Today, my travel proposal aims to test whether we are truly aware, when we passionately embrace the challenge of personal and cultural advancement that we can ultimately call travel.
Often, we choose destinations cleverly suggested by travel agencies, who know the desire they awaken by associating the supposedly most appealing elements to tempt us to visit a particular place.
But these same agencies rarely offer complete packages where the truly interesting aspect lies precisely in those details, in those hidden stories that, as the great theorists of Surrealism would say, teach us to discover something as disconcerting as those other worlds that exist within this one, with which we coexist daily, without fully grasping their value and importance.
To help you understand this idea a little better, I'd like to invite you on a brief, though hopefully sufficient, stroll through one of Spain's most interesting medieval towns, viewed from multiple perspectives: tourist, cultural, adventurous, gastronomic, and many more.
I'm referring to that resilient yet melancholic Castilian time capsule, already mentioned in the universal poem of 'El Cid'—who, of course, witnessed his passage on his historic exile—which for centuries was one of the most important cities in that distant no-man's-land, considered the Duero frontier: San Esteban de Gormaz.
In San Esteban de Gormaz, they'll be sold a tour of its main artistic, historical, and cultural landmarks, such as the Romanesque churches of San Miguel and Virgen del Rivero, the remains of the old gates and walls, and also the solitude of a castle with crumbling walls, where in the off-season swifts and Egyptian vultures nest among the weathered stones, disturbing the eternal sleep of its legion of ghosts.
But they'll find hardly any references when, practicing the noble art of strolling—that same thing that has always been known by the kindly name of "wandering the streets"—they come across curious details that surprise them and that, in fact, they didn't expect.
One of the most striking examples, perhaps, is when immersed in the adventure of wandering aimlessly and leisurely through narrow alleyways that, despite the passage of time, have not yet lost their charming medieval character. In this architecture, whose foundations seem to sway at the mercy of time, one might observe the presence of discordant elements that open the door to another reality.
This architecture, far removed from any aesthetic considerations, remains functionally rural, and its facades display fragments of numerous Roman-era tombstones used as infill.
Fragmented details, whose vision transports us to those other worlds within this one, as we said at the beginning, that still speak to us, that still invite us to speculate, to think about those who came before us, and to realize that, in the end, everything prevails, even those prayers, beliefs, gifts, and philosophies that we think are obsolete, but which, when observed objectively, differ little or not at all from our own biases, lines of thought, and ritual practices that we continue to perform in our daily lives.
NOTICE: Both the text and the accompanying photographs are my exclusive intellectual property and are therefore subject to my copyright.
