Caceres

I tried to post this last night but couldn't so everything on here refers to yesterday 13th March.

We are parked tonight in a Motorhome car park in Caceres, it's free and it has services but no electricity and we are only permitted to stop for 24 hours. There's room for 14 vans and we arrived at about two o'clock and took one of the last two places. Whilst we had some lunch prior to exploring the town vans kept arriving and, finding the place full, turning round and parking further up the road in the area reserved for buses and coaches. By the time we left half a dozen had parked there despite the signs prohibiting them and we suspected things would end badly. Sure enough when we returned at about 7.15 there were about a dozen Motorhomes there,as were the police. We guessed from the body language and arm waving that they were being told to move on. It's now an hour later, the police have gone but there are still a half dozen or so vans parked. Looks like we'll have some entertainment later this evening. There is a campsite just outside town which we looked at before coming here but it meant getting a bus into town and back so we decided to stop here instead. We reckon if we are having a "moving" day we need to be where we are heading by 2pm latest to be sure of a spot or, even if it's a big site, a decent spot so whilst it's disappointing not to get the spot you want, I don't have a great deal of sympathy for the French convoy up the road who couldn't get themselves out of bed this morning.

We had never heard of Caceres until a couple of days ago when a guy we met at Los Gazules recommended we stop here and we are glad we did. The historic old town remains pretty much as it was six centuries ago. Narrow high walled streets suddenly open up into plazas with a church or palace on every corner. The town is still contained by it's protective walls and when you view an empty cobblestoned plaza with its ancient doorways and windows and it's skyline of turrets, towers, domes, gargoyles and storks nests it truly is like a film set. We visited the Concatedral de Santa Maria (another climb to the bell tower!) which whilst not as opulent or ornate as Granada or Seville feels much more like a place of worship and which contains a sixteenth century carved cedar altarpiece perfectly complementing the gothic stone roof arches. The ecclesiastical museum doubles as the sacristy however the priest preparing for mass welcomed us warmly as he put on his vestments and robes. The church of San Mateo is undergoing renovation but we could still visit, (another spiral staircase) and had a collection of small nativity scenes from around the world, beautiful, weird, charming and tacky as we moved around the exhibits.

The town's museum held an eclectic collection of items donated by local families as well as two floors of sixteenth and seventeenth century paintings, mostly, of a religious nature together with portraits of people you or I have never heard of. Every corner we turned brought another gasp of surprise at how this town could have remained so intact, giving us a peek back to the Middle Ages. The town has another claim to fame; Franco was declared head of state in 1936 in the Palacio de los Golfines de Arriba although they don't mention this in the official tourist guide.

Unfortunately, I've had problems with my WiFi over the last few days (what else is new) so I can't post any pictures today but I'll definitely post some tomorrow of this amazing little historic town within a city.

 

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