Thursday September 4, 2014

We left Reinosa and continued climbing.  Will we ever go downhill again?  It was quite chilly this morning, but we soon warmed up.  The mist in the hills was very pretty.

We have been following the N611 it is a parallel road to the motorway.  As I mentioned in yesterdays post it is a good wide road with a paved shoulder and no cars on it.  Spain has built new motorways and left their old major highways in place, it is such a quiet road great for us.

The morning mist was soon burnt of by the sun, until we came up another hill where the hills were shrouded in ‘mist’.  No that wasn’t morning mist that was smog.  What a shame, we came over the hill and discovered why it was so smoggy – welcome to your job, welcome to your house and welcome to your smog.

We soon left the “factory” town behind and finally began to swoop downhill like the eagles we were sharing the hills with.  Soaring up and down a great ribbon road.  For non-cyclists a ribbon road is a road that has rolling hills, you swoop down the hill and get all the way or almost all the way up the next rise – lovely road.

As we came into Aguilar de Campoo this castle sat on top of the hill.  This looked as if it could be an interesting Town. We had planned on staying here, but had no idea what it was going to be like.

We arrived in Aguilar de Campoo at 11:30 and found the Tourist office straight away.  It looked as if it was closed, although the opening hours stated it should be open.  I tried the door and yes it was open – saving electricity by not having any lights on!  The young girl was very helpful, but as usual would not call any of the hostals/hotels to see if they had vacancies.  We had to cycle around the Town.  We called the camp site which again was outside of the Town and up another hill, they wanted E28 for the pitch.  We opted for a hotel tonight, breakfast included for E45.

We really wanted to stay in the Town as it had a great history and the brochure the Tourism office gave me showed a walk that we could follow taking in all the main sites and entrances to the Town.   It was a Roman town and had many \”gates\” (entrances) to the town.  One of the quarters of the Town was the old Jewish quarter and the \”gate\” has hebrew writing on it – if you look really close you can still see it on the white stone above the gate.  This is the only remnants left of any Jewish occupation.

The following photos are of Aguillar, which we had no idea was going to be this beautiful or historic.

The main square was a hive of activity at lunchtime.

There are two monasteries in the Town.  Santa Clara houses 45 nuns who make various pastries and breads.  The other is a school and hostel that charges E75 for a night.

Amongst all the history in the town there are some commercial areas.  I loved the way this flower shop advertised.

We broke the budget and had pizza and beer for dinner.