Category: Castile

Our primary target for this trip is Morocco, but before we departed Oregon Ton also handed me a list of Spanish cities she wanted to visit if we have time. Merida is one of those cities and luckily it was right at the distance and direction I wanted to drive today, so we were able to kill two birds with one drive.

Leaving the campground I hit a pretty big pothole that rattled François pretty strongly. About 10 minutes later the alarm on our refrigerator that tells us the door is open went off. I thought the jostling from the pothole may have caused something in the refrigerator to push on the door. So we pulled over and rearranged the contents of the fridge, but a few minutes later the alarm happened again. Ton went back again to make sure there was no pressure on the door. For the next two hours we fought a battle with the door alarm. It would go 5 or 10 minutes without alarming, and then alarm for a few minutes and then go silent again. It was annoying and I had visions of another day wasted on maintenance. I finally pulled over and took a look at the latch to make sure nothing was broken and everything seemed ok. Finally out of desperation we did the old turn it off for a few minutes and then turn it back on and see if the problem goes away. Sure enough for the next hour we had no alarms. Just as we pulled into the parking area in Merida the alarm went off once. Since the door was closed and the refrigerator was good we decided to go on with our visit of the city, the beeping wouldn’t bother anyone if we weren’t there.

The Merida Roman sites consist of an amphitheater, a theater, a circus, a temple to the godess Diana, the longest Roman bridge still in use, and as a bonus a Moslem Alcazar built over a former Roman fort.

The amphitheater was where the gladiatorial games were held as well as other events. It held 3000 people. It was buried during the Moslem era and middle ages. It is very well preserved and most of the interior rooms and the floor of the arena are as they were during Roman times.

The theater next to the amphitheater is even more impressive. it was built to hold 15,000 people and has now been restored to use. The facade of the stage is still largely intact which is rare in these buildings. The only other one we have seen with the facade was in Orange France.

After the theater we visited a temple dedicated to Diana. The temple had changed purposes many times after the Romans and in the middle ages was converted to a palace for one of the richest families of the area. In the 1960’s the building was purchased and restored as best as possible to its Roman state.

We headed to the river to visit the Alcazar and Roman bridge. The Alcazar was a fort built at the entrance to the town from the bridge. There was an original Roman fort on site, but the Moslems who ruled Spain rebuilt it to their standard using the material from the city walls and Roman fort.

There were several more sites to visit in town, but we were a little tired and the refrigerator was bothering me. While we were walking I had googled a motorhome service center in town and they were getting ready to reopen from siesta so I proposed we head there.

As we walked back to François around 4pm the town seemed oddly quiet to us until we realized that siesta is later in this part of Spain because it is hotter. Everything shuts down from 2 to 5 pm.

We drove across town and waited about 15 minutes at the service center. The entire time the alarm for the door didn’t go off of course. A technician gave the fridge a once over and declared that everything seemed normal, nothing was broken and the electrical connection for the alarm seemed ok. So we shrugged and headed off to the local campground for the evening, hoping not to get an alarm in the middle of the night.

When we settled in for the evening Ton and I regretted that we didn’t have more time as Merida definitely deserves more of it. We missed the circus maximus which is considered one of the best preserved, as well as the museum of Roman art, and we rushed our visits to the alcazar and the bridge, this is what happens when timetable drives your visiting.

We were happy when I noticed that Tordesillas was the perfect distance to cover towards Morocco. It was about 360 kilometers south from Orio, and we have set a target of 350 to 400 kilometers per day to travel, so it was a no brainer to stop here.

The drive was again uneventful, starting in rain in Orio and ending in mostly blue skies in Tordisillas. The freeways started out tolled in Basque country, but by the time we got to Castilla they were free so we again were happy.

This is the third time we have stayed at the family run El Astral campground in Tordisillas. We think this is the best campground restaurant we have eaten at and we enjoy the food and the service. We had originally planned to walk to town for a wine tasting, but I pointed out that a half carafe of the excellent house wine was only €3.30- so we decided to save the walk, and enjoy the sun and another carafe of wine on the sunny patio of the restaurant. An uneventful, but good day for us.

It has been raining hard on and off for the last couple of days. Over night it rained really hard again and the ground and roads in the campground were muddy. Today we had planned on a long drive to Porto, but in the morning Ton mentioned that her and Kit were hoping to visit Salamanca on the way to Porto. As we told Kit and Stephen before they came out part of the beauty of traveling in RV’s was to have flexibility in your schedule. So instead of a long drive to Porto we had a 90 minute drive to Salamanca. It was a win-win for everyone.

We headed into town at 12:45 after finding out there was only one bus per hour because it was a Saturday schedule. We arrived in the center of the city, and headed over to the Plaza Mayor. It was originally built to provide housing and to act as a bull fighting ring on occasion. It is a large square with four major entries on each side of the square. Now it is full of restaurants and cafes and looked like a good place to hang out.

Before we got to the Plaza Mayor we had diverted to the market. It is another market built of cast iron from the 1870’s. The windows are stained glass and add a nice touch to the building.

Ton window shopped, but Kit picked up some cilantro and other vegetables for dinner. Ton has been fascinated by the many types of shrimp available in Spain. Today she was happy to see a shrimp with a very large claw like one we had eaten back in Roses.

Just as we were leaving the Plaza Mayor the wind started to pick up and the rain began. I told Ton that we should find a cafe or bar to pop into until the rain let up. She said that the forecast was rain all afternoon. But we did go into a bar and order a round of beers. Luckily after we were done with our beers the rain had stopped and we had blue skies for the rest of the day.

The University of Salamanca is the third oldest university in continuous operation in the world, and is the preeminent University in the Spanish speaking world. It occupies a large part of the center of Salamanca. Cervantes the writer of Don Quixote was a student here and many quotes from the novel are on the walls of the University.

Salamanca has two cathedrals that are for some reason located next to each other. They are called the old and new cathedral, though they are both quite old. We spent some time near one of the entrances looking at the stone work. Ton called me over and asked me to look at the figures by the door. A couple of them stood out, but the one that looked out of place was an astronaut carved by one of the doors during a recent reconstruction. I guess it shows that these are living buildings.

Salamanca is a joy to visit as everything is very close together. My job is navigator and every time I was given a new point to go to it turned out to be only 4 or 5 minutes walk away from where we were. This would come back to haunt me later in the day.

Our last stop was the Roman bridge across the Tormes River. The bridge itself is of mixed construction with about 2/3rds of the arches of the bridge of Roman origin and the other 1/3 of medieval origin. The bridge has been rebuilt multiple times in history but is still an impressive site.

After we crossed the bridge we decided it was time to head back to the campground. The problem is that for some reason the transit system for Salamanca is not loaded into google maps. In most cases all I do is press where we want to go into the maps and push the transit Icon. I didn’t have that today, so I was not sure where the nearest bus stop was or what time the next bus was coming.

I new we were looking for Bus 20, but I didn’t know where the nearest stop for Bus 20 was. I had a hunch and after walking for about 15 minutes we came to a bus stop, but it was not the right one. Some more staring at google maps convinced me that we needed to go to another road about 15 minutes from where we were. So off we went, but this time there was not even a bus stop. We were right by a bridge I knew we had crossed into the old city so I headed across it to a bus stop at the base of the old town. I was sure it was a stop for 20, there were about 15 different bus lines listed as stopping there but none were 20. So now truly flummoxed I told everyone we should find a taxi. So we started down the road, and just as we were about 150 meters from the bus stop we had just investigated here comes bus 20 headed for it. The bus stopped at a red light and Stephen begged him to let us on. I decided to run for the bus stop and see if I could beat him there. I don’t run like I used to and the bus beat me to the stop by quite a bit so I was sure we were going to miss it. Luckily for me a nice lady saw me lumbering towards the stop, and actually put one leg in the door of the bus so the driver could not leave until I arrived. I got on and to by time for the rest of the crew to catch up I gave him a €20 bill so he had to make a lot of change.

I felt bad because we had walked more looking for the bus stop than we had visiting the old town of Salamanca. But everyone else took it with good humor. Just as we got back to the campground the wind picked up again, the temperature dropped by several degrees, and it began raining hard. So our luck held out for the day.

It rained cats and dogs last night with occasional thunder. The finale came at 7am when lightning struck close to the campground. I took that as a sign that an early start was not in the cards and rolled over to sleep in. When Stephen and I got out to check on the state of things Stephen found two rubber mats placed in front of his front tires. The campground was worried about us getting stuck getting out and had placed the mats there to allow us to get traction. We felt bad about driving over the brand new mats and it turned out we probably didn’t need them.

Our stop for the day was Tordisillas which was only about 2 hours down the road towards Porto. Ideally we would have found a stopping point a little further down the road but there didn’t seem to be any. I had fond memories of Tordisillas from our very first trip to Spain in 2018 so I was looking forward to an easy day of driving.

Before leaving town we had planned to visit a Mercador Grocery nearby to stock up on food. But when we arrived we found the dreaded height barrier over the parking entrance restricting access to vehicles under 2.5 meters. Luckily there was an Aldi up the street without barriers so they got our money instead.

The drive over to Tordisillas was quiet. We were routed on a local road for about half the trip and it was relaxing and much more intimate. While traveling this way is much slower, the reward in seeing sites is much higher.

The other reason I picked Tordisillas was that Ton and I had one of our most memorable meals at the campground here. We would often reminisce about the grilled meats we had at the campground in Tordisillas. We also find that going back to a place that generates fond memories can be a risk as the second try does not live up to the memory. In this case the second try was just as good as the first with the added pleasure of sharing it with friends. After our very hearty lunch we decided a siesta was in order so we were back to the RV’s for a nap. We are starting to adjust to Spanish hours, so about 6:45 we walked into town to join the evening promenade in Tortillas.

Kit had asked us to visit Segovia and we are glad she did. When she asked I didn’t even know where it was located in Spain, but it turns out it is just a little northwest of Madrid. It should have taken less than 2 hours to go from Toledo to Segovia, but we also forgot that today is labor day in Europe. So we ran into very heavy traffic as a large part of the population of Madrid was heading out of town. It was also raining heavily so I was a little worried about how our day would turn out.

Our taxi dropped us off at the base of one of the main attractions in Segovia the Roman aqueduct. It is an amazing structure. Built around 100 AD it covers 17 kilometers from springs near the mountains to the town. The aqueduct as it passes thru the town has over 168 arches. It is one of the best preserved Roman aqueducts in the world and is a beautiful feat of engineering.

Stephen and I spent a lot of time looking at the cut of the stones and how the arches were built. The precision of the work is astounding to me given the limits of the tools available then. The Romans were really incredible builders.

We next walked to the 12th century Cathedral near the center of town. I have been pleased to find that there seems to be more variation in the design of Spanish Cathedrals than you find in other parts of Europe. They seem more creative, and designed to fit more into the terrain and cityscape rather than imposing themselves on the land and city.

The third major building in Segovia is the Alcazar. The Alcazar was built on a cliff on one end of the town that overlooks the river below the town. There has been a fort on this site since the Romans, but the building that became the Alcazar was started by the Moslem rulers of Segovia in the 900’s.

When Segovia was reconquered by the Christian kings of Spain it became a fortress and castle for the kings. The royalty of this part of Spain occupied the castle until the late 1700’s.

The walls and ceiling retain a lot of the geometric patterns that are featured in Islamic art. In some rooms you can see where Christian art has been integrated into the Islamic art.

The views from the castle are fantastic. You can see for miles in three directions from the platforms on the castle. You can also see many of the quarry’s that were used to produce all of the stone necessary to build the town and the castle.

In the late 1700’s the castle was converted into the Spanish army artillery school. The museum includes a lot of artillery pieces from the era of the artillery school and I had a good time looking at them.

Segovia and Toledo while very different from each other are both beautiful cities. Apparently, there is a lot of discussion about which city is the most beautiful. Stephen and I talked about this and we decided that they were both more or less equal, so why worry and just enjoy seeing both.

The rain had stopped just as we arrived in Segovia, and the afternoon was perfect. We walked back across the town one more time doing a little shopping and looking for a place to eat. Our timing was wrong as we forgot that dinner time in Spain is quite late. The restaurants we wanted to visit were all closed to 7 or 8 pm. We eventually decided to eat at the campground and Kit and Ton cooked up a great meal.

We told Kit and Stephen that we thought they should visit Toledo as Ton and I think it is one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. It is located about 80 kilometers south of Madrid so we guessed the trip would take about 90 minutes factoring in Madrid traffic.

We arrived at the campground outside of Toledo about 11:30 and headed right into town. Toledo was built on a bluff overlooking the Rio Tajo River. It is a beautiful location for a city.

The city is known as the city of three religions. At one time it had large, Christian, Jewish, and Moslem populations living together. There are well preserved synagogues, and a mosque, as well as the Catholic Cathedral.

Ton and I enjoy the town because it really maintains its medieval feel. There are lots of small pathways and staircases between homes and businesses that are only suitable for foot traffic. This is a city that really makes you feel like you have gone back in time.

We spent several hours wandering the town and enjoying the sites. The only problem with Toledo is that you are either walking up hill or down hill, there is almost no flat to the town. Stephen at one point told me the people in this town must be really fit.

Our path led us to the base of the town, so we were facing a long up hill climb to get back to our next stop in the city. Luckily I spotted a series of escalators built into the hill to take you back to the top. We all appreciated the towns investment in this people mover which saved us climbing about 300 feet up hill.

After about 4 hours of walking the town we crossed over the old footbridge to the road to the campground. We were only about 30 minutes from the campground but it was going to be all uphill. Ton, Stephen and Kit told me they would gladly pay for a taxi. After about 15 minutes we flagged down a taxi and were quickly deposited in the campground.

Everyone was pretty tired after the last couple of days so we all relaxed for a couple of hours. Just as Ton and I had decided we would snack for dinner, Kit once again surprised us with another wonderful meal.