BOX 248: Castile.

You're looking at Segovia Cathedral from the vantage point of our hotel window, near one corner of the town's Plaza Mayor. It's January 2004, probably near sunset, and Anne and I were thrilled to be back in Segovia, following our visit there the previous summer, when we finalized some arrangements for our January UW-Shebogyan visit. (See BOX 241 for more Segovia photos and explanation of our campus travel philosophy.) Our group of 40+ arrived, after an overnight flight from O'Hare to Madrid and an hour bus ride, at the Roman aqueduct at the foot of the Old Town: quite a stunning view to some of our travelers who hadn't expected such an astonishing arrival point.

You see a few of our travelers in this photo, including folks from previous trips, including Chris Scholke with the beard and, with her back to us, Mary Beth Emmerichs, one of the leaders of this trip. It was a 10-to-15-minute walk uphill through the all-pedestrian Old Town to our hotel, but taxis were available and a hotel van transported our luggage. I took a couple of other photos from our window, clearly at sunset, possibly another evening, but they're unfortunately blurred and don't deserve full-size reproduction. Perhaps that first evening--but maybe later in the week or even in another town, since I've had to guess at the order of slides in this box--I took a picture of some of us at dinner:

On the first full day of our trip a local guide gave us a walking tour of the city. Here he is in front of a statue of Segovia's local hero Juan Bravo:

And here you see him at the edge of the city, possibly on the ramparts of the Alcazar:

On this trip my views of the Alcazar, the iconic fortress of Segovia, are all from down below the city walls:

Outside the walls are important historic churches, such as the Iglesia de la Vera Cruz, dating back to the early 1200s:

In the above photo you can see the Cathedral (built over 300 years later) in the distance. I took one closeup of the wonderful Romanesque doorway of Vera Cruz:

Another church we visited, near the Aqueduct, was the Iglesia de los Santos Justo y Pastor (1100s):

As you can see from these photos, the weather was cool but not stormy or snowy as we had feared it might be. There was snow in the mountains surrounding Segovia, to be sure:

Here's a view of the skyline of the Old City from below:

. . . and one more shot of the Cathedral:

We were glad to see that the storks that in the summer had made their nests in chimneys and on bell towers were still there:

I don't remember why I took this next photo: maybe those are birds' nests attached to the green tiles or bricks, or maybe I just liked the colors:

On our second full day in Segovia we offered our travelers a bus tour to Castilian locales both north and south of Segovia. The first (and for me by far the most memorable) stop was at the Gorges (Hoces) of the Duraton River, a national park. There was sleet as we entered the park but it cleared up by the time the bus parked and we walked over the rugged plateau to the gorges:

Located on a spur of land high above the river is the ruin of a monastery built upon the land where Saint Fructus (San Frutos) was a hermit in the 9th Century:

Our walk over to the hermitage through this desolate but dramatic landscape, devoid of people except for us, was a tremendous experience. In the pic just below, you can see a stretch of the river at the bottom left, coursing its way around the land topped by the hermitage.

We had the ruin to ourselves too, as we wandered through it:

The bus next took us to Pedraza, a well-preserved medieval small town, now existing mainly as a tourist attraction. The gate into the town is impressive in itself:

Here's the central plaza:

On a far grander scale is the city of Avila, which we reached in the late afternoon and explored after dark. I'd taken some pics of Avila during my first visit to Spain, in 1987 (BOXES 168=169) and have only one photo this time, of a small segment of the wrap-around city wall:

The third day we made an excursion to Madrid, which our travelers explored on their own. Some of us went to the Prado, where there was a vast Manet show, with emphasis on how Velasquez and other Spanish artists influenced him. Again I took only one photo of this city, showing some of our group outside the Prado:

Our itinerary allowed two days of free time, during which travelers could explore other reaches of Spain if they chose. Mary Beth led a small group to Seville, and Anne and I, with several others went not quite so far: to Cordoba on the high-speed train leaving from Madrid. I took a fair number of photos in Cordoba--one of my favorite places I've ever visited--and will save them for the next post.