Well, not exactly. We went for a day out and visited the Roman and medieval sites of the Cinco Villas or Five Towns. It's a long drive from Jaca: according to Google Maps 1 hour and 44 minutes. There are two stretches of motorway which relieve the narrow wiggly roads a bit, but it's 118 km to Sadaba, and when you get there it's not very easy to find somewhere for a cup of coffee. We had our coffee and set off for the first of our Roman ruins, the mausoleum of the Attilius family. Just out of town, along a stony track.
First we found a thistle the size of a triffid.
Then the mausoleum:
It's a facade in a field, surrounded by a wire fence. Second century Roman.
From the mausoleum we looked back at Sadaba and saw the castle. How could we have missed it? So we returned to town and parked by a spider.
Sadaba castle
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How could we have missed it?
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After the castle we went to Sadaba's only restaurant and had a nice leisurely meal, then headed out towards Uncastillo where we understood the Roman ruins were. I followed signs at a village called Layana; the man in the bar told us we couldn't miss it; the track didn't go anywhere else, and he was right.
We found a lot more than we expected.
First the last remaining columns of a porticoed street.
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| From the walkway inside |
The site known as the City of Bañales - they really don't know what it was called, but they have found a lot there.
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| Bath house |
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| The forum? |
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| the bath house from a distance. |
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| columns of the aqueduct |
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| We saw about 30 columns |
Finally, hot and tired, we went back via Sos del Rey Católico, birthplace of Fernando. It's a lovely monumental town, where in the year 1984 the director Luis García Berlanga made the film La Vaquilla. The monument to him, or to the event, is what you can see above and below; the man in bronze in his bronze director's chair, in a circle of chairs, each with the name of one of the actors from the film. There was a medieval market going on in the town.
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| View from the house where King Fernando was born. |
This shopping centre offered bags to put your wet umbrella in!
Life-sized Roman soldiers in the airport.
Look carefully at the gargoyle
Tourists with umbrellas, with plastic ponchos, on open-topped buses getting very wet. Massive puddles.
The Louvre is the old royal palace. It's just amazingly big! We were there for five hours looking at exhibits. As a palace it was very impressive. I was thinking; if Mary, Queen of Scots lived there during her time in France, the Scottish palaces must have been a real let-down!
