Today we left Frómista and headed to Calzadilla de la Cueza. This was a “double shift” as we combined two days of a “normal” itinerary into one longer day.
Regarding the title of this post – 3 were good and 1 was bad. At breakfast there was a man who was so “ripe”, and his hair looked like it hadn’t been washed for days, that he caused a gag reflex. Then he went to cut a slice of cake – he grabbed hold of the whole cake with his hand as he cut his slice – that was cake off the menu for me!
The background to the picture above is the Church of San Martin de Tours. Dated from the 11th century, it is one of the most complete Romanesque temples in Europe.
Frómista itself was born as a settlement near a Roman villa called Frumesta vacceos, a name derived from the word frumentum (Latin for wheat) due to the abundance of wheat that existed in their fields. During the Middle Ages this settlement became a city of splendour and around the year 1066 the Monastery of San Martín was built, ordered by Doña Mayor, widow of King Sancho Garcés III of Navarre.
We walked through a couple of small villages on the way out of Frómista – Población de Campos and Revenga de Campos before we got to Villalcázar de Sirga. There we stopped to take a look round the Iglesia de Santa Maria La Blanca, built by the Order of the Templars at the end of the 12th century, in the transition period from Romanesque to Gothic and finished in the 14th century. King Alfonso X the Wise composed the Cantigas de Santa María (a set of 427 compositions in honor of the Virgin Mary) inspired by one of the images that are kept in the church. This was where we had the second of our “smells” today – the freshly cut grass bizarrely smelt like emulsion paint!
The road was very straight and flat (easy to walk on but monotonous) as we walked into Carrión de Los Condes. On the normal itinerary this would have been our stop point for the day. But this was only halfway – as the rain was starting we decided that a stop for coffee and pain at chocolate was necessary. On the way out of Carrión, we crossed over the Puente Mayor – a rebuilt representation of the old bridge over which the locals passed hundreds of years ago with carts and horses. It currently has a total of 7 large arches and, unlike the old bridge, it does not have fortified doors at each end.
From Carrión to Calzadilla is a pretty straight flat path with no towns in between. The rain did materialize (it was very cold) so out came the raincoats for the first time. Thankfully this wasn’t a long, or very heavy, downpour, and the rain was soon replaced by the sun. This was the time for the third “smell” – the air smells so fresh after some rain dampens down all of the dust. There looked to be some heavy downpours around but thankfully they avoided us.
The final stretch also provided our final “smell” – that of wild rosemary. It was enough to make me hungry for some cooked lamb! We then walked into town, with a view of the town cemetery in a field to our right, and then to our hotel. There were less poppies in the fields today but there were a lot of blueish flowers in a few fields to give a different look. The manager said he had no record of our reservation even though our bags had been transported and were in front of him. Anyway after some back and forth he gave us our rooms – if some walkers had arrived before us and taken the available rooms then it could have become interesting.
Tomorrow we head to Sahagun.