On our way north from Portugal to the ferry at Santander, we stopped for a four day break in the Spanish town of Caceres. The main attraction was the Old Town, which is UNESCO World Heritage site due to its blend of Roman, Moorish, Gothic and Italian Renaissance architecture. The Old Town still has its wall intact and there hasn't been any modern development within it. We had a good roam around it and visited a few churches, museums and underground cisterns, which were very cool.
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| Morg of the steps leading from the main town square, Plaza Mayor, into the Old Town |
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| Los Golfines de Abajo Palace |
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| Overlooking Plaza Mayor from the Old City walls. |
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| One of the completely mad but very amusing tiny dogs that ruled the Plaza Mayor |
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| San Francisco Javier Church |
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| View from the bell tower |
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| Interior of San Francisco Javier Church |
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| Underneath San Francisco Javier Church was a small museum dedicated to the various religious festivals that are held in the town and surrounding area. These are different priestly outfits worn for those various festivals. |
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| In the museum. One of these guys has rock hard abs. |
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| Happy pig says... |
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| One of the very cool underground cisterns. |
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| View from the entrance to the modern art gallery |
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| Cathedral de Santa Maria |
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| The bells! The bells! |
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| View from the bell tower |
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| Inside the Cathedral de Santa Maria |
It took a couple of days to get our heads around the switch from Portugese (Meat!!!!!!!!) to Spanish food (tapas)- but one meal that deserves a special mention was a tapas lunch that we had in the Plaza Mayor. We got 3 or 4 tapas to share. Each was 3 or 4 euros and they were incredible- you would have been happy to get most of them at a fine dining restaurant as an entree.
We also had a few fun meals at our campground restaurant- 9 euros for entree, main, dessert, bread and a drink! Not bad at all.
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| On the left is the roll of calamari, served with sauce of this, sprinkling of that etc- very fancy and delicious. On the right is the raspberry gazpacho, a local specialty. If someone had told me how delicious cold raspberry coup with oil, breadcrumbs and a truffle cream would be I definitely wouldn't have believed them! |
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| Afternoon G&T in the campground. |
After leaving Caceres we did one massive haul north all the way to Santander. It was a long and really boring drive, mostly because for a large proportion of the time it looked like this....
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| The scenery was rather bland (apologies for the crappy through-the-windscreen photo). 3 - 4 hours of driving in fog = not fun. If you look very carefully you can see a truck on the other side of the road. However - finally passed the 10,000mile mark! |
And after a brief stay in Santander it was adios and back on the ferry to the UK. It feels a bit sad to be leaving Europe and finishing our time in the motorhome, but we're pretty excited about our month in the USA. So bring it on!
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