Gate of the Sun

By the morning of our first full day on terra firma we were ready for some serious sightseeing. The old city ofToledo is certainly picturesque, with many interesting and attractive historic buildings. According to the Henry Higgins character in Pygmalion (and My Fair Lady) the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain. Well, it certainly didn’t for us. After the previous muggy day, the weather changed overnight to give us a grey, overcast showery day. Still, we weren’t going to let that slow us down so we headed up the hill - the hill that we’d largely avoided having to haul our luggage up - to explore the old walled town.
We couldn’t help comparing it with Carcassonne in Southern France which we’d stayed in two years ago. Both are ancient walled cities, each on the top of a steep hill, but there the similarity ends. Toledo has an incredible rat’s nest maze of really narrow streets, and is far less touristy than its French counterpart. The shops and restaurants cater more to the locals than they do to the tourists, which for us was a plus. One downside though is that few people speak more than just a smattering of English. We tried to rely on Google Maps for our navigation but it struggled to work reliably in the area so we found ourselves doing a bit of backtracking each time that we tried to walk between any two places. Nevertheless we found the place interesting and enjoyable. The lady at the local Tourist Bureau had given us a map showing many interesting places to visit and it was clear that we weren’t going to get round all of them in the time available.
We started with the Museum of the Visigoths Council and Culture, which covered a significant period of 12th century history which neither of us had known anything about, Evidently, Toledo had been the centre of the Visigoth movement, and we learnt a lot from the visit. We then visited the impressive Toledo Cathedral, built between 1226 and 1493. Even by normal cathedral standards it’s a huge building, especially in its width. Even though there were a lot of visitors at the time that we were there, the massive space didn’t seem at all crowded. We were each issued with an electronic tour guide, but after a very interesting 90 minutes or so we were both staring to flag, so we cut out the last 1/3 or so of the tour.
After a some rest back at the hotel we had recovered enough energy to face the world sgain. At about 8pm it was still light and we headed back up the hill on the 10 minute or so trek to the old town. The place was jam packed, with what appeared to be mainly local families doing their shopping and dining out. We found a friendly local restaurant where Mary had a paella entree and a local beef main course while Brian enjoyed an excellent Toledan salad containing local ham, orange and other assorted goodies followed by the house specialty, a pork and tomato dish. It was accompanied by an excellent local red. We’ve enjoyed all the local wines that we’ve tried, and have found food and drink prices to be very reasonable, about half of what we’d be paying at home.Read more