After our solitary visit to Castillo de Peracense, we continued on to Albarracín, which is located in the province of Teruel in Aragón. Albarracín has everything I could ever want in a Spanish town: a castle, cave paintings, and Roman ruins. Although, the cave paintings and roman ruins are not in the town, per se, but they are quite nearby.
As what now seems typical for this region, before we reached the town, we drove without actually being able to place our destination within the landscape. However, before long, we were winding our way along the final approach, a narrow road with the Guadalaviar river on one side and towering cliffs on the other. We went through a tunnel and, bam, there we were—in the town of Albarracín. The first thing I saw on the other side of the tunnel was a small restaurant with a terrace tucked into an overhanging rock. (We would later eat there at my request.) It turns out that we had actually driven under part of the historic town, which was constructed on the steep hill above the river. As it was getting dark, we continued past the steep town rising above us and turned toward the modern section where we would find the campground.
This was my first experience at an established campground in Spain. I found it similar yet completely different than most campgrounds I’ve been to in the U.S. First, the similarities: The layout consists of a road that circulates around the designated camping spots, which seems to be pretty standard in many places, and a central building containing a bathroom. Okay, now, while not a much longer list, the differences are incredibly profound. First of all, there was a restaurant, not a couple of vending machines, not a snack-bar, but a full-on sit down and receive your food restaurant—so Spanish. Second, the building housing the bathrooms also had a laundry room and a place for about 10 people to wash dishes, and the bathrooms had showers that you didn’t have to pay for. Third, the campground has opening and closing hours: The gates close at 11:30 pm and open again at 6 am. And, lastly, it was much louder in the evening that I am used to in the U.S (which honestly, could be said of anywhere here), though I suppose this was mostly due to being near the restaurant. Fortunately, I bring my earplugs everywhere I go.
The next morning, we went into the old part of the town, climbing the steep cobblestone hills, past an exceptional blue house, and exploring the narrow labyrinthine streets with medieval houses that leaned over the passageways almost blocking out the sky. While the old part of the town seems expansive, it’s actually quite small. It takes almost no time to cross it, but the fun lies in the fact that there are probably 100+ different ways to cross it—up some narrow stairs, down an alley, under an archway—it’s live puzzle solving with a million tiny features to hunt out. At the highest point lies the castle and the remaining, fortifying walls that encircle the upper reaches of the hill. After just a couple hours exploring, we continued on to the main destination for the day—cave paintings.
In addition to castles (and dolmens), Spain is chock full of cave or rock paintings or “pinturas rupestres.” Of course, I imagine this is well-known as Spain is home to the world-famous Altamira cave paintings, which you cannot see in person (you can see a reproduction in the Archaeological Museum in Madrid). However, there are probably thousands of other paintings located in Spain of varying quality, which is why the country is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site for such paintings.
I had been itching to see some of these paintings since before my feet hit the dry Iberian soil. Needless to say, I was uncontainably excited like a small puppy (but with much less spontaneous peeing). Now, my partner had tried to temper my excitement, I think in an attempt to keep me from being disappointed, by telling me that the only times he had seen paintings, he hadn’t actually seen paintings. His parents had also told him that when they were younger and went with guides to see paintings, they didn’t see them until the guides threw water on them, which let’s be honest, is a terrible thing to do to those paintings, but it was a different time. However, like many a puppy, my excitement could not be tempered. I think the only time my partner has seen me so excited was when I first caught a glimpse of a puffin in Iceland and saw penguins and whales in Argentina.
The Neolithic, Levantine paintings are located in a protected area called Pinares de Rodeno and spread throughout a rocky pine forest. Each set of paintings is tucked beneath overhanging rocks, called “abrigos,” and are enclosed by protective cages with a little panel providing an outline of what you can find on the wall and a description. You access them by hiking the mostly easy terrain and looking for the orientation signs or the red metal protective cages along the rock walls.
In the end, there was no reason to temper my excitement. Before long, my sweaty hands clutched the first set of metal bars protecting their inhabitant—a long panel of wild bulls, the whitish outline standing out quite well on the reddish-orange rock. I pressed my face into the metal cage, staring at the image created between 7,000 and 4,500 years ago by someone who was like me yet so completely and utterly different at the same time. I couldn’t wait to see more. We followed the trail, searching the caged wall for images of bulls, horses, even a more-or-less anatomically correct archer.
Searching for these painted animals awoke my inner explorer that I was afraid had been slowly dying and ultimately killed off in Mascún canyon. After viewing the second-to-last set of paintings on our list, we followed a faint trail leading up a small valley into the pines where we had seen some people coming down. We thought that perhaps we could connect to the last set of paintings without returning to the main trail. Instead, the trail led to the rocky top of the hill, where we found a collection of ceramic pots strewn about the landscape. Pinares de Rodeno, being full of pines, had been used to collect sap for generations, ending actually not really that long ago. Almost every single tree we saw in the park bore long vertical scars in their bark from this history. The sap was collected in these ceramic pots, which we had found broken and discarded among the rocks.
After our Neolithic hunt, we drove to Rome, or rather, part of the Roman Empire. This area is also home to a masterful example of Roman engineering: an aqueduct running 25 km (about 15 miles) from Albarracín to the town of Cella. This aqueduct isn’t like the towering showpiece of Segovia, but it is no less magnificent; it’s beauty lies primarily in its construction, as much of it is underground with portions following canyon walls. The first part we visited was at the end of a somewhat overgrown dirt road traversing farm fields. You can hike there, but due to the late hour, we drove. It was one lane with high grass in the center that brushed the underside of our rental car, fortunately creating more noise than damage. Happily, we didn’t meet another car because there was no way to cross, which would have resulted in a stand-off of who was willing to back up the entire length of the road.
From the parking lot at the end, we walked up hill a short distance, 5 minutes or so, to an entrance to the underground aqueduct. Here, you could actually go down into the aqueduct, walk along the tunnels, and see the carved-out walls, including the small depressions on the sides where workers would have placed oil lamps to light their excavations. When these particular portions of the aqueduct were re-discovered, there was still one of these lamps in its proper place within the tunnel.
We walked along about 100 to 200 meters of tunnel, exiting where it got muddy and full of water and wished we had brought our rubber boots. Then, we walked uphill to view some of the openings into the tunnel from above, which is how they constructed the tunnels to ensure that they were at the ideal location and angle for the water to flow correctly—neither too fast nor too slow. On the way down, I realized the rock we were walking down was covered with marine fossils, evidence of when the Iberian Peninsula was underwater.
The next section of the aqueduct we visited was off the road toward Albarracín in a canyon, about a 20-to-30-minute walk from the parking lot. In this narrow canyon, el Barranco de los Burros, the aqueduct circumnavigates the walls of the canyon. You can walk up a rocky trail at the end of the canyon, enter the aqueduct to the left or the right, look through the “windows” carved into the canyon wall, and see the aqueduct on the other side. Within these tunnels, we also saw the same depressions in the wall we had seen earlier, but instead of oil lamps, in one, we saw a small nest filled with eggs. We climbed back down from the aqueduct and walked calmly through the pink light signaling the end of the day. Since that morning, we had seen town of Albarracín with architecture from different eras, Neolithic cave paintings and sap collection pots from more recent history, a Roman aqueduct, and fossils from the Jurassic period and, while not in order, had seemingly traveled through the entire history of the peninsula.
