The Road from Santiago

  We are in Battle of Ebro country.  Through the summer and early autumn the Republican armies laboured over a territory which was very unforgiving for any caught in it. The rocky nature of the terrain turned the land into a factory for producing splitters when any shell landed on it.   We stayed here in 2008, during the 70th Commemorations. I thought I recognised the road and the junction we come to confirms it.  We stayed in a farm which had been a casualty clearing station during the battle.  The place was littered with the remains of the war, human and material. An unexploded shell was on the landing and a Reichsher gas mask container.  On the patio was a glass ossuary for the distangled bones of the fallen.  This did not unphase our five year old.  A week later we were earnestly asked if it would worry him to see plastic bones in a museum.  Not really, he seen the real things. The nature of the rock preserves many of the fortificati...

  Another day of spectacular views, natured harvested to making the good things of life and a general sense of long sigh and deep breath.  Not much to review so let’s talk olive trees. Fossil evidence indicates that the olive tree had its origins 20–40 million years ago in the Oligocene - so, no dinosaurs in the frame.  Around 100,000 years ago, olives were used by humans in Africa, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, certainly for fire wood and probably for food,  Wild olive trees, or oleasters, have been collected in the Eastern Mediterranean since  about 17,000 B C. The genome of cultivated olives suggests their origin from oleaster populations in the Eastern Mediterranean. By 5000BC olives were being cultivated.  As far back as 3000 BC, olives were grown commercially in Crete and may have been the source of the wealth of the Minoan civilization .  It seems olives were chiefly as a source of oil. An olive tree in Mouriscas , Abrantes , Portugal, (...

We are climbing 169m to top the ridge to go through Vilalba dels Arcs,. We are in Battle of Ebro country. The Ebro Offensive was the beleaguered Republic’ls last great attempt to push back the fascists and prolong the war until the Democracies finally work up to what was going on.  It did, in part, they didn’t.  More of that in other places.  Villalba de los Arcs suffered great damage in 1938. It wasn’t the first time. The pueblo was part of the Templar estates centred on Miravet and, when the Order fell, a Hospitaller town.  The 14th century, generally thought of as a fairly bleak time, saw depopulation. The Reaper’s War - think Catalan Peasant’s attempt to decouple from the whole Spain thing - saw the town sacked by government troops in January 1643. Once the war was over bands of rebels operated in the area until 1685.  During the Succession War the place became a hospital for the wounded.  King Phillip’s troops occupied the place and kept a garrison the...

  Should TV-7232 ever have a ‘Friends of’ page on Facebook, I will join. It doesn’t.  I’ve looked.  Nor does this singular road seem to trouble the web much above road work warnings. This is a sad lack.  It winds passed somewhat glorious vineyards. It has views.  I imagine the heat of a june afternoon.  Chirping things and shimmering heat haze complete my idyll.   You know people talk about wine and suggest it can be any other colour than red. Nonsense I know but what can you do with some people.  Champagne is, without doubt, the most overrated thing on the planet.  I can only assume that is the reason sports stars spray it everywhere.  If they have to have something to drink, try cava. The word cava means cave or cellar. The name for the fizzy wine was adopted in 1970 because the French were probably getting picky over their own fizzy stuff.  The one advantage of this is that it has given us constant jokes along the lines, it ...

  Round and round the Streetview route goes and where we will follow, nobody knows.  As we are heading out east it takes us down a dusty track which, sometime in 2013, the boys and girls of streetview thought, I wonder what is down here.  They have never been back. After sweeping along the new cut C-221 we come across Batea.  Spain is blessed with a sufficient number of hills to place towns on to give a whiff of the Medieval and fighting fantasy.  I suppose in Blighty we would have industrialised the hell out of the place but not here. Batea sits atop a hill and the houses terrace down to a neat selection of fields.  It is the sort of place where tractors park up. Batea has a lot of History and one of the fuller wiki pages so you really need to look at it.  https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batea_(Espa%C3%B1a)   I do mean that. Someone spent a lot of detail  One novelty I will pick you.  The Snow wells. According to wiki ‘The snow wells were...