Just keep going North

Whilst driving in Spain the main thing we've been watching is the compass on Google maps to check that we're still going North. Yesterday was a long drive North from Cordoba, about the equivalent of our normal journey to Scotland, getting on for 500 Km.

We're now in Segovia, a long way north from the Algarve and only one hop left to the Galicia coast and Santander. Our geography of Spain is getting better but until this trip would have needed a map to find Segovia.

As we move north things are definitely getting more Spanish. A primary example of this are less people speaking English and no English menus. A demonstration of the effect of this happened to me when ordering breakfast in Spanish (Duolingo) on the way here. I thought I'd ordered some kind of ham and cheese tostada. But there was a lot of Spanish involved and me guessing Si or No. What I ended up with was half a toasted baguette with olive oil 🤣

In general though our experience of Spanish food has been brilliant. We've had so much good food and no bad food. An example was breakfast this morning in a cafe in the main plaza in Segovia (difficult to think of a better setting for breakfast). It's really just toast with emulsified tomato paste and local ham. You get it everywhere in Spain and it's just delicious.

That brings me onto another lovely Spanish tradition which is that when you order stuff you generally get other stuff free. It might be churros with your morning coffee, orange juice which we got with this mornings breakfast or tapas we got with a beer and glass of wine today. You never know what your going to get but we love it.

Onto Segovia, which we would definitely come back to. The old city, built on a hill, is surrounded by a massive defensive wall dating back to the 12th century. Much of this is still intact and indeed the picture at the end of the blog has one on the tower gates in the background.

The centre of the old city is a beautiful plaza, but what dominates everything is the cathedral. This might give you an idea.

The cathedral is huge, very impressive and a complete contrast to Cordoba.

Despite how impressive the old city is the main attraction of Segovia for me though is the Roman aqueduct. Never seen anything like this. The Romans clearly understood the importance of clean water to build something like this. 167 arches and over 93' tall. What did the Romans do for us? This for a start!

Segovia is also famous for it's Alcazar, however whilst it's routes far back to the moors its now an 18th century re-build. We didn't have time to go and see it and reviews suggest the inside isn't so impressive. So we drove to a viewing point on the way out of Segovia this morning and it is pretty wow from a distance, as is Segovia cathedral. Terrible pictures, I'll do better next time 🤣

I'll leave you with one more picture of one of the nicest places we've stopped for an aperitif in a while.

More soon.