Camping Altamira to Zaragoza - about 160 miles, more or less my preferred distance to drive in one day. In this case, northwards up the A23 motorway. Aside from Teruel there are no large towns, it's a depopulated landscape of dry upland plains with more mountainous bits in between - 'Espagna vaciada', empty Spain. Compared to the A7 which follows the Mediterranean coast there is little traffic. I set the cruise control to 60mph and watched the world pass by. With the high plains at about 700m and the mountain passes 500m higher I also watched the average fuel gauge notch downwards from 30.3 to 29.6mpg. Still, it's a lot better than our first motorhome, a Ford Transit with dual wheels on the back which on a good day managed no more than 22mpg.
Why are we heading to Zaragoza? A good question, by a process of elimination probably. I rejected the idea of heading to the north coast via Tarragona and Huesca because erroneously I thought it was the long way round. The plan to stay in Albarracin then head north through Soria and Logroño fell foul of our concerns about how busy sites might get during 'Semana Santa', so we've settled on the more boring option aiming for sites in Zaragoza and Zumaia because they are easily bookable. Also, both of us feel less than perky, we've picked up a bug somewhere. Gill felt so lousy she took a Covid test. It was negative, but that in itself doesn't mean she feels any better, just less of a biological hazard.
Zaragoza is Aragon's regional capital. It was founded by the Romans, its name an imperfect Arabic transcription of the title of the city's founder, 'Caesar Augustus'. Subsequently it was ruled by the Franks and then the Arabs, before becoming the capital of the Kingdom of Aragon in the mid twelfth century. It was besieged many times, in the War of Spanish Succession, in the Napoleonic period and twice during the Spanish civil war.
Today it is a productive industrial city specialising in automotive and aeronautical engineering and builds trams and rolling stock for light railways. Though the place has a compact historical centre most of the buildings date from the twentieth century. It's fair to say it is not Spain's most beautiful city, partly due to its location. It straddles the Ebro, otherwise the environs are waterless, a wilderness of dessicated white rock.
The place split the cab. Gill found the centre cold and corporate, the recently constructed outskirts bland, soul-less and somewhat Ballardian, the people not quite so amiable and accommodating as you usually find in Spain. She was right, but as I mentioned in the previous post I am someone who can become mildly obsessed with the design of a distribution centre or motorway interchange and have a bit of a soft spot for brutalist carbuncles. In that sense Zaragoza is my kind of town!
I only took a few photos of Zaragoza's under appreciated contribution to mid twentieth century urban design; here's one taken from the bus-stop.
The number 41 bus takes a circuitous route into the centre, much of the outskirts look as if they were planned in the 1980s, an enormous swathe of apartments, shopping centres and villa developments built to a strictly geometric plan, as if you had plonked Milton Keynes into the Arizona desert. Much of it did seem windswept and bleak.
I also could see where Gill was coming from about the centre of the city feeling corporate with its big office blocks and wide avenues. However not all of the architecture was mundane, there were a few commercial buildings from the 1920s with a bit of jazz age pizzazz.
Some of the more recent ones attempted to overcome their style deficit by embracing enormity, sadly ugliness does not diminish with size.
The city centre lacks greenery, there are public spaces but they all seem to specialise in odd metallic post-modern installations.
However, we weren't here to critique Zaragoza's urbanism but as usual seeking somewhere for lunch, namely the el Tuba area which has a reputation as a bit of a foody enclave.
It consists of a few narrow alleys in the oldest part of the city, a mix of old established tapas bars with a cluster of newer pop-up style restaurants in graffiti daubed vacant lots.
Yesterday evening I downloaded an article about Zaragoza's emerging food scene, so we had identified a couple of well reviewed places before we arrived. Aragonese cuisine tends to be meaty like in other inland regions of Spain. Croquettes feature too, which is more our thing.
We headed for Taberna Doña Casta which has a whole menu dedicated to croquettes.
We went for the Jamon Iberica with nuts and cheese....
then the mushrooms with goats cheese..
All the while I entertained Gill about the place being the finest place for tapas in South Yorkshire and that the Spanish food would be better without so much jam on. Luckily she's a very long suffering person with a forgiving nature. We headed off to explore the historical bit.
The classic touristy shot of Zaragoza is of the multi-domed baroque Basílica de Nuestra Señora del Pilar taken from half way across the Puente de Piedra. Never one to pass over the opportunity to reinforce a stereotype I patiently waited my turn to go click.
It is an humongous church. The Spanish States' appetite for over blown gigantic buildings is something that seems to persist across the ages, from Seville's thirteenth century cathedral which aimed to be the biggest church in Christendom to huge Baroque structures like this one.
It's difficult not to regard Gaudi's Sagrada Familia or secular buildings like el Escorial, Plaza Espagna in Seville or Valencia's Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias as all part of this urge to construct enormous monuments. I am not a fan, I think it was Albert Camus who wrote "It's a strange and insufferable uncertainty to know that monumental beauty always supposes servitude."
We decided we needed a coffee. Most places around the cathedral area looked like tourist traps. I summoned-up TripAdvisor and found a place called Café Botanico with four stars. It seemed to be within easy walking distance but down an obscure narrow alley. Google to the rescue, I typed its name into Maps and the posh voiced assistant led us there.
On the way we passed a Goya Museum, I had forgotten he was Aragonese. It was open, but by this time my need for a coffee was greater than my urge to admire Goya's etchings. Moreover, Gill gets very disconsolate very quickly in art galleries; her pain is more profound than my delight, so we tend to walk on by.
I liked Café Botanico. It had a laid-back mid-noughties ambience with stylishly random up-cycled furniture, quirky lights and background music that I recognised as something that wafted out of our elder daughters bedroom when she was in sixth form.
I couldn't put a name to the band. Again Google to the rescue. Gill made her phone listen to a snippet of the song - it was something by 'The Shins' the app reliably informed us. Most of us identify with a particular musical era, usually the music from our late teens and early twenties, in our case the early to mid seventies. However if you have kids the music they listened to also sticks in your mind.
I felt curiously content sitting in Café Botanico listening to the Shins, a tad nostalgic too, recalling the times we spent in Bristol eating a relaxed Sunday brunch in some hipsterish café off Whiteladies Rd, when our elder two were at University.
We decided the cakes looked good, we couldn't decide which to choose so the waitress said she would bring us two small portions of different ones. The small portion were quite big.
I was still musing about how our kids taste in music had influenced my own. It was true for the elder two but not in our youngest daughter's case. From an early age she loved J-pop and K-pop, was and still is deeply into Manga, Animé and Cosplay. When she was in her teens we were in our mid fifties, too old to cosplay 'Bleach'! We did end up at a lot of Animé conventions though. Laura's interests influenced us in a different way, she persuaded us to take her to Japan. We loved it. One day we will go back. Lots has been written about how parents influence children, but it's a reciprocal process, I've learned a lot from all three of our children.
We've been travelling for over two months now, perhaps the music in the café had made me homesick, not for England particularly, but I was missing our kids.
We headed to the bus stop, back on the 41, a slow crawl through faceless suburbs, and after a quick shop in Mercadona, ensconced again in Camping Ciudad de Zaragoza. Gill decided the place was peculiar.
Reviews on Google and Search for Sites were fair to middling, three things came up repeatedly, firstly, the facilities were 'tired'; secondly it was overpriced at €30 per night; finally the site was 'ok' as an overnight stop. I think we'd concur with all of that, especially the last bit. Because we stayed two nights we gained extra opportunities to discover irritating things about the place.
Nearby the sprawling modern suburb of Rosales del Canal looks like it was built in in the 1990s. The adjacent barren ground was developed as the the city's municipal campsite, also providing a pool and other sports facilities for the new community.
It's all very much of its time with lots of bare concrete, brushed steel and slatted wood, softened by hundreds of trees planted around the site. It's a good design, but three decades on the place is showing its age. Hence the word 'tired' in the reviews, but in the case of the sanitary blocks 'dysfunctional' might have been a better description. There was one exception to this, the pot-washing place was the finest I have come across in all the years we have travelled. As pot-washer in chief this pleased me inordinately.
Unlike the showers. Just to get things straight, I am not some weirdo who creeps about in the morning with his mobile taking photos of bathrooms. I found the photo below on a Google Maps review of the site.
As you can see the shower block contains small individual cubicles with a common changing area. This is more or less the norm in Scandinavia and not unknown in some older facilities on Spanish sites. However, in other places I have been with this set-up the hooks for your stuff have been either next to the cubicle or in a row on the wall opposite. Zaragoza's were in a cluster at one end of a row of showers - in a block, four hooks on one side of a bench four on the other side, one for each of the eight shower cubicles. A small difference in design, but it takes no imagination whatsoever to work out how awkward this becomes when the block is busy, especially as the washbasins on the opposite wall had big mirrors behind them.
I was lucky on day one, as I entered the shower block another guy was pulling on his tee shirt and exited before I undressed. Next morning began well enough, the place was busier with five cubicles or so in use, clothes hanging-up on some hooks but nobody about. A different vision greeted me when I finished my shower, a couple of guys drying themselves. I joined them, three others completed their ablutions, now there was a gaggle of us gathered around the hooks, towelling away, all avoiding each other's gaze, and avoiding glancing towards the mirrored wall opposite. What the chap cleaning his teeth at the one of the washbasins made of the scene I dare not imagine. Clearly it was too much for others. Three times the main door slid open, a guy entered, paused momentarily, then marched straight back out again.
"How was your shower?" Gill enquired when I got back to the van.
"Memorable." I replied.
How you evaluate a place is very circumstantial, it only takes a couple of 'off moments' to colour your perception then everything seems annoying. However, Zaragoza's campsite did seem prone to the peculiar. For example, on our first evening around nineish we heard a low, industrial sounding hum, then it became a whine, like a turbine in the distance, sometimes mid pitched then higher as if its speed was fluctuating wildly. "I hope they don't work all night", Gill observed.
In the end curiosity got the better of me and I wandered off to see what was going on. I didn't have to go far. About 50 metres away in front of one of the camping bungalows a lone figure was just discernable in the darkness. He was sitting on a bicycle mounted on a frame, pedalling furiously, the faster he went the higher pitched the whine became. Our slumbers were safe, there was no way he could do this for very long at all.
Back inside, on Google - there were two possibilities. He was a van lifer with an abnormal commitment to sustainability and had taken to recharging his leisure batteries through pedal power. It's a thing apparently, spawning a clutch of inadvertently funny YouTube videos from the US featuring sad men with beards full of advice on how to repurpose a scrap exercise bike and a cycle frame to generate electricity.
The second possibility is we had a wannabe Jason Kenny next to us and what we were hearing was a 'Turbo trainer', a device developed to build a professional cyclists' stamina by attaching a racing bike to magnetically resistant rollers designed to mimic varying gradients. Next morning on the side of a van parked nearby I noticed the logo of a cycling team. Mystery solved!
Then there is the matter of Zaragoza's 'Top Gun' soundscape. When Gill was navigating us towards the campsite she noticed an enormous airport a few kilometres west of the city. About twice the area of Heathrow the place is divided between civil and military use. Passenger flights to Zaragoza are modest, as you would expect with an inland regional airport in Spain, but the place is a major European air cargo hub. Planes come and go 24/7.
The military aircraft were more infrequent but much louder, screaming overhead in small groups. I looked up the history of the place, it was built by USAF after a deal between Franco and the Americans in 1953. Since the mid 1990s it's been used solely by the Spanish air force and is home to the combat training school for its fleet of McDonnell Douglas EF18s. They seemed to be out in force while we were here. Given the situation in Ukraine the roar of combat aircraft is unsettling and saddening. Early one evening the van shook slightly and there was a distant echoey boom. Somewhere over the wide open spaces of Navarre an EF18 went supersonic.
As we packed-up to leave Gill observed, 'our time here has been a bit weird'. I think so too. Would we come back? Like most other people who left a review, we agreed maybe only as an overnight stop. In truth there are few other options in the vicinity, and if you are scooting towards the Med near Valencia then Zaragoza is an obvious place to break your journey. If we do return I'll probably use our onboard shower.
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