Avila, Storks, Snails!

Storks. Spain has lots of them. (You have to lock yourself inside your homes between 12:00 and 4:00 AM on Friday the 13th - on that dark and evil day, storks soar through quiet Spanish streets and reap the flesh of the innocent.)

We woke up early and loaded up the car - we were on our way to Ávila, Spain's most famous walled city. A UNESCO World Heritage Site (like 88% of things in Spain,) Avila boasts the best preserved mediaeval walls in the country, constructed of brown granite around 1090. The city also has a tremendous Gothic cathedral, various churches and monasteries, and a profusion of bakeries selling locally-themed cookies. Avila's other claim to fame is its status as the residence of St. Teresa of Avila, a mystic, nun, writer of the Reformation, and general holy heavy-hitter. It is very much worth a visit.

The drive took us up past Madrid and into the jurisdiction of Castile and Leon, an autonomous community produced from old Castile - the seat of the Spanish empire. Extremely dry and dusty, it's an arid and scrubby land with impressive rock formations, canyons and a completely insane number of castles. Castile and Leon possesses such a ridiculous quantity of castles for strategic reasons: when the Christians and the Moors hotly contested the land during the Crusades and the Reconquista, castles provided handy places to hunker down and efficiently protect their turf. Another fun fact: Castile and Leon used to be covered in a serviceable scrub forest, which was almost completely wiped out due to the cattle-raising customs of the Middle Ages. The land hasn't really recovered since. If only they had Al Gore.

We stopped in one of the many dusty and non-descript towns that line the highway from Madrid to Avila. Spain's two-bit roadside towns look almost exactly like those found in our desert Southwest, down to tumbleweeds, sweaty migrant laborers, and poorly air conditioned bars. Difference: even the most crumbly no-account-miserable town in Spain has a bullring (plaza de toros) and an extremely large cathedral. This particular town did possess a castle, which is probably written into the Castile and Leon constitution as a requirement for incorporation.

We wandered around trying not to die of heat stroke and walked into a place that billed itself as a rotisserie chicken emporium. Whoops: they were out of chicken. Out of other stuff too. Feeling too lazy to go elsewhere, we decided to stay put. Small, informal Spanish restaurants tend to pre-prepare their dishes and keep them up front, where you can point at them (a great thing for those of us whose Spanish is at the level of a 5th grade ignoramus). My dad and I managed to inadvertently order half the menu (which we didn't want) due to our lamentable Spanish, but, hey, at least it was cheap. Microwaving pre-prepared dishes is standard practice - at this place, the husband (who ran the front of the house) passed the food up via dumbwaiter to his wife, who heated it up and added the finishing touches. The food was perfectly acceptable, and primarily interesting for its Spanishness.


A variation on carcamusas, pork stew with tomato and paprika. This pork stew seems to be a favorite across Spain, and for good reason: it's very simple but quite good if the meat is cooked for a nice long time.


Green beans cooked with shrimp, mushrooms, and what seemed to be some egg. Another unusual dish but a pretty tasty one. This could have been a curious Spanish attempt at Chinese food as I look back on it. I did not try Chinese food in Spain's small towns but suspect they would find a way to work paprika into the Egg Foo Young. Spanish people love paprika.


Now here's Spanish soul food - caracoles (snails) in a bacon-paprika-red pepper sauce. These are little suckers treated rusticly, unlike those high-minded escargots most of us are used to. They're fairly tasty if you open your mind to them, though - they must be dug out of their shells with a toothpick. The extracted snail looks almost exactly like a plug of ear wax with antenna stuck on. Ignore the appearance and pop it in your mouth: the flavor is about the same as that of a clam. Further, they were cooked in bacon, and bacon has the ability to make pretty much anything edible.


Chicken in onion sauce. A pretty good and nicely fatty onion sauce - would like to figure out how to make this. Roast chicken in some sort of sauce seems to comprise a very large portion of the Spanish diet. Fine by me as roast chicken is one of God's perfect foods.



Square in downtown Avila. Was filled with about 50 bored looking American kids on on some sort of ghastly package tour when we arrived, but they cleared out. Thank St Jessup Jerome of the Oozing Pustule for that.

We arrived in Avila about when we were supposed to. Our hotel, Las Leyendas, was built directly below the castle walls and offered convenient access to the old town - a good thing, since you'd have to be criminally insane to want to drive there. It's a clean, modern, and fairly basic place, and it suited our purposes well (although they forgot to give me towels one day which is not cool.) As we were slightly bushed from the drive, we took a siesta like all sane organisms then reconvened to look around town and grab some tapas.


The iconic main entry of Avila's old city.

Avila really is beautiful - atmospheric, resolutely medieval, and pleasantly free of roving packs of tourists. The walls are singular and unusual, and especially amazing when approached from the freeway - it's easy to imagine yourself as some 11th century besieger, thumping up on a horse, seeing the walls, and thinking, "Oh fuck, we have to besiege that?"


A battlement. One needed battlements back in the day. I like to imagine boiling oil being poured off this thing upon some invaders. Does my heart good.

The walls are entirely intact and incredibly thick , and the residents have kept them up with some fierceness over the centuries - simply building their modern city around the perimeters of the ancient city. It is not as visually arresting as Toledo within the city walls, at least initially, but the ambience of the place quickly grows on you - tapas bars, wide open Baroque squares full of grandmas and bored teenagers, flights of swallows that nest in the city walls.


A perturbed looking (and old) statue of a pig near Avila's main gates. A pig statue was considered an essential and lucky accessory for one's medieval castle in these parts. My mom thinks we should start manufacturing yard-size versions of these for today's ancestral fortresses/McMansions. I am inclined to agree.


The walls of Avila at night.

We headed to a place called 3 Caracoles for early drinks and tapas (8:30 is early bird special time in Spain). Located right across from the fortress like Avila cathedral, it was a nice place to watch the sun go down. We were also treated to the sight of what appeared to be a mattress and kitchen appliance give-away for the elderly of Avila, who were brandishing walkers and congregating around a truck. Maybe they'd sat through a time-share pitch down South for the benefit of receiving bed-sore preventative mattresses - who knows. Old folks in Spain share with old folks in other Countries with Issues the assurance that they have been through things worse then you can ever imagine and survived. They must be treated with extreme respect. Or they will destroy you.



I ordered some mussels. I was hoping for the standard broth n' paprika treatment and was rather taken aback when they came out shelled and drizzled with olive oil, raw onion, and paprika. Not a great preparation. Makes me sad to see a mussel suffer so.



Next up was my usual: tuna belly with red pepper pistou. A good example of a classic Spanish dish. I have no idea why Americans tolerate tuna fish packed in water - the flavor of the stuff packed in olive oil is infinitely more delicious.



Spain is known for its migratory white storks, which can be seen almost everywhere in Castile and Leon. They are extremely large and ponderous and build landing-strip size nests - some very old. They now have too many storks in some parts of Spain. My guidebook had a great bit about how storks are coming in such immense numbers to some tiny bumfuck villages that they are invading the populace which just cracks me right up for understandable reasons. I mean, what the hell is an overabundance of storks really gonna do - carry away small children to their dark and bone-scattered lairs, shit on your John Deere dust-farming tractor, build fifteen nests upon the statue of St Jessup de Jerome Of the Sacred Oozing Chest Wound? How bad can it really get with storks?


Well, I guess they can do this.


Courtyard we had tapas in.

After these tapas, we walked a bit further down and came upon a more formal restaurant, the name of which I, uh, cannot remember. It did have a lovely courtyard right up against the walls - I enjoyed kicking off my shoes and squidging my toes around in the grass. We simply ordered a tortilla (omelet, not corn thing, remember that) and a salad, as well as some wine, and watched the swallows until it was time for bed.