, relax and enjoy themselves; it is generally flanked with shops and restaurants and usually has the town hall and the main church somewhere close by. In the centre sits a military veteran with only one arm selling Spanish lottery tickets.
When we arrive somewhere new it is usually the first place we make for because sitting with a glass of wine and a complimentary tapas it is the best place to be to get a feeling for the character of the town and its people.
In the search for real Spain we have visited and enjoyed dozens of Plaza Mayors; Madrid, the largest, Salamanca, the second largest, Toledo, next to its towering cathedral and the tiled Plaza de España in Seville. We liked them all and we began now to compile a list with a view to choosing our top five favourites.
We considered Ávila, Mérida and Valladolid, Cáceres and Santiago de Compostella in Galicia but after a lively debate weighing up the pros and cons and putting forward the case for each one in turn we finally agreed on the top five but could not reach absolute consensus on the actual order.
So this is our list: Segovia in Castilla y Leon because of the Cathedral and the architecture and the little streets running away from it like spokes from a wheel, Trujillo, where we had been only today, because of its unspoilt medieval charm, the unpretentious and functional Ciudad Rodrigo, Chinchón with its open balconies and bullfights and although we had only just arrived we liked this place so much that we both agreed to include Almagro in the list.
After a second leisurely drink we paid up and left the square and strolled back to our hotel where we asked for some dining recommendations and the receptionist convinced us to go to her favourite restaurant just a couple of streets away so after we had rested and changed we took her advice and found the place in a side street off the main square.
Although it wasn’t especially late when we finished the meal we were tired after a long day that had started three hundred kilometres away in Mérida, taken us to Trujillo and then a three hour drive to Almagro and we were ready for bed. We walked back through the Plaza Mayor that was lively in a subdued sort of way (if that makes sense) and then to the street to the hotel.
About half way along the route back to the hotel we heard the lyrical sound of Spanish guitars, clacking castanets, the rhythmic stamping of Cuban heels and clicking stilettos, rather like the sound of an approaching steam train and we wondered where it was coming from and then through the pavement level window of a cellar we could see a dancing class in full swing.
Some local people suggested that it would be quite all right to go inside and watch so we did just that and before the lesson ended we enjoyed fifteen minutes of genuine Spanish music played by an assembly of musicians and a group of young people dancing the flamenco; stamping, posturing and pouting in a rapid, aggressive, staccato style – wonderful vivacious movement, flicking to the left and prancing to the right and accompanied all the time by the sound of chattering music like a machine gun firing into the sky.
It was a wonderful way to end the evening!
Posted in Arts and Crafts, Cathedrals, El Cid, Europe, History, Literature, Postcards, Spain, Travel, World Heritage
Tagged Almagro, Avila, Caceres, Chinchon, Ciudad Rodrigo, Cuenca, Flamenco Dancing, Madrid, Mérida, Plaza Mayor, Salamanca, Santiago de Compostella, Segovia, Seville, Spain, Toledo, Trujillo
The Plaza Mayor is arguably the most important part of a Spanish town or city and I really cannot think of an equivalent in the United Kingdom where we have public squares but use them in an entirely different way.
This is the place where people meet, relax and enjoy themselves; it is generally flanked with shops and restaurants and usually has the town hall and the main church somewhere close by. This is the beating heart of a Spanish community and when we arrive somewhere new it is usually the first place we make for because sitting with a glass of wine and a complimentary tapas it is the best place to be to get a feeling for the town and its people.
On this occasion we were in the provincial town of Almagro and staying at the Hotel Retiro del Maestre, a renovated old Spanish nobleman’s house on a street leading to the main square. It was a friendly family run hotel with spacious and comfortable public rooms, a large outside terrace basking in the sun and was a nice room for us with a view over the garden.
It was late afternoon by this time and with the sun beginning to dip we didn’t linger long but made our way quickly to the Plaza Mayor to find a bar. On the way we passed by the equestrian statue of the Conquistador Diego de Almagro and then entered the rectangular Plaza. At a hundred metres long and forty metres wide and flanked on both sides by arcades of Tuscan columns supporting overhead galleries all painted a uniform shade of bottle green and fully glazed in a central European style this place is truly unique in Spain. These galleries were originally open and used as grandstands for public events, religious festivals and even bullfights that were held here until 1785, when they were finally banned by King Carlos III.
We choose a table on the sunny side of the Plaza, ordered beer and wine and just sat and watched the activity while we nibbled the inevitable olives. The bar owner shooed away some small boys playing football, telling them to play elsewhere and families began to arrive and the bar quickly filled up with chattering customers. Walking around the square was a proud grandmother pushing a young baby in an immaculate pram which matched her pristine outfit and she completed at least a dozen circuits, stopping frequently to chat and to show off the small child to anyone who showed the slightest interest.
In the search for real Spain (not the coasts and the Costas), in the past three years we have visited and enjoyed dozens of Plaza Mayors; Madrid, the largest, Salamanca, the second largest, Toledo, next to its towering cathedral and the tiled Plaza de España in Seville. We liked them all and we began now to compile a list with a view to choosing our top five favourites.
We considered Ávila, Mérida and Valladolid, Cáceres and Santiago de Compostella in Galicia but after a lively debate weighing up the pros and cons and putting forward the case for each one in turn we finally agreed on the top five but could not reach consensus on the actual order.
So this is our list: Segovia in Castilla y Leon because of the Cathedral and the architecture and the little streets running away from it like spokes from a wheel, Trujillo, where we had been only today, because of its unspoilt medieval charm, the unpretentious and functional Ciudad Rodrigo, Chinchón with its open balconies and bullfights and although we had only just arrived we liked this place so much that we both agreed to include Almagro in the list.
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P is for Plaza Major but it could well have been:
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Posted in History, Spain, World Heritage
Tagged Almagro, Avila, Caceres, Chinchon, Ciudad Rodrigo, Cuenca, Madrid, Mérida, Plaza Mayor, Salamanca, Santiago de Compostella, Segovia, Seville, Toledo, Trujillo
Galicia is a popular holiday choice with Spanish people living in the south because they like to holiday in the north to escape the oppressive heat and enjoy Galicia’s famous seafood. In August alone, eight million Spaniards travel north from cities like Madrid and Toledo to the more temperate climate of Galicia with its green scenery and spectacular beaches.
The climate though is changeable and the region is often referred to in Spain as the wet or rainy region. The local geography is also dramatically different from that of the central and southern regions with meadows, hills and mountains and is known affectionately in Iberia as green Spain.
In 1998 I won a competition in the Times newspaper for an all expenses paid weekend to a chateaux in Cahors in France. This was the result of answering three simple questions about the Apostle Saint James and the Spanish city of Santiago de Compostela, which were about pilgrimages and seashells. I was glad that I knew the answers and ever since had the place on my ‘to visit’ list.
Santiago de Compostela is the capital of autonomous region of Galicia and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. After Jerusalem and Rome it is the third most holy city in Chrisendom and the cathedral is the destination today, as it has been throughout history, of the important 9th century medieval pilgrimage route, the Way of St. James. Santiago is such an important pilgrimage destination because it is considered the burial site of the apostle, James the Great and legend holds that his remains were carried by boat from Jerusalem to northern Spain where they were buried on the site of what is now the city.
People continue to take the Pilgrim trail and there were many here today who could be identified by the pilgrim staff and the symbol of the scallop shell. The shell is the traditional symbol of the pilgrimage because the grooves in the shell, which come together at a single point, represent the various routes that pilgrims travelled, all eventually arriving at a single destination. It is also symbolic of the pilgrim because just as the waves of the ocean wash scallop shells up on the shores of Galicia, God’s hand also guides the pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela.
The day after visiting Santiago de Compostela we drove north and we were heading for the coast and the beach. Without a map we inevitably got lost almost immediately as we attempted to negotiate the busy town of Padrón and this involved a couple of u-turns and, to be perfectly honest, quite a lot of uninformed guesswork.
Finally, after wasting twenty minutes or so, we found a brand new road that had only recently been opened and we were driving effortlessly towards the Atlantic and the town of Santa Uxia de Ribeira, which is a fishing town famous for the quality of its shellfish. The reason for Galicia’s seafood reputation is the unique flavour that results from the fresh water from the rivers that create the rías and it is claimed that the cockles, mussels, octopus and squid have a taste that is unrivalled anywhere else in the world and because of this, the price of shellfish harvested in Galicia, is almost double that of the rest of Spain.
On the recommendation of the owner of the hotel we were heading for the coast at the Dunes of Corrubedo National Park that he assured us was an unspoilt beach with large sand dunes and unique wild flora and fauna that could be found at the very end of the Barbanza Peninsula just past the town of Ribeira. We arrived at about eleven o’clock, parked in the shade in an empty car park and gave the staff in the café a bit of a wake-up shock when we sat ourselves down for a drink.
Later we walked through the pine trees and through the sand dunes and arrived on a magnificent sandy beach with its blue flag fluttering proudly in the breeze. It seemed almost endless, lush golden sand dipping away into the sea where the gentle breakers were rolling in and crashing onto the beach in a most reliable way and the best thing was that it was practically deserted with plenty of personal space available for everyone.
Galicia is keen to encourage tourism but I hope that they do it in a sensible way and places like this don’t get swept away in a package holiday tsunami. The Parliament of Galicia has introduced a range of initiatives aimed at increasing foreign tourism to the region and in recent years overseas visitors have started to visit Galicia, exploring its scenic countryside and its cities, towns and villages, but as yet this is only a trickle and currently less than one thousand ex-pat Brits live in the Province.
We enjoyed a couple of hours or soon the beach but as we sat and enjoyed the natural beauty of the place it slowly began to fill with families and although there was still plenty of space for everyone it felt much busier now so we decided to leave and try and find somewhere for lunch. There was a fishing village on the other side of the bay that we thought looked most promising so we set off to try and find it.
To reach Corrubedu was quite straight forward and half an hour later we drove into the unspoilt fishing village that had some new properties under construction but at its heart was a port and a backdrop of traditional houses and pavement restaurants that probably hadn’t changed very much in years. In the port there were a collection of small colourful fishing boats, some had been left to rest but on others men were still working gutting and filleting fish accompanied by flocks of excitable seagulls.
There were three restaurants to choose from, all with similar menus, so we choose the one with the best view over the harbour and we joined the local people and the fishermen who were enjoying their lunches. We selected Galician style squid, tortilla, salad and cerveza and enjoyed a traditional meal in the company of the noisiest people in all of Spain. The next table was full of an animated crowd who were gesticulating and shouting to such an extent it was impossible to ascertain whether they were just having a good time together of falling out with each other. They left after a while and the peace and quiet was deafening.
This place was excellent and we finished our meal and explored the back streets and the traditional houses with their elevated granite grain stores in the gardens, called borreos, with their distinctive Celtic crosses and elaborate carvings. It is an interesting fact that Galicia has a culture, which is both unique and distinct from the rest of Spain, and the core of this difference is centred upon Galicia’s identity as a Celtic, rather than a Latin or Hispanic sub nation. Galicia along with Andalusia, Catalonia and the Basque Country are acknowledged as independent historical nationalities under the Spanish Constitution and as a consequence enjoy special rights and privileges.
Because of its Celtic roots Galicia doesn’t have sombreros or flamenco and back in Santiago de Compostela later that afternoon in a side street adjacent to the cathedral there was a man squeezing the life out of some bagpipes that sounded as though he was castrating an extremely uncooperative cat. It was excruciatingly painful so we moved on and walked around the streets for a second time, looking for places that we hadn’t been to before and eventually, after an hour or so, we arrived in the little square with the Restaurante de Buen Pulpo where we had promised ourselves that we would eat again, but neither of us was especially hungry because of our splendid lunch so we just had a drink and then returned to the car park and drove the short drive back to Pontescures and the hotel.
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G is for Galicia but it could well have been:
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Posted in Beaches, Food, History, Spain
Tagged Culture, Galicia, Photography, Pilgrim Trail, Santiago de Compostella, Travel
Each new trip to Spain includes visits to World Heritage Sites so when I counted them up I was interested to discover that out of the forty-three sites on the UNESCO list (second only to Italy with forty-seven) I have now been to twenty and that is nearly half of them.
In 2005 I went to Barcelona in Catalonia and saw the works of Antoni Gaudi, Palau de la Música Catalana and the Hospital de Sant Pau. Then in 2008 I saw the Historic Centre of Cordoba, the Caves of Altamira in Cantabria, the Old Town and Cathedral of Santiago de Compostella and the Alcázar and Archivo de Indias in Seville. In 2009 in the motoring holiday around Castilian cities it was the Old Town of Segovia and its Roman Aqueduct, the Walled Town of Cuenca, the Historic City of Toledo and the Old Town of Ávila. This trip in 2011 added Cáceres, Mérida and Aranjuez and also Trujillo which for the time being is only on the tentative list.
Even before I knew anything about World Heritage Sites it turns out that I have visited two more in the days of my beach type holidays. Although, to be absolutely fair, when I went to these places neither of them were yet on the list. In 1988 I holidayed on the island of Ibiza which was accepted onto the list in 1999 in recognition of its biodiversity and culture and the following year I went to Tenerife and took a cable car ride to the top of Mount Tiede, a national park that was accepted to the list in 2007.
Even though they weren’t World Heritage Sites at the time I visited them I am still going to count them but the final two might be a bit dubious – but anyway here goes. In 1984 while driving back through Spain from Portugal I drove with friends through the city of Burgos which was accepted in that year because of its Cathedral and in Galicia in 2008 while visiting Santiago de Compostella I managed to drive over parts of the Pilgrim Route, which exists on the list separately from the old city itself.
World Heritage Sites (posted June 2009)
Posted in Cathedrals, Europe, History, Spain, Travel, World Heritage
Tagged Altimira, Antoni Gaudi, Avila, Barcelona, Caceres, Cordoba, Cuenca, Ibiza, Mérida, Santiago de Compostella, Segovia, Seville, Spain, Tenerife, Toledo, Trujillo, UNESCO, World Heritage Site
We were staying at the Hotel Retiro del Maestre, a renovated old Spanish nobleman’s house on a street leading to the main square and we found it easily and left the car in the underground car park. It was a friendly family run hotel with spacious and comfortable public rooms, a large outside terrace basking in the pleasant sun and was a nice room for us with a view over the garden.
Spain consists of a number of autonomous communities established in accordance to the second article of the Spanish Constitution which recognises the rights of regions and nationalities to self-government whilst also acknowledging the ‘indissoluble unity of the Spanish nation’. Currently, Spain comprises seventeen autonomous communities and two autonomous cities, both of which are on the Mediterranean coast of North Africa. As a highly decentralised state Spain has possibly the most modern political and territorial arrangements in Western European. Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia are designated historic nationalities and Andalusia, although not a nationality, also has preferential status, the remaining are regional Provinces without nationality.
Posted in History, Spain, World Heritage
Tagged Blue Flag Spain, Cantabria, Costa Blanca, Galicia, Santiago de Compostella, Sherry, tapas
Sir Walter Raleigh wrote:
Give me my scallop shell of quiet;
My staff of faith to walk upon;
My scrip of joy, immortal diet;
My bottle of salvation;
My gown of glory (hope’s true gage);
And then I’ll take my pilgrimage.
Santiago de Compostela is the capital of the autonomous region of Galicia and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is located in the most northwest region of Spain in the Province of A Coruña and it was the European City of Culture for the year 2000.
Posted in Cathedrals, Europe, Galicia, History, Literature, Spain, Travel, World Heritage
Tagged Cathedral of St James, El Cid, Galicia, Green Spain, Pilgrim Trail, Reconquesta, Santiago de Compostella, Scallop Shell, Sir Walter Raleigh, Spain, UNESCO
If El Cid represents the secular aspects of heroism and military conquest during the Reconquista the spiritual hero representing the religious justification and the Christian ethos of the crusade against the Muslims was Santiago, St James the Apostle, and the patron Saint of Spain.
In ‘Don Quixote’ Cervantes wrote ‘St. James the Moorslayer, one of the most valiant saints and knights the world ever had … has been given by God to Spain for its patron and protection.’ Since the reconquest ‘Santiago y cierra España’, which means St James and strike for Spain has been the traditional battle cry of Spanish armies.
Posted in History, Literature, Spain
Tagged Babieca, Battle of Clavijo, El Cid, El Poema del Cid, Reconquesta, Santiago de Compostella, St James
Today we drove north and we were heading for the coast and the beach and because we liked the place so much planned to drive back later through Santiago de Compostela.
Without a map we inevitably got lost almost immediately as we attempted to negotiate the busy town of Padrón and this involved a couple of u-turns and, to be perfectly honest, quite a lot of uninformed guesswork. Finally, after wasting twenty minutes or so, we found a brand new road that had only recently been opened and we were driving effortlessly towards the Atlantic and the town of Santa Uxia de Ribeira, which is a fishing town and famous for the quality of its shellfish.
Posted in Europe, Galicia, Spain, Travel
Tagged Blue Flag Beaches, Corrubedo National Park, Galicia, Hotel Corona de Galicia, Santiago de Compostella
Have Bag, Will Travel 