Brucato's Go To Portugal & Spain 2022: Ah, Siesta!

Ah, Siesta!

Today has been a pretty slow and steady kind of day! We were up around 7:30 am (although tomorrow if I wake up then and feel like going back to sleep, that is exactly what I am going to do!). Showered and dressed and ready to go somewhere around 9:30-ish, even though just about everything here – from stores to museums to Cathedrals don’t open until at least 10 am.

Lots and I mean lots, of fish...

How that market did smell...

We did have an interesting experience, though, trying to get the dryer to … DRY! I did a small load of wash, as something to experiment with – put it into the dryer, figured out how to turn it on, and in 40 minutes – the clothes were still as wet as when I put them in! Obviously, heating of some sort needed to be included in the process. With help from R and the Bosch Serie 4 manual that came up on line, we did figure out how to add some heat! And, an hour or so later, voila! We actually had non-air-dried clean clothes! There truly are more settings, though, than you can shake a stick at! Why do “they” have to make this so complicated? There are something like 4 different “dry” settings – one if you really want it dry; a second if you want it “almost” dry but want to complete the process on a hanger or drying cupboard, a third if you want it partially dry in order to iron it completely (Oh! And we actually have a FULL-SIZE ironing board here in the apartment!!) and a fourth that I can’t remember that was probably something like SO dry it now no longer fits or something!

We did need to pick up a few more supplies for the apartment, as well as get some cash for the family to spend. We walked across the walled part of the city to find a Santander Bank, and while their first ATM wasn’t working, their second was. So now we’ve got EUROS! Yeah!

GREAT walls!

Our very FIRST Verraco this trip!

While we were looking over the lovely plaza where the bank was, and R was taking photos of a lovely fountain, he actually found a Verraco – a prehistoric stone statue of a pig. I am inserting here what Wikipedia (that source of ALL knowledge and information!) says about them

The Bulls of Guisando, in El Tiemblo, Castile and León, Spain.

Verraco in Mingorría, Castile and León, Spain.

Verraco located in the Plaza mayor of Villanueva del Campillo. It is the Vettones's largest zoomorphic sculpture found until now in the Iberian Peninsula.

Verracos in Villatoro, Castile and León, Spain.

Mule of Villardiegua de la Ribera, Castile and León, Spain.

Verraco in Ciudad Rodrigo, Castile and León, Spain.

The verracos (Spanish: verraco; Portuguese: berrão; literally 'boar'), in the Iberian Peninsula, are the Vettones's granite megalithic monuments, sculptures of animals as found in the west of the Iberian meseta – the high central plain of the Iberian peninsula – in the Spanish province of Ávila, Salamanca, Segovia, Zamora, Cáceres, Ourense and the Portuguese provinces of Beira Baixa, Beiras e Serra da Estrela, Douro and Terras de Trás-os-Montes. Over 400 verracos have been identified.

The Spanish word verraco normally refers to boars, and the sculptures are sometimes called verracos de piedra (pigs of stone) to distinguish them from live animals. The stone verracos appear to represent not only pigs but also other animals. Some have been identified as bulls, and the village of El Oso, Ávila, named for "the Bear", has a verraco which supposedly represents a bear. Their dates range from the mid-fourth to first centuries BC. There are some similar zoomorphicmonument markers in lands of Poland from the same period or older. ^[1]

Though they were perhaps not confined to a single usage, the verracos were an essential part of the landscape of the Vettones, one of the Pre-Roman peoples of the Iberian Peninsula. It has generally been assumed, from their high visibility in their original open fields surroundings, that these sculptures had some protective religious significance, whether guarding the security of livestock or as funerary monuments (some of them bear Latin funerary inscriptions). The verracos are particularly numerous too in the vicinity of the walled Celtiberian communities that Romans had called oppida.

So far, we have found five here in Avila (including the one that some builders are using as a work bench!) and tomorrow, after we head out of town, we will be looking for more! (I tend to think of them as Etruscan tombs; R is not amused at that thought!)

We then headed to the Avila Cathedral to tour. It was a very nice Cathedral, but as we both talked about, once you’ve been to Toledo, you’ve seen the King of Cathedrals and nothing else comes even close! Oh well! Additionally, it had to be at least 20 degrees colder inside than outside, so that by the time we finished, I was really freezing!

Another Monstrance!

Baptism font

High Altar

Being about lunch-time after this, we settled in the main square (where yesterday I was trying to pretend I wasn’t going the wrong way on a no-way street…) for salads. I got a tomato salad, which was good, but R had a Cesar salad which was AMAZING! (We may even return there so that I can have one for myself, and can leave R’s food alone…). After that, we headed back to the flat to try the Siesta Experience. But first, we made a reservation with the restaurant downstairs for 8 pm tonight. I was first to get to the incredibly comfy couch, so R had to settle for the double bed … and even though our luncheon beverages included nothing stronger than sparkling water and a Coke for me, we were both out like lights! Neither of us is certain how long we slept, but we came in somewhere around 2 pm and it is now almost 5:30 pm, and I don’t remember too much in between! Maybe this Siesta idea isn’t so bad after all!