Segovia's impressive Roman aqueduct.
Today we decided to drive to Segovia, another of Castile and Leon's iconic cities. A very old city, it's home to one of Europe's most splendid Roman aqueducts, the royal Alcazar, and a cathedral, situated within some impressive city walls. It also (not incidentally) happens to be Spain's center for cochinillo, Castile's beloved roast suckling pig. You shouldn't be surprised that this town was a hit in our family.
Before we left for Segovia, we went for a stroll on Avila's city walls, which admit visitors. You can't ride a bike on em' like the walls in Xian, China, but they do accord great views of the plains around the city, as well as a sense of how lonely it must have been to be a 12th century sentry.
Not unattractive up here.
The area around Avila. See if you can find the bull ring.
Nice stained glass windows here. The cathedral served double duty as a defensive fortress when times got rough and nasty.
Avila's main square. Occasionally fills with package tourists in baseball caps, but usually more salubrious and packed with fearsome looking abuelas/children playing soccer.
Avila's very old cathedral. I went inside and checked it out - it's got beautiful stained glass windows and a profoundly Gothic ambience inside. The interior museum contains some of the most distressing Christian art I've ever seen - if you happen to really enjoy wooden carvings of Christ's dripping blood with profound anguish on their faces, you should head to this cathedral immediately. On a more positive note, they have an excellent collection of illuminated manuscripts, so elaborately and skillfully produced that it's hard to believe humans made them. (If someone told me to make an illuminated manuscript, i would spend roughly twenty minutes on it, proclaim it too boring, and go off to read about kimchi tacos on the Internet. Weep for us).
Detail of the aqueduct.
The aqueduct from above. Meson Candido, one of Segovia's most beloved pork restaurants, is to the bottom right.
We left for Segovia around noon - a quick fifty minute drive. First I should tell you about the city's aqueduct. It's the first thing you see when you drive into town, a tremendous granite span, striking in its pristine modernity. It's hard to believe something so huge and so well preserved looking can be so old, but it is - built during the reign of either Vespasian or Nerva, it provided water to the then-frontier Roman settlements below. People of the medievial era, being somewhat stupid, decided it made far more sense to ascribe the aqueduct to the Devil then to, say, curious and unproven phenomona like Romans. The townsfolk called the aqueduct the "Devil's Bridge" instead, and there it remained, merrily resisting quite a few attempts to tear it down (a few Moorish invaders simply gave up, not having recourse to awesome things like dynamite). The aqueduct even provided fresh water to the city until quite recently. One wonders how townspeople managed to explain away the even-curiouser phenom of a bridge that ran with water.
Meson Candido, located conveniently right next door to the aqueduct.
Lunch was at Meson Candido, the most venerable of Segovia's various and sundry temples to cochinillo pork and roast baby lamb. A true institution, open since 1905 and chugging along ever since, Meson Candido operates like a gigantic and hectic machine - rather reminiscent of Beijing's monolithic Peking duck houses. The decor is true old-school Spanish, composed of all wood salons stuffed with wall-eyed animal heas and retro relics from the restaurant's very long life, and quite a few of the waitstaff seem to have been around during the building of the aqueduct itself. Celebrities, heads of state, and other dignitaries have all devoured the tender flesh of baby animals here, and the tourists and accolades just keep coming, seemingly unfazed by the passing of decades, the financial crisis, or the pitiful wails of animal rights activists. Reservations are highly recommended, but of course I didn't bother to make any. We simply ambled up (it is right next to the aqueduct) and asked for a spot. It took them about twenty minutes to get us seated, wherein the wait staff directed us up three separate flights of stairs in different directions to find our appointed table. Once seated, a tablecloth, place settings, and utensils were thowcked onto the table at mindblowing speed, menus were passed out, and we were compelled to order soon.
We started with a simple mixed tortilla, Spain's beloved egg and potato omelet. This was acceptable, though I've never really understand the vast appeal of eggy substances. Plenty of vegetables in here and a creamy center.
We tried a grilled tuna salad escabeche (vinegar) style with red bell peppers beneath. A pretty good rendition, with chunks of grilled tuna rather then the usual canned. I liked the tangy vinegar flavor of the escabeche combined with the peppers. Not a knockout but a great counterpoint to the main attraction - the cochinillo.
The cochinillo (roasted suckling pig) was, as expected, divine. My dad proclaimed it the best piece of pork he's ever put in his mouth and as a North Carolina native, he knows that of which he speaks. The Candido families tradition involved cutting up roasted pigs with the edge of a plate - not a ritual we saw performed. Juicy, tender meat was covered in a layer of super-crisp and crackling skin, all sitting in a very juicy and rich broth. We got a middle piece composed mainly of ribs and belly, but some luckier diners had a leg thrown in the mix for their troubles. We perhaps made a mistake by ordering a single-person person - we should have ordered the quarter pig for two and been done with it.
We also had some salt roasted prawns, the Spanish variant on China's beloved salt and pepper shrimps. These were pretty good (though we would have better in Basque country). Spain seems to be some sort of curious epicenter for delicious-ass prawns, perhaps attracted here by mysterious underwater vibrations (military technology, I bet). The tail meat is always nice but I prefer sucking the heads off these beasties much more - all that delicious bright red goo inside, yum yum.
Dessert was Segovia punch, a dessert dearly beloved in this region of Spain. Composed of sponge cake bathed in marzipan with a cream center, it had a nice creamy and pillowy texture, and a slightly nutty, not overpowering flavor, alongside a pleasant caramel sauce. It also happens to be rather fetching looking, with its criss-cross top.
Segovia's cathedral.
Stuffed to the gills, we knew we needed to see more of Segovia, so we unstuck ourselves from the table and began walking up the hill, from the aqueduct and into the old city. It's definitely a steep walk: Segovia's old city is located on a narrow and windy promontory - great for defending against invaders and sweaty business for pork-stuffed July tourists.
A display of fish in one of the square's restaurants.
We passed by Segovia's cathedral, but did not go in. Visitors to Spain often suffer from cathedral overdose, wherein even the sight of a cathedral with rose windows/flying buttresses/carved images of bleeding saviors can induce cold chills, personal itches, and hives. True story. So we passed on.
A Segovian.
The cathedral is located in Segovia's fetching and rather elevated main square, lined with nice-looking restaurants and tapas bars, cochinillo and roast lamb centric restaurants, and tacky-ass tourist shops. Restaurants in these parts consider preserved baby pigs and lambs to be excellent decor schemes and display the intensely dead little fellows in whimsical window displays all over the city. PETA types might want to go somewhere else, maybe give Segovia a pass. Hell, just avoid Spain entirely and save yourself the trauma of being constantly irate.
The Alcazar in question.
The path to Segovia's famous Alcazar palace winds through the city's old Jewish ghetto, where the city's productive and considerable Jewish population were forced to live during the ever-escalating crackdowns of the Inquisition. Although they were consigned to the least desirable portions of town (and, on one occasion, had their houses knocked down without their being consulted to add on to the cathedral,) they managed to build a large synagogue, attractive wooden houses, and exist in relative harmony with their Christian and Muslim neighbors. Sadly, the Jewish expulsion order of 1492 can be attributed to Segovia: Isabella and Ferdinand signed the order in the throne room of the Alcazar.
One of the Alcazar's towers.
One of the castle's splendid Moorish-style gardens.
A stroll through the narrow alleyways of the old ghetto led us to the Alcazar, placed most attractively on a rock promontory at the far edge of town. The blue and white castle's pointy towers and Germanesque slate roof give it a true fairy-tale ambience - as does the terrifyingly deep moat (yes, you can spit into it, but you probably shouldn't, that's probably not right.) It's rumored that Walt Disney based Cinderella's Castle at Walt Disney Land on Segovia's own palace, but we can't really be sure. I suspect Cinderella's castle definitely carried out less in the way of inquisitions and testicle-crushing torture within its walls unless there is something about Walt Disney Land I don't really want to know about.
The landscape around the Alcazar. Castile and Leon's landscape reminds me nothing more then high-elevation Southern Utah.
The Alcazar tourist see today is, at least inside, a 19th century remake - skillfully done, but definitely not old. This is because a horrible 1862 fire destroyed the vast majority of the palace's interior, bringing about an 1882 reconstruction, jury-rigged from drawings of the interior before the disaster. In its later life, the Alcazar was used as a site for military records and as an Artillery Academy (imagine trying to escape over that drawbridge, yon pantalooned and chicken hearted cadet of old, imagine that).
The view from Avila's Alcazar.
A retablo portraying Santiago or St. James, whackin' some Moors. I'm afraid you can't see the detail but it is extremely gruesome.
A mural portraying Isabella's proclamation of her queenly status.
View of the very old park below the Alcazar, still popular with soccer players and city residents.
A reconstruction of Ferdinand and Isabella's throne room.
A Moorishesque ceiling. Truly gorgeous, even if it is reconstructed. One of the best aspects of Spanish architecture is the interesting Moorish influence.
A pine tree on the palace grounds.
A tragic story about the Alcazar involves Prince Pedtro, the 12 year old son of Henry the 2nd. Apparently not the brightest of children, the 12 year old Pedro fell to his death out of one of the Alcazar's windows in 1366, an event immortalized by a sepulcher roughly where he broke his fall. It is rumored that his maid, upon realizing what had occured, jumped out the window right after him. (Which makes sense. As the babysitter of the child of the King of Spain, would you want to explain what happened to your employers? Didn't think so.)
We walked back to town after the Alcazar to explore a little more, passing one pork and lamb restaurant after another. My dad and I found this place, which had an impressive display of baby pig. A whole pig can be bought for about 70 euro, if you're inclined to tackle a whole one.
We drove back to Avila to kill the remainder of the long afternoon. Spanish days seem to go on longer then days in the USA, seem to go on forever and ever, an interminable length of time. This is a good thing becasue when you are drinking wine and watching the swallows beneath a medievial way, liquid and slow time is a good thing, you don't want the minutes to rush ahead, you don't want to get to the next thing. Spain appears to have negotiated a slower rotation of the earth for its own personal use, and that is reflected in the people as well - people who amble one foot ahead of the other down the sidewalks during the height of (our) rush hour, people who stop to study menus, thoughtfully regard bottles of booze in the wine shop, stand in the center square and philosophically smoke a cigarette. So too is the attitude towards food: you eat late, later then anyone else does in the world, and when you do eat you draw things out - walk from tapas bar to tapas bar, sip wine and beer, darkly consider the mussel you have just skewered with a toothpick. Slow is Spain. Perhaps that is why the Slow Food movement is not so dominant here, because no one knows how to do it any other way, because McDonalds doesn't serve wine and probably doesn't let you smoke either. Spain (metaphorically) watches us zip by on our Segways, shrugs, and thinks about lunch time.
For dinner, we shrugged and went for tapas at our hotel's upstairs restaurant, La Bruja, which boasts both excellent reviews in the area and an excellent outside view of Avila's floodlit city walls. (Avila's tourist brochures like to tell you that it is the biggest floodlit monument in the world, which is sort of like saying you have the world's biggest ball of twine, but whatever fills you with pride, Avilians).
This is one of the most bizarre things I have put in my mouth to date. The menu billed it as a "salad" with mandarin orange, arugula, hazelnuts and shaved dark chocolate. Always game for weird-ass stuff, I was surprised to find that this was in fact a pasta dish, made with fettucini. The flavor continued the magical-mystery tour: ever eaten one of those Terry's chocolate oranges? The ones you whack on a table? This tasted like a pasta tossed with wedges of those dark chocolate Christmas treats. Totally bizarre. We didn't finish it.
A very nice Spanish cheese plate. I know exactly diddly squat about Spanish cheeses - christ, I'm still working on the Italian roster - but these were tasty as anything, especially the earthy and complex blue and the crumbly and irritable goat. Manchego cheese can be truly lousy, but the cheese industry in Spain is improving by the year - we encountered some really nice cheeses during our time in Spain. I'm also very partial to Spain's quince jam, a traditional accompaniment to cheeses - with its delicate saffron and stone-fruit flavor, it's an exotic addition to any cheese course.
Beef ham. Seriously, that's what the menu said. They meant to say it was beef dried in the manner of ham, of course, and so it was - spicy, aged, gamey, very good. I liked this a lot.
We headed off to bed at a relatively early 12:30. We'd be driving all the way to the Basque country the next day.
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