Toro to Tordesillas - 32 miles

Today I head for Tordesillas. Although it does not get mentioned by name in 'As I Walked Out…' the map in the preface of the book marks it out as where Laurie Lee suffered sunstroke before being taken to Valladolid. I think it fair to assume he had some input into that map so, written about or not, Tordesillas forms part of my route.

It is twenty-two miles to Tordesillas in a direct line from Toro. Lee headed east on a '…white dust road as straight as a canal..' whereas my white gravel track is taking me further south as today I am going to follow the arcing route of the Douro. At Toro I connect with the EuroVelo 1 cycle path, a lengthy route that goes from the Barents Sea coast in the north to Huelva on the southern Portuguese coast. For my part it conveniently provides a fifty-seven mile cycle from Toro to Valladolid via Tordesillas. 

I headed to the road by which I entered Toro yesterday, enjoyed again the view across the Douro plain from this high point, and then began my decent. Whereas yesterday my legs were burning on this hill, today it was my brakes as I squeezed hard to control my speed on the rough and narrow path that took me down to the main entry road and the new bridge across the Douro. I crossed and picked up the river track towards Tordesillas although not before doubling back to the old medieval bridge, now a pedestrian route into Toro but, until the beginning of this century, a main road to the town. It was then back along the rough and potholed track, shaded by trees and surrounded by the sound of countless unknown birds.

Setting off

Old Toro Bridge

Yesterday I paralleled the Douro river without seeing it. Today I am alongside it and I only have to look to my left and towards the low morning sun to see it sparkling among the trees. My route, a track of grass and poppy-lined white gravel, took me along the river and then across the fertile Douro plain. Away from roads and villages, it was a setting of peace and tranquility. I saw evidence of a time gone by: remnants of stone walls defining long forgetting pens, a collapsed mud house, the round stone carcass of a roofless windmill sitting like some silent sentinel in a field. I stopped to watch three birds of prey fighting it out high overhead but over what I never worked out. And I saw farm workers, hoes over shoulders, heading to the fields as if the clock had been turned back a century. With the peace and with no deadline to chase It was a wonderfully relaxed ride.

I had aimed to stop at the village of Villafranca de Duero for a coffee and food but its streets were silent save for the shrill cry of swallows that swooped past me as I cycled through. The afternoon was spent on a long section through forests of small Spanish oaks and then fields of vines on a track that was varying degrees of stony, providing varying degrees of shaking, or of soft sand which proved skittish and sometimes impossible to cycle. I was glad to get onto hard road and to stop for coffee at Torecilla de la Abadesa even though I was only three miles from Tordesillas. It was a basic and dingy establishment and most definitely 'a local bar for local people' but the sandwich and coffee were welcoming.

The rough and scrappy track I followed into Tordesillas kept the town out of view until I was a mile away. It sat on its hill with its line of red roofs and the white tower of the sixteenth century Santa Maria church standing above them, still the town's most prominent building from afar - I am assuming it is the church Lee refers to in his book as being '…like a fountain..' - although sadly it now shares the skyline with electricity pylons. 

Shortly after, I was walking Tordesillas' narrow and confining cobbled streets with their houses of red brick and pastel coloured rendering and everything silent until you passed through that bubble of noise that was the small Plaza Mayor, after which it was silence once again. After sorting my accommodation I went off to explore. That white church tower tops a town with a lot of history. It was a residence of the Catholic Monarchs and there was a royal palace here until the eighteenth century. It was also the location of the signing of the Treaty of Tordesillas, significant in Spanish history for deciding how the new world discovered by Columbus would be divided between Spain and Portugal. All this I learned in the Treaty Museum located in the palace where the treaty was signed and in the adjoining patio where large models of major buildings in the region of Castile and León were on display. I wandered further, saw the town's medieval bridge and enjoyed a beer in the colonnaded seventeenth century Plaza Mayor. It was seven when I decided to head back to my room to decide my plans for the evening, just as the shops seemed to be opening and those silent streets were starting to fill.

Santa Maria

Plaza Mayor

Plaza Mayor