A few days in Plasencia

Ahahahaha so much for my resolution to post more this year! I promised to tell you about my trip to Plasencia, and that was back in April. But it was a fun trip, so I shall enjoy revisiting it for you. 

As I mentioned in my last post, Plasencia's not on the high-speed rail line. We always stay in the area of Sol metro station in Madrid, because it's good for the nightlife but also good for Atocha railway station, which is a major hub. In the past we've always got the AVE, but this time we were on a regional service, and working out which gates we needed to go through was more complicated than we'd expected. Luckily the staff at the passenger assistance desk were able to help, and we arrived at Plasencia on Friday afternoon without any problems. We decided to walk from the station to the hotel, but on reflection should probably have taken a taxi. It wasn't that far, but it was uphill with cases.

Inside the parador.

The hotel made up for it. As I mentioned in my last post, it's a former monastery. To be exact, it's 15th century, right in the old town. The walls are stone, greyish and feeling very sturdy, but the coolness was welcome in the heat. It was decorated in dark wooden furniture, heavy iron and brass lights, and religious paintings, in keeping with the character of the place.

Nice big room. Not shown: the statue of the Virgin over the bed. *Offputting*.
Which led Mr Robot to relay the old Catholic joke: What's foreplay?
Putting a tea towel over the saints first.

And we got an extra surprise on arrival as there were banners and bunting over the streets, stalls being set up, and a giant moveable dragon right outside the doors of our hotel. What was going on? It turned out the weekend of our arrival, the town was having a 'medieval fair', something that wasn't in any guide, but we were very grateful for. It was mostly artisan food and drink, plus a few other local products. For our first couple of nights we ate all manner of barbecued meats and vegetables, hog roast and sausages, from the market, and stocked up on sausages to bring home.

The dragon paraded through the fair several times a day.

I'll spare you a day-by-day breakdown of our trip, but it was super. We always avoid hotel breakfasts and go out into town for coffee for Mr Robot and something for me – in Spain, I usually have hot chocolate and some sort of bun or churros. It's great seeing places wake up, and local people going about their business. Plasencia's quite small, but the town square is lined with café-bars and restaurants. And Plasencia's a place that does proper tapas.

Let me explain.

You don't order tapas. You order a drink, and a very small snack comes for free with your drink (none of this 'sharing plate' nonsense). That's your tapa. I'm not sure how it works for vegetarians or people with allergies; our only real food issue is that I don't like really fishy things, but the joy of tapas is that if you do get one you don't like – anchovy, for me – you can just cram it down. It's small enough not to be a problem. We had great fun going from bar to bar. Tapas highlights included a very small crab brioche, strong cheese kept in olive oil, migas (breadcrumbs) and revolconas, a local dish of potato mashed with paprika and tiny little bits of ham. 

Pitarra wine. And yes, we brought a bottle home with us.

One bar highlight was Pitarra del Gordo ('the fat man's pitarra'). I assumed from the sign that a pitarra was a barrel, but we googled it and it turned out it is a clay jar. Making wine in clay jars is a very old technique, and very rarely done nowadays outside this region (it is being revived in parts of Portugal, just over the border). When it is done, it's usually kept by the makers. Did, we asked the barman, he sell pitarra wine? He did! And we drank a lot of it. The other highlight was Chicken Abadia, billing itself as 'Plasencia's only medieval bar'. It was sure to be either terrible or brilliant, and happily it turned out to be the latter, with the world's happiest landlord, who also did all the excellent cooking, singing along to his classic rock playlist. The name of the bar come from Spanish slang for male genitalia; he basically called his establishment Cock Abbey. What time did it close, we asked. "Eleven, twelve... one, two, I don't know, it's like a pirate ship!" he told us. Consider us a pair of very jolly rogers.

We were in Chicken Abadia on our last night when French air traffic control
decided to have some fun… we got home okay in the end

It wasn't all food and drink, I should point out. We went round the two-in-one cathedral – the old one was begun in the very late 1100s; by 1498 they'd decided to replace it but from what I could see, took the old one down in stages to put up bits of the new one. When the money for the new one ran out, part of the old one still stood, and now there are two very distinct parts, with some very visible joins. 

I'm not joking when I say you can see the joins.

The ethnographic and textile museum shows the traditional lifestyle of the area, with a special focus on the fabrics – from bedding to folk dress to religious vestments. 

Most of the floats paraded during Holy week are kept a former church right by the parador. Some of them were extremely impressive; the figures on The Last Supper one are life-size. It takes a lot of men to carry that one!

And we walked. There are all sorts of picturesque routes around the town, so we walked out to the countryside, up to a peacock-filled park, all over the place. 

Looking back I see we were only there for five days, but I have so many good memories it feels like much, much longer. It is a fantastic town.