The castle and church complex in La Iruela
The locals in Siles told us that there would be no spring, and it turns out they were not wrong. We’ve gone directly from 50s F and rain to sun and high 70s F, and a temperature sign I saw in Baeza on Sunday even claimed it was 80 F.
Even with that, we are still in the “shoulder season” for travel, which is both a blessing and a curse.
It’s a blessing because prices haven’t skyrocketed yet. It’s a curse because some tourist sites have yet to open.
On Sunday, it was a bit of a curse in the Cazorla/Peal de Becerro area. Or perhaps the curse is the longer term economic crisis in Spain.
In La Iruela, where we were staying, we walked up to the castle and church complex near the top of the town. However, upon arriving we found the complex locked and a sign explaining that it was being renovated. The sign appeared a bit weathered, and there was no sign of work in progress, so we were not sure if, like El Cubo in Siles, this was a long term closure due to lack of funds or off-season work not yet completed. There was one visitor who had made it into the castle (see above left), or maybe he was helping with the renovations.
Stymied in La Iruela, we left the La Iruela/Cazorla area– the entrance to the other edge of the park that we live in (those of you in Minnesota think Ely; those of you in the South, think Gatlinburg)– and headed to the nearby ruins of a Roman villa.
We were expecting another complex like the one at Italica, but this is what we encountered at the Roman ruins of Bruñel:
However, we noticed a very nice BMW motorcycle sitting in the olive groves nearby, and as we pondered our next move, some folks appeared from inside the fence with helmets in hand. I did not see how they emerged from the fence, but I met them at their motorcycle and asked how they had entered (in Spanish). They showed me the whole in the fence, but I had noticed that there was an inner fence as well, so I said, “But there’s another fence right?” and they said, “Yes, and there’s another hole,” and they told me where that one was as well.
And this is what we saw:
Within the foundations of a small Roman settlement or a large Roman villa are the remains of a number of floor mosaics which decorated rooms and courtyards in the 2nd through 4th centuries. It appears the most intricate ones have been carted off to museums, leaving the geometric designs to bake under short roofs and be encroached upon by weeds and flowers.
Again, the fading signage, the holes in the fences made by enterprising tourists, and the roofs covering the main attractions suggest this is not a shoulder season issue.
This area is comprised of two fertile river valleys among gentle hills and has been inhabited for thousands of years, so there are a number of historical sites, and with both of our morning plans abbreviated by closures, we thought we’d try one more site nearby. This was a pre-Roman tomb on a small hill near the town of Peal de Becerro.
And, as you might have guessed by now, we were again locked out.
This time the fence was a bit more formidable, and there was no BMW hidden in the olives to show us the way in. There was, however, a really nice pavement roller, fresh blacktop, and a new sign, so maybe this was a shoulder season closure. Hard to tell.
In the time-honored tradition of turning lemons into lemonade, we opted for a picnic near the tomb with the following view of the Spanish countryside (and the one you can see in the header if you click on the title of the post to go to the post page rather than the generic blog homepage).
Refreshed and unbowed, we headed for the town of Baeza, a UN World Heritage Site because of the number of 16th century buildings still standing in its old quarter, which we hoped would not be closed.