The church of San Martin is one of several Romanesque churches in the city. I made special mention of it in my journal so it must be nice, but I didn't mention why I mentioned it, so I don't have much to say about it.

The Plaza Mayor is located in front of the cathedral, and is as expected a main meeting place for the locals, as well as the main eating place for tourists. We dined at an unexceptional cafe on the square with the rest of the (sparse) tourist crowd. As any foodie knows, Spain is the new France, the leader in culinary skill and inventiveness that grabs all the attention. And that's clearly true at the top spots. But Spain seems well behind France and Italy, and even England, in casual dining; in France and Italy for example you're virtually assured of a great meal anywhere, while Spain's mid-tier restaurants and cafes can be pretty awful.



After lunch we walked around the city's narrow streets until we eventually arrived at every tourist's second destination, the Alcazar.

The interior is fairly standard, huge but unadorned. The figures in the photo below are on top of various floats that are carried through the streets during Holy Week. These festivals in other parts of Spain are world famous like the running of the bulls or the tomato throwing craziness, but here's it's pretty staid.

We then entered the city and headed for the gargantuan cathedral, built in the sixteenth century with obvious Moorish influences. Because it's right in the center of the city it's almost impossible to get a photo of its outsized proportions although there's a side view from a distance pictured here (not ours) that takes in the massive bell tower as well.

We stopped first at my insistence at the Church of Vera Cruz down in the valley below Segovia. The church is an eleventh century church built by the Knights Templar, and is characteristically semi-round. I've had a fascination with the Knights Templar ever since I read Umberto Eco's Focault's Pendulum, and will always go out of my way to see a Templar church even though they're rarely interesting. I'm not sure why this book didn't spark a huge boom in Templar interest, as it's vastly superior to the silly Da Vinci Files, which basically rehashes the same plot as Focault's Pendulum. But since the Da Vinci book and movie I'm sure the lonely little Templar church is lonely no more.



There were some monasteries and convents in the general area as well, plus a mint where they converted the gold from the Latin American colonies into coins, but it's mostly ruins now, as you can see from the area around Somchai. The city of Segovia is draped along the hill behind him.

119. Segovia

We then moved on to the main event, the ancient city of Segovia. On my high school Spanish class trip I remember Segovia being the trip highlight, partly because of its location, a walled city with a fairytale castle and domineering cathedral perched high above the surrounding valley, and partly because we took a train here from Madrid, and I discovered that you could open the train doors while it was moving.



Segovia was a major city in Roman times, and the population at that time of 50,000 is about the same as the current city 2,000 years later. Ah, progress. It subsequently became a Visigoth and Moorish city, but achieved its current look when it was reconquered by the Christians of Castile in the twelfth century.