On the drive from Barcelona to Bilbao, there must be a few dozen towns for which the romantic traveler longs; these are the cute little several-hundred-year-old villages with some amount of historical significance, and it would take weeks to drive this route and stop at all of them. Of course, on a similar 600 kilometer drive (San Francisco to Los Angeles on Highway 5), where would we find a single one? After a few days in Barcelona, knowing that our near-term time was limited (kids’ school would commence in a couple of weeks), we rented a car and hit the road, heading West toward the Atlantic.
We made three meaningful stops on the all day drive to Bilbao, the first being Montblanc (http://www.montblancmedieval.cat/en/), about 100 kilometers west of Barcelona. Montblanc is a medieval town in the Catalonia province of Tarragona, with the village supported by “Catalonia’s finest piece of military architecture,” according to our guidebook. This likely refers to the walled-in city, built in the 14th century. When wandering the interesting roads and alleys within the walls, the gothic church of Santa Maria in the center of the town was a quick but worthy respite. A 60 minute Montblanc diversion sufficed for our first tourist adventure, and our first hard goods purchase in Spain—a wooden toy gun that shoots corks (at sisters) when it is being used, which has been almost never, since that day.
Only about 10 kilometers further west is the Monastery of Santa Maria de Poblet, part of the “Cistercian triangle”, or the three Cistercian (an order of catholic monks and nuns) monasteries. Besides their religious function, these monasteries “helped to consolidate power in Catalonia after it had been recaptured from the Moors,” notes our guidebook. Monestir de Poblet was built beginning in the 12th century (when all three monasteries were founded). Unfortunately, we arrived here around “tired and hungry and cranky time” and nothing really solved the problems, with the heat not helping; you know the kind of heat that causes a fairly sweaty back but with the addition of a backpack there is no hope? (“How hot was it today?…Oh, it was a half strapper,” meaning so hot that there was no way you would put both back pack straps over your shoulders or else the back of your shirt would be drenched.) So we really just took a look at the famous monastery from the outside and decided not to pay to enter…but we were there, right? Does this count as visiting? Please?
Further west, and approaching dinnertime, we exited in Tudela, a town of 35,000 on the southeastern side of the Navarra region. The drive from Barcelona, west to Bilbao, runs across Catalonia, into Aragon (through the capital of Aragon—Zaragoza, named after Caesar Augustus), then through Navarra, La Rioja, and finally the Basque country; for children keeping track, we accomplished 5 of Spain’s 17 communities in one day. Tudela is the “second city” and apparently a commercial center within Navarra (no commercial activity was really evident; it felt like a much smaller town). It is also known for a 13th century bridge over the Ebro River with 17 irregular arches. We planted ourselves in Tudela’s town square, a classic central meeting space, built at the end of the 17th century. The square, called Plaza de los Fueros, was used as a bullring at one time and bullfight scenes are painted on some of the surrounding building facades. Dinner in the square was fair, in terms of food quality, but if we had more time to search, I suspect we would have found better cuisine, due to the city’s size and what we saw through restaurant windows as we scouted the streets on our way to the car. The ambiance in the square on a Tuesday was fantastic: beautiful dark skinned and smartly dressed locals seated at cafes chatting and smoking (making them at least slightly less beautiful and less smart), kids running around, kicking soccer balls, the slow and relaxed pace of life evident, sun setting over the old bullring square. While it was midweek, we were surprised that the square was fairly empty by about 10 p.m. as per the photo, given the late hours in Spain. Still, as in the U.S., the larger cities follow this rule more closely.
