Day 7: Ciudad Rodrigo

I picked out today's destination having caught the name on a map. It might be out of the way and only a small place, but I'm a bit of a buff on the Peninsular War being a fan of Bernard Cornwell's series Sharpe, and so I recognised the name Ciudad Rodrigo as the site of a famous siege in 1812. At the time it was held by the French, who were protected by the British advancing from Portugal by the city walls. The British gained the upper hand when they made two breaches in the walls and swarmed the defending French. As a result, they gained their foothold into Spain. And so knowing about the history of the place and seeing it on a map, I wanted to see it in the flesh. I imagined it would be a big old fortress and I could relive the famous siege.

Ciudad Rodrigo lies about 90km to the west of Salamanca, which took us about an hour to cover in an entirely non-descript coach journey. This part of Spain is exceedingly flat and is mostly given over to growing wheat. For some reason I'm attracted to the idea of driving through Nebraska and Kansas, which are nothing but corn fields for hundreds of miles, so this was a tiny warm-up.

Having left the coach station we soon found ourselves walking through an archway and into the town. That archway wasn't one of the famous breaches, but it was immediately next to one (since filled in) judging by a memorial plaque on the inside to the fallen Major-General "Black Bob" Crauford. And right next to that were steps leading to the top of the walls, so we started our time in Ciudad Rodrigo by doing a circuit of them.

My initial impression is that they weren't terribly high. I was expecting something much taller, requiring lengthy ladders to scale and leaving the soldiers extraordinarily vulnerable to the Frenchmen defending the fortress with their muskets. I'm doing the soldiers a massive disservice, that said - there was no cover at all and the relative stumpiness of the walls meant that they were very close to the soldiers taking shots at them. The lack of cover and flatness of the land in this region meant that it was hard to get a worthwhile photo for the blog, though we noticed the mountains that indicated the border with Portugal in the distance. At least we were the only people on the walls, a welcome change from our experiences of tourist-ridden Dubrovnik. That said, the view behind us of the church and houses was a good one.

Things improved as we completed the first quarter, since we caught glimpses of greenery, bridges and the Río Águeda.

Before long our route was blocked by some sort of tower, and so we had to get down to walk around it before continuing our journey.

We eventually espied a little church and both rushed for our cameras in excitement at finally having something to photograph. This one came with the bonus of having some flowers in bloom!

We were delighted to remark upon descending that the town itself was much brighter than the landscape outside it. The flowers by that little church weren't one-offs after all.

Before too long we chanced upon what turned out to be the main square. Ciudad Rodrigo is so small that it really did come down to turning a corner. We decided to stop for a drink (why is it that non-Brits think a beer should be one third froth?) and that drink became a meal once we'd seen that the food on the menu was palatable for our finicky tastes and the prices were acceptable for my padlocked purse.

Once lunch was over and the endless wait to pay was bought to an end (by my deciding to enter the restaurant and ask whether I might, since they're terribly relaxed about this sort of thing here), we had an hour left before our bus was due to leave and so set off to explore the rest of the town. It turned out to be quite the hidden treasure, full of little side streets, proud buildings ... and cannon.

We decided to pop out of some of the gates and soon learnt that we were unlucky with out starting point, because the views were much nicer on the other side.

We headed back to through the main square on our way back to the gate we needed to exit through.

We took one last look at the main church, which was much bigger than we initially would have thought ...

before exiting through the gate that initially entered through and wishing goodbye to Ciudad Rodrigo.

I'm glad we came. From the historical perspective it wasn't what I thought it would be (but then I suppose Normandy is just sand and stone without the context) but the town itself was a beautiful little enclave which proved to be well worth a short visit.