Alquezar

Today we had to drive to Huesca, so in the early afternoon, after dropping David off at the bus station to catch a bus to Barcelona, we went east to Alquezar. It poured with rain! Even so, the village of Alquezar is extraordinary. The area is the Somontano de Barbastro. There are lots of vineyards around, mostly just showing dry sticks at the moment. You have to drive 18 km off the main road, past various little villages, then up a steepish ramp. There is a car park with lots of ancient olive trees in it. You walk down well-made cobbled streets and suddenly you have the collegiate-fortress before you.

It's got this amazing chasm just opposite; in fact there are cliffs all over the place. We climbed up the ramp to the fortress and were given a quick explanation  of what we saw by a priest who kept saying: "the guide will be here in a minute." He told us what the capitels of the columns in the cloister represented. Romanesque, by the same "Master of Aguero" who carved the capitels in San Juan de la Peña and some in Jaca cathedral.                                           

I'm not sure if my favourite is Noah's Ark, with the birds lying on their backs on thr roof of the ark.

Or the sacrifice of Isaac with what looks like a donkey on a spit.

Home to Jaca and it hasn't rained at all here.

It's plum blossom time again. Trees all over the town are covered in pink blossom.

Roman Zaragoza

We wanted to go to Merida in Extremadura this week. It's where there are important Roman remains, and the journey is about nine hours by car. We couldn't do it, we had to be in Zaragoza, so we went to see a bit of late-Roman; the crypt of the church of Santa Engracia. It's right in the commercial centre of the city. On the outside it looks like this:

And in the crypt they've got these two fourth century Roman sarcophagi. They are for various martyrs: called innumerable but actually eighteen, I think. The biggest names are Engracia and Lamberto.

Autumn snow

Yesterday we drove home from Zaragoza. The views on the way through the mountain pass of Monrepos were striking; the peaks of the Pyrenees had their first snow. My photos are all speckly because they are taken through a dirty windscreen.

It's amazing how small the mountains look in photos when they seem so enormous from the car!

Clouds

Yesterday afternoon the sky looked spectacular from my house.

Looking south-west

Peg-legged angel

An old photo of my favourite Romanesque capitel, the peg-legged angel. Nobody knows why an angel has an artificial leg. Maybe he's not an angel but a man halfway transformed into an eagle....just an idea-I keep thinking about it!

October

It's mid-October and still quite warm. The leaves are changing colours but we don't have any spectacular views of autumn changes yet. There's a mushroom growing on my front grass; I've no idea if it's edible or not.
I gave up on the poinsettia; I couldn't keep up the discipline of  putting it in the dark and taking it out at the right times.
It's got to rain. There's a drought and the reservoirs are low. They've said for Thursday.
Last week I took a group of Japanese tourists on a little guided tour in Jaca-mostly the cathedral. They were very apreciative, and knew about Romanesque architecture, but there's an interesting cultural gap; although they could do the architectural bit, they (naturally) had little or no knowledge of the Biblical characters and stories which for most westerners form part of their background-at least that was the case in the past.