by Tony Kevin
chapter eight
Walking through Extremadura
From Mérida to Baños de Montemayor, a health-resort spa village built over Roman thermal baths, just south of the regional border between Extremadura and Castile-León, is a walk of 210 kilometres. There are two cities on the way: Cáceres, eighty kilometres north of Mérida, and Plasencia, about fifty kilometres south of Baños, a little to the east of the waymarked Vía de la Plata, but an easy side-trip by bus. After Cáceres, the camino skirts a very large reservoir, the Embalse de Alcantara, fed by two major rivers, the Río Almonte and the Río Tajo.
The camino then crosses some low mountains, just north of a village called Cañaveral, after which it enters marginally higher and better-watered country. After passing through a large irrigated valley, the Valle del Jerte, it returns to dry encina grasslands, climbing gradually towards greener hill country surrounding Baños de Montemayor, and on through the mountain pass of Puerto de Béjar on to the high Castilian meseta. It took me twelve days to walk from Mérida to Baños, including two rest-days in Cáceres and Plasencia, averaging around twenty kilometres per day.
I had expected this be a fairly boring part of the journey, to be endured and completed as quickly as possible before enjoying the anticipated greener country further north in Castile. But walking across these harsh dry plains of Extremadura started to unblock my memories and my spirituality. In these two weeks, doors into my soul started to open. Though I did not recognise it at the time, these were probably the most life-changing days of my walk, days that re-shaped it as a real pilgrimage and something more than just an interesting, long walk through Spain. Spiritual growth can steal up on you: it does not have to be a moment of blinding, dramatic revelation, of Saul becoming Paul on the road to Damascus; it can also take the form of a slow recognition of good things, the slow spreading of a sense of peace, and the inner healing of an unsettled soul. It was more like that for me.
Still, there must have been some resistance and inner turmoil as the old Adam in me, my controlling and over-controlled personality, obstinately resisted the strengthening spirit of pilgrimage in me. Does this sound like a sort of process of exorcism, of good driving out bad? Perhaps it was, but I did not experience anything like that. It was more of a quiet and slow healing process, re-discovering a calm after the storm that had been my life for the past few years. When I look back at John Eddy’s wise words in his blessing, predicting good things I might find on my pilgrimage — words whose significance I did not fully appreciate at the time — I think now that these were the days when I began to experience such things. But it is hard to relate this in writing, for how does one report a personal miracle? I must just go on telling the story of the journey as it happened, and let interested readers join the dots as they will.
After the generous hospitality of the brothers at Alcuéscar (see Chapter 1), it was a very long day’s walk, forty-odd kilometres, to Cáceres. Again, I did not quite make it, getting only as far as Valdesalor, a small village that had grown into a rather soulless modern dormitory town of Cáceres. I caught a local bus the few remaining kilometres into the city centre, and this was the last time I took a bus on the camino.
Cáceres, a city of 70,000, with rich links with the Spanish conquest of Latin America, was a much more attractive and interesting city than I had expected. It sits in the foothills of uplands — bare now, but they would have been forested once — overlooking vast dry plains. It had been founded by the Romans in the first century and the whole area would have been heavily settled by Roman former legionaries moving up from Mérida. Many of the original conquistadores and soldier–colonists came out of this south-western region of Spain; for example, Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro both came from this area. The Roman military genes, and fourteen centuries of surviving in the harsh Extremaduran environment, bred tough, resourceful people here, well up to the huge challenge of conquering Latin America. Many conquistadores, having returned to Spain with their acquired American fortunes, settled in Cáceres, a city to their taste that had had a notorious reputation as a violent, free-wheeling frontier town since its reconquest from the Moors in 1229. In the sixteenth century, Cáceres was still a strange place: an urban jungle of rival great families jostling for power, a violent city of strongly built fortified palaces. It took many years for the Spanish monarchy to bring the fractious and fiercely independent great families of Cáceres to order.
The old city — a UNESCO heritage site — is an impressive collection of austerely beautiful palaces and churches in golden sandstone, running along the crest of a walled hill. I wandered around early in the morning, soaking up the atmosphere of this unusual city, which still has a strong macho mood about it. I was remembering scenes from Romeo and Juliet and, indeed, Shakespeare might have recognised this city as the Verona of his imagination. It was easy, walking through the now-silent narrow streets of this city, overtopped by its brooding, windowless fortress-palaces, to imagine the bodyguards of the Montague and Capulet families brawling their way through these same streets, to hear their shouted threats and boasts, and the clashing of their swords and the cries of the wounded.
Around the old aristocratic city is an equally old residential and market city centred on the large Plaza Mayor, where I found a rundown but friendly place to stay, the Pensión Carretero. There were good, inexpensive restaurants tucked away in side streets, once you got out of the rather touristy main square. Walking uphill along the main shopping street, a pedestrian mall now, I entered a third Cáceres, a dignified and green nineteenth-century city of broad, treed avenues, parks, and refreshing fountains — a miniature Paris. This part of Cáceres was all the more beautiful, knowing as I did at first hand how dry and harsh the countryside was just outside the city. This Cáceres was a welcome oasis. On a quiet bench in the main city park, I called home and had a joyful, long conversation with my wife.
Walking out of Cáceres the next day, I had my first taste of highway walking along the N630, the main national trunk road that runs from Seville in the south to León in the north. The N630 is the modern-day successor to the Vía de la Plata, but is itself in course of being superseded by a north-south motorway under construction. I would grow to hate this busy and overcrowded road in my encounters with it over the next 300-odd kilometres. The camino runs roughly parallel to it, but is mostly mercifully out of sight and hearing of it. But sometimes you have to walk alongside it or, at worst, as here, on its very verge. It was a narrow and busy two-lane highway, on a high road embankment with impassable wheatfields below it on either side. It felt, and was, dangerous to walk here. I was at risk of being blown off my feet by the airwash from huge trucks and buses roaring past me only a metre away at speeds of 130 kilometres per hour. After ten kilometres of this, it was a relief to get off the highway onto a parallel dirt road.
Soon I was in Casar de Cáceres, a pretty village with a pilgrim albergue in the main square, opposite a loud, electric town clock that chimed all night on every hour. Earplugs helped a little. I met interesting fellow pilgrims that night, including José, an assertive but cheerful retired waiter from Seville, forty-ish and on an invalidity pension (back troubles, he said), but seemingly pretty fit to me — fit enough to bicycle from Seville to Santiago. He first demanded that I help him carry his heavy mountain bike up the steep stairs to the second-floor albergue rooms, because he was sure it would be stripped of parts if he left it downstairs in the street overnight. He would not hear of one of the two dormitories being reserved as a courtesy for women, insisting that unisex sleeping was a firm camino rule. But he was a friendly dinner companion, like many Spaniards, with a highly vivid and dramatic style of conversation.
There were also Tim and Liz, a quietly charming young walking couple from Wales, whom I was to meet several times on the way until finally — improbably — crossing paths again at the very end in Finisterre. And there were Marit and Karin, two cheery Swedish women walkers; K
arin was combating a sprained knee, which was forcing her to use buses and taxis for much of the way. They soon became famous along the camino as las chicas suecas, ‘the Swedish chicks’, merrily losing their way from time to time, only to be put back on the right road by helpful Spanish police and taxi-drivers. Marit is a social worker who works with refugees; Karin is a journalist. Both had grown-up children but, as far as I could gather, were currently partnerless. They had done pilgrimages to Santiago together before, on the Vía Frances. But this was their first time on the Vía de la Plata, and the heat and aridity of the route was still a bit shocking to them.
The next day, Marit and I set off together on the camino along a high ridge, with stunning views westwards towards Portugal and eastwards across dry plains to the central uplands. We were walking on the old Roman/Moorish Vía de la Plata now, marked by the worn-down stumps of huge Roman granite millarios (milestones). It was exciting to imagine the Roman legions or the al-Andalus trading caravans moving along this very same road.
We were headed for a remote country train stop called Río Tajo, overlooking the huge Embalse de Alcantara, where, according to the guidebook, we should have been able to catch an afternoon train to the village of Cañaveral, further on up the N630 highway. But when we reached Río Tajo we found Karin, who had come up by taxi, bearing bad news that the train no longer stopped here. It was a frustratingly surreal moment: there was the tidy but locked station, with shade and green pot-plants inside, a ticket office, signs, boxes of timetable leaflets … I just couldn’t believe it was closed. I rang RENFE (Spanish Railways) on my mobile and, sadly, it was indeed true — trains had ceased to stop at Río Tajo a few months earlier. In a bad temper, we climbed back up to the N630 and endured another several kilometres of walking in blazing afternoon heat. Someone in a passing vehicle threw a raw egg at the girls — the only incident of bad behaviour towards pilgrims I ever encountered in Spain. The egg fortunately missed them.
Then we arrived at an improbable oasis: the Villa Lindamar, a palatial, modern-style country bungalow, now a tourist centre specialising in 4WD bird-watching tours into nearby national parks, run by an enterprising, young Netherlands-based couple, Martin and Linda. It was bizarre to walk off the awful N630 into this little boutique hotel, with a long bamboo bar, nice bedrooms, and even a swimming pool. As the sun finally set over the lake below, I went for a cooling dip in the pool. The intense heat and glare of the day had at last turned into a pleasantly warm evening, with the rock walls around the pool terrace holding onto the day’s warmth as the evening set in. The lake below was no longer the hard, glittering metallic sheet it had been all day. Now it was recognisable as blue water.
I was drinking cold beers, luxuriating in my swimming trunks in the cool pool, while a middle-aged, badly sunburned Englishman, with a white towel round his ample belly and a mobile phone glued to his ear, sat nearby in a deckchair, irascibly trying to sort out last-minute hitches in a complicated Spanish land-purchase. It was an entertaining but jarringly incongruous moment. What was I doing here in this swimming pool listening to an English property developer haggling over a deal? This was supposed to be a pilgrimage, not a business holiday in a resort that felt like California or Mexico. I felt uneasy, disconnected. It went on that way later, as I sat sipping gin and tonics over the bar, chatting in English with Martin and las chicas suecas about the eccentricities of the locals. It was fun, but I knew I had fallen into the world of Anglophone tourist Spain. In just these few hours, the precious pilgrim’s Spain, which I had just been starting to connect with in recent days, had again drifted out of reach.
The next day, a Saturday, I was anxious to be off early and alone with my thoughts. I wanted to cross the mountains at Cañaveral, and get out of these arid plains, to reach the city of Plasencia — which I sensed would be soothing for my uneasy soul — in time for my daughters’ confirmation Mass in Canberra the next day, Sunday. So in the first light of dawn I was climbing back up onto the high plateau, back to the old Roman road high above the N630. It was red-earth country with very little grass, the main vegetation being a sort of wild fennel bush. There were cows, a few windmill pumps feeding stockwater tanks, and nothing else. It looked and felt like Texas or outback Australia. Far over to the east was the huge, new north-south motorway under construction.
I by-passed Cañaveral without stopping, and the yellow arrows then took me up a steep pine-forested slope to a mountain pass. I was glad to leave the dry plains behind. What lay ahead looked marginally greener and softer. I walked down into a tiny village called Grimaldo, on a north-facing slope under high hills that sheltered it from the parching southern winds and sun. There were almond and peach trees, vegetable plots, grapevines, running streams from a mountain spring. My spirits lifted at last. I had a snack and chat at the local bar and then caught the late afternoon bus into Plasencia, promising the friendly bar lady that I would come back the next night to Grimaldo to sleep in the pilgrim refugio attached to her bar.
Plasencia was all I had hoped for, and more: an elegant little city with a strong local pride and culture, nestling at the foot of high mountains, the Sierra de Gredos, which are snow-covered in winter and still with snowdrifts on the peaks. It is well-watered country, with the cool, clear waters of the Río Jerte running down from the mountains through pleasant parklands set out below the old hillside town. Plasencia has an important place in the history of the Reconquista. It was founded in 1186 by King Alfonso VIII of Castile as a fortress city, with the double purpose of colonising and guarding Castile’s recent conquest of the strategic northern borderlands of Extremadura. It was recaptured briefly by the Moors in 1196, but was retaken and held by Castile the following year. It was interesting how my walk was tracing in reverse chronological order the Castilian conquest of most of the great Moorish cities of Spain: Granada, Córdoba, Mérida, Cáceres, and now Plasencia … with Salamanca and Zamora, the most northerly Moorish city on my route, yet to come.
I hastened to find the Plasencia cathedral. I wanted to go in there and pray for my daughters, Vanny and Raingsey, at the same hour that they were being confirmed in Canberra’s Catholic cathedral, Saint Christopher’s. Their coming confirmation had been very much on my mind these past weeks. They had prepared for it in my absence, but my prayers had been with them. Confirmation, one of the seven Catholic sacraments, is an important moment in Catholic life because it is the sacrament whereby a Catholic begins to leave childhood behind to become a full adult member of the church.
The cathedral was a magnificent building, begun in the thirteenth century and finally completed in the sixteenth century. It was a hybrid of styles, blending a small early Romanesque part with a much grander sixteenth-century completion, the latter in gloriously ornate High Gothic style (the ‘plateresque’ style). It was a cathedral out of a fairytale, with romantic carvings around the doorways and spires, and a magnificent huge painted and woodcarved retablo (altar screen) behind the main altar. Recently cleaned, the almost white sandstone glowed in the late afternoon sun.
As I walked into the cathedral, I stopped, entranced, as the glorious first notes of the Magnificat of the Italian Renaissance composer Francesco Durante rang out through the towering naves. This wonderfully triumphant choral music, in final rehearsal by a choir from Salamanca University for a free concert later that evening, sounded absolutely right in this setting. I stayed to hear the full rehearsal and came back later for the evening concert, which also included Mozart’s Missa Brevis.
After the concert, I dined in a good restaurant nearby on a roof terrace overlooking the floodlit cathedral plaza. I was having the menú del dia (the economical, set-price menu of the day that most Spanish restaurants offer), and so expected to be seated modestly in the dining room downstairs; but the patron, in a special moment of kindness on seeing I was a pilgrim, graciously insisted I sit on the special upstairs terrace under the grapevine pergolas. I was in such a good mood afterwards that I s
topped into a bar on the main city square to treat myself to a nightcap, which turned into three leisurely malt whiskies, two Scotches and an Irish. This little luxury cost me considerably more than the whole earlier dinner had. I found that the best rule in Spain is always to drink local Spanish alcohol, avoiding imported drinks. Spain makes good gins and cognacs, but I never tried Spanish whisky.
Plasencia, like Cáceres, had some grand old palaces, a former Jewish quarter, and many good clothing boutiques and gift shops tucked away in the cobbled walking streets for well-off Spanish tourists — of whom there were many, presumably from Madrid, an easy few hours’ drive eastwards from here. There wasn’t much cheap accommodation, but again I was lucky: I found a traditional hostal, the Rincón Extremeno, hidden in a tiny lane just off the main square. By now I felt quite comfortable walking into such places and saying politely, ‘Soy peregrino andando a Santiago, quiero un dormitorio individual por favor, no muy caro si es posible.’ (‘I am a pilgrim walking to Santiago; can I please have an inexpensive single room?’), and getting what I am sure was a generous discount (I never asked) on a simple basic room, and a friendly welcome in the bar and restaurant later. I loved the courtesy and friendship in these little family-run hostals where, if the wife of the patron was running the kitchen, you could always rely on getting a good, honest meal.
Back to Grimaldo by the bus the next afternoon, I found a bunk in the pilgrim refugio — a spartan, minimally renovated workman’s cottage. There were quite a few other pilgrims there. Alex, a pleasant, retired Englishman who had lived on the Costa del Sol for many years, filled me in on the local history. He stressed that I could not imagine how poor and deprived these now picturesque and comfortable villages had been twenty years ago.