A National Park, a Walled Town, and Santa Teresa - Avila, Spain and Canary Islands
Avila, Spain and Canary Islands
Thursday 15th May
Reserva Natural Valle de Iruelas,, Castilla y Leon
We have travelled south again, this time 100 miles, to the Sierra de Gredos – the mountains we saw from Salamanca Cathedral yesterday. We are in another National Park, the Reserva Natural Valle de Iruelas. It was a beautiful day and after setting up the van among the trees, we sat down outside to a cup of tea and saw a Azure Winged Magpies and Golden Aurioles. Pretty good. The rest of the day we spent reading and walking around the site, which is very pretty, steeply sloped, with terraced pitches among tall Poplars and Black Pines. In front of us is an area of natural scrub with Wild Roses and Broom in flower, rising to a giant rock garden of huge boulders, pines growing on and around them. Writing this now, as night has fallen, there is a constant whirring of circadas outside, it is terrifically exotic. Just 30 miles north of us is the medieval walled town of Avila, the reason we are here.
Friday 16th May
Avila
This looks like a medieval painting of a walled town. The centre of the old city is surrounded by the best preserved medieval town wall in Europe, forming a complete circuit 2 km around, with 88 turrets. We parked the car into another underground car park (St Teresa’s, who was born here), and learning from Salamanca, found the tourist information centre and got ourselves a map! The Cathedral first, the most interesting part was behind the altar, where the pillars and vaulting in a curious red and white mottled stone, make a complex and beautiful space as they arc around the the east end of the church. Back to the car to collect our lunch (sandwiches, own bread, goats cheese, salami & lettuce), which we ate sitting on a bench in a shady garden, the town wall on one side, and a fountain splashing behind us. This had an obvious effect by the time we had finished but luckily we had noticed loos at the car-park, which after a bit of head-scratching we worked out were not occupied, but could be unlocked by swiping the car park ticket.
We had decided to walk the 1.6km bit of the town walls that are walkable, paid at the kiosk and climbed up. The sun was very intense and there was little shade, but there were great views across the old and new parts of the town, to the plain and mountains beyond. A tower crane in the city, very pleasingly, had not one but three crane’s nests, all with cranes on them. At intervals, here and there along the wall, a very substantial wooden screen blocks the view on the inside towards the town, which we soon worked out was to give some privacy to rich people in the adjacent houses and gardens. A terrace of ‘ordinary’ houses was on full display at bedroom level. The town wall curves around the town and steeply down the hill towards the lowest part by the river, so when we finally climbed down from the wall, we had a steep walk back through the old streets, enjoying the shade when we could as it was bakingly hot. This part of the town was less polished, many of the buildings run down and some looking derelict, but not for long it seems, as the builders were at work doing up many of the old places. They may not finish – everywhere we have been, both town and country, many houses are part built or part restored and then left unfinished, either the result of the downturn or perhaps for some, it’s the way people do things here.
We eventually reached the Convento de Santa Teresa and it was wonderfully cool inside. The convent is on the site of the house where she was born. To the cognescenti, she is famous as a mystic and a reformer, advocating an austere life of poverty. This did not go down very well with the established church. She walked all over Spain, founding her own convents, the Barefoot Carmalites. She died in 1562.
As we sat and recovered, a women made her way up the nave on her knees, then stood, genuflected and knelt in prayer. She was one of a group of people, mostly women whom we had followed in. They eventually gathered, noisily, in a side chapel dedicated to Santa Teresa, where they took turns having their photos taken in front of the alter and reredos. This is richly gilded and at its centre is a life sized and realistically coloured statue of Santa Teresa herself. A service started in the main church, so we were left in peace listening to the priest chanting and the women singing the responses, it sounded timeless.
The foothills and lower slopes of the mountains we crossed on the way ‘home’ had a very striking park-like landscape of (I think) Holm oaks. These trees are of an almost fairy-book shape with thick sturdy trunks and a compact shapely canopy, as if trimmed, the whole tree having an uncannily close resemblance to broccoli. Here and there the trees gather to form extensive woodlands which at the edges thin out to groups and individual trees with grassland underneath. This landscape seems to stretch out to the horizon and is almost certainly the home of wild boars, and is probably where the related Iberian domesticated pigs, gorge on acorns.