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Castles in Spain road trip

September - October 2018
A 22-day adventure by Tim Lynette Read more
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  • TravelerCastles in Spain road trip
    Day 9

    Palencia - on the way to Burgos

    September 18, 2018 in Spain ⋅ ☀️ 26 °C

    It turns out that just around the corner from our hotel in Valladolid is the best churreria in town, so churros and chocolate for breakfast was necessary. We were then going on the Burgos but went to Palencia, about half way, for a break and found three great surprise treats. The first was a lovely Visigoth church dating to 661 a.d., and said to be oldest church in Spain, then a huge art Deco (1931) statue of Christ on a hill outside the city - over 20 metres tall, and maybe 800 metres high, it is the fourth tallest Christ statue in the world. Then Palencia cathedral which is simply wonderful. I thought - ok, another cathedral, but it was probably the prettiest cathedral we have seen. It dates from the 14 century, but it is built on Visigoth foundations, and has a crypt with Visigoth pillars. It also has lots of 14c and 15c art, lots of beautiful stained glass, and huge tapestries. A real joy to find!Read more

  • TravelerCastles in Spain road trip
    Day 9

    On to Burgos

    September 18, 2018 in Spain ⋅ 🌙 17 °C

    After really enjoying Palencia cathedral we went to find our new apartment in Burgos, which was good and right next to the cathedral. So many cathedrals, maybe we should called this trip "cathedrals in Spain" not "castles in Spain"!

    We went on a tapas trawl in Burgos tonight and decided that Burgos is a really pleasant place to be in the evening, especially after some good food and some glasses of wine!    Read more

  • TravelerCastles in Spain road trip
    Day 10

    Seeing the sights in Burgos

    September 19, 2018 in Spain ⋅ 🌙 20 °C

    Another cathedral - the cathedral in Burgos really does dominate the town so we started off there this morning. It is enormous, started in the 12C and added to over the centuries. It has some good parts, particularly the very fine carving in stone and wood, and some hideous bits of over decorated and brightly coloured statues. The outside facade and spires are beautiful. There are many chapels from different centuries and one of the nicest is the earliest 13C, very simple and plain. We must have spent 2 hours in there and ended up skipping bits.
    We then walked through the town to see mediaeval gates, bridges and palaces. Our next stop was the museum that contains artefrom the Roman sites at Cluni a but after we started walking round it they told us the archaeological section was closed this week. Duh.
    So instead we went to the Museum of Human Evolution that we planned to visit tomorrow. Near here they have found human fossils dating from 1.3 million years ago and this museum is a wonderful explanation of the different branches of the human tree with fossils and artefacts from each period. We stayed until it closed at 2.30. Exhausted and hungry we retired to our apartment and rested after lunch. This evening for dinner we tried the local specialty of roast suckling lamb. Yummy.    Read more

  • TravelerCastles in Spain road trip
    Day 11

    A trip 1.3 million years into the past

    September 20, 2018 in Spain ⋅ ⛅ 20 °C

    Woke this morning to thick fog, with even the spires of the cathedral barely visible. Thankfully it dispersed as soon as the sun came up and the day was clear and hot as usual. We drove out of town to the site of the archeological digs at Atapuerca, where a series of cave systems were discovered during the cutting of a railway. It is a dig that has been going on for forty years and shows no sign of getting to any kind of end. The caves have animal and human habitation going back 1.3 million years (that's a lot!) with a series of types of humans, including a completely new subspecies never found before. Sadly the tour around the site was all in rapid Spanish so we didn't keep up very much. Must go and get a Spanish refresher course I think!

    Back in Burgos we trekked up the hill overlooking the city to go to the castle (oh, another one!) which was founded in the 9c and rebuilt in the 14c. It was the centre of napoleon's army in Spain until Wellington came along and defeated it. No doubt with Sharpe's help - read the books !

    Then back to the museum to go and see again the finds from this mornings dig site.

    We leave Burgos in the morning to drive to Rioja. We have enjoyed this city a lot, it has a lot going for it, and the food has been excellent- always a big plus. In places you find life sized statues of ordinary people doing ordinary things, like the photo of a young lady looking out over the river. It all seems very human.    Read more

  • TravelerCastles in Spain road trip
    Day 11

    Camino de Santiago

    September 20, 2018 in Spain ⋅ ⛅ 17 °C

    When we were in Segovia the road outside our hotel had brass scallop shells embedded in it, which are the symbol of the pilgrims taking the Camino de Santiago to Santiago de Compostela. The story is that Saint James , having being beheaded in Jerusalem was buried in Spain and his shrine became a centre for pilgrimage. There are now many routes of the Camino, including ones from Britain, but the major ones go through northern Spain and the Basque Country, and many go through Burgos. A minor one goes from Madrid through Segovia by our hotel, and there is even one from andulcia from Seville. Burgos has many hostels for the travellers, and the Camino is a big thing here with maps and souvenirs everywhere. Our apartment here is in close sights of the cathedral so there are scallop shells in the road here too, and lots of pilgrims trekking the streets.Read more

  • TravelerCastles in Spain road trip
    Day 12

    Rioja

    September 21, 2018 in Spain ⋅ ☀️ 25 °C

    Fòr most of this trip we have been travelling through brown flat countryside- the massive high Spanish plain - that is used mainly for growing wheat, now harvested. Also mile upon mile of sunflowers ripening in the sun. This must be sunflower oil country rather than olive oil. No fields of olive trees like there are in Andalusia. Just once we saw a few cows in a field but there is not much grass here for them.
    Today all that changed and as we left Burgos we encountered hills and now we are surrounded by mountains - and VINES! We have arrived in Rioja and everywhere there are vines covered in purple grapes just waiting to be made into delicious red wine. We are no longer in Castille y Leon we have crossed into Pays Vasco - Basque country and all the signs are in a strange language - a bit like Welsh.    Read more

  • TravelerCastles in Spain road trip
    Day 13

    Bodega visits

    September 22, 2018 in Spain ⋅ ⛅ 15 °C

    On our way into Laguardia we stopped to see the winery of Marques de Riscal, which is one of the biggest and most famous Rioja names. The estate is huge and I guess hadn't suffered much from Spain's economic problems as it is beautifully maintained and has built a splendid new hotel and restaurant designed by Frank Gehry of the Bilbao Guggenheim museum fame. The building has become a tourist attraction in itself and well worth a visit. In the car park we came across a vintage Bentley on a British Bentley owners club tour of Spain and Portugal. Later in the day, in Laguardia, we went to tour the opposite size bodega. In the town of Laguardia itself, the bodega of Carlos San Pedro is family owned and operated by just seven people, with casual labour help, producing only 50,000 bottles a year. All the houses in Laguardia, including our hotel, have dug caves and tunnels down into the rock underneath them, and the bodega still uses theirs for wine making and storage. We tasted three wines there, a 2014 crianza, a 2010 reserva and a 2009 grand crianza which were all really good, and the best, the grand crianza superb.Read more

  • TravelerCastles in Spain road trip
    Day 13

    laguardia

    September 22, 2018 in Spain ⋅ ⛅ 27 °C

    We spent the morning wandering the narrow medieval streets of Laguardia, and walking around the walls. The town is so small and confined to a narrow hilltop that it only takes 20 or 30 minutes to walk around. The tiny main square has a clock that as it chimes the hours little people come and out and spin and dance. It seems to be a huge tourist attraction as the square every hour is full of tour groups standing waiting for the show. We also went into one of the churches here, which was built in the 14c with a magnificent coloured portico. This was repainted in the 17c and an extension to the church built so from then it wasn't open to the elements and now is still in fine condition. Later the streets were filled the sounds of a basque pipe group - being Celtic they seem to have the bagpipes in heritage.Read more

  • TravelerCastles in Spain road trip
    Day 13

    laguardia archaeology

    September 22, 2018 in Spain ⋅ ⛅ 24 °C

    In the afternoon we visited two sites just outside of Laguardia. The first was the remains of a celticiberian settlement dating from 1400 BC to 400 BC. Although there are only the low remains of walls it's easy to see the layout of the village and the streets through it. The outer walls would have been just wattle and daube to keep the animals in so they have all disappeared. At the site there is a nice little museum of some of the finds, and it was a great place to sit and eat our bocadillos (rolls) with spectacular views around us. Then on to a stone dolmen from around 3000 b.c, one of a great number all over the Basque Country, like in the uk and northern France. It took us a while to find and Google decided to send us over the hills over rough gravel track roads, and when we got there we could see the proper Tarmac road that we could have used.Read more

  • TravelerCastles in Spain road trip
    Day 14

    Granny meets the dinosaurs!

    September 23, 2018 in Spain ⋅ ☀️ 29 °C

    120 million years ago the plain south of Rioja was a flat swampy wetland, home to many herbivore dinosaurs and so also the carnivore raptors. As these dinosaurs walked in the mud , it dried, was covered by later sediments and fossilised. Their footprints can still be seen today as the sediments have eroded. We drove around some of the sites and to a small interpretation centre. It was blinding hot out in the hillsides but I've never seen anything of dinosaurs before so well worth it. In many places they have put up replicas so you see what the creatures that made the prints looked like. Many of the tracks are from bipeds, in one case a family of two adults and a junior iguanodon, but there were also tracks of giant quadripeds such as saurodons.Read more

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