Sepulveda: time travel

There are many ways to live and enjoy a city; so many, it could be said, as the limits or goals that the traveler wants to put in his imagination.

It will not be the first, nor the last time I intend to seduce you with the charm of a Castilian villa, noble and ancient, through whose streets history and stories flow with charming determination: Sepulveda.

But on this occasion, I grant myself the role of Mephistopheles, with the desire to tempt you with the vision of a country Sepulveda, of a Sepulveda always alive but simple; In short, with a Sepulveda permanently anchored in the details.

Because the details are important: they are the salt that joins the dough where the special bread of memories is molded.

Therefore, it is not difficult to walk through the medieval streets of Sepúlveda, and find stores that exhibit those typical pottery products, beautiful works made with those ancient pottery techniques that date back to the Neolithic and that constitute, in addition, part of their Celtiberian heritage .

Typical also and a luxury for the senses, especially in these times when the large commercial areas are practically overwhelming the small and medium-sized business, are the markets that rise in the heat of its Plaza Mayor, a practice they have been practicing, from Saturday to Saturday, since purely medieval times and where the traveler can taste a multitude of products from the land, freshly collected.

There are still, in the narrow alleys, memories that call nostalgia. Like that notice of a fine of one hundred pesetas - the national currency, before entering the European Union and starting to operate in euros - for making 'minor and major waters', that is, for urinating or defecating in the street, which offer a quaint note of a time, where any place was good if the need tightened.

But Sepúlveda is also, with deserved fame, a gastronomic city, to the point that visits by King Emeritus, Don Juan Carlos de Borbón, were frequent to one of the best restaurants in all of Segovia and its Community: the Casa Paulino Restaurant .

Paulino, now retired, proudly tells everyone who wants to listen to him, how the king frequently went by helicopter to eat at his restaurant, landing at the top of the town, next to the Romanesque church of El Salvador, the oldest one the one that sepulvedanos have as a real treasure, which it really is.

Another guarantee of fascinating adventure is its proximity to the so-called Sickles of the Duraton River, a spectacular natural space, in whose ravines the raptors dominate and whose caves lived, in the times of the Muslim invasion, an eremitic fever similar to that one that made famous the Leon area of ​​El Bierzo.

In Sepúlveda, part of the old Jewish quarter also survives, because like many other towns and cities of rancid ancestry, the Three Book Cultures lived together here: Christians, Jews and Saracens.

Perhaps that is why its inhabitants still remain faithful to the ancient tradition of keeping patios and windows flowery, which give their streets a special color.

In short: a trip to Sepulveda is more than a trip to Tradition; It constitutes, I can assure you, a true time travel, where the traveler can experience a multitude of singular and true sensations.

NOTICE: Both the text and the accompanying photographs are my exclusive intellectual property.

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