Spain Kingdom of Castile

In a new book on Spain, Christopher Howse sets out to see the country as a pilgrim, celebrating the glories of its ancient churches and shrines. Here he takes a walk into the hills around Segovia. he lost glory of Old Castile and its surviving pleasures – food being one – wait to be sampled on a morning's walk from the walled city of Segovia over to Zamarramala. It's only a mile away, and the prospect looks bare, but there's a lot to see. So leave the café chairs in the Plaza Mayor on the high ridge of the little city, and plunge down the 72 shady steps to the left of the 16th-century Hotel los Linajes, down past the Romanesque church of San Pedro de los Picos, where grass grows on the roof, and through the fat-turreted Puerta de Santiago in the city walls. Open countryside begins. The village of Zamarramala is due north, so the sun toasts your right cheek on the way there. Even in June, though, you can see snow on the peaks of the Gredos beyond the ripening corn. As a Victorian diplomat remarked of Morocco, Spain is "a cold country with hot sun". The populated plateau here is almost at the altitude of Snowdon, and the hardy people say their climate is Nueve meses de invierno, y tres de infierno – "Nine months' winter and three an inferno." Below the rocky outcrop on which the Alcázar of Segovia sits, with its improbably pointed turrets, you cross the clear, cold River Eresma. Someone 100 years ago with infinite patience built an iron footbridge, held together with hundreds, thousands of rivets, beside the ancient stone arches of the road bridge. There's a parapet of wrought iron, with railings like the grilles round saints' shrines. It's tempting to lean here and contemplate the water that runs to join the Eresma and the Clamores, the streams that embrace Segovia. They run north to the great Duero, which all year makes its slow 500-mile journey to the Atlantic. From that ocean seafood makes its way uphill, through to the most remote town, in vans by night. So here in landlocked Castile, on this road to Zamarramala, past the neat kitchen gardens, we reach a window from which lobsters in a tank, their claws bound up with rubber bands, wave their antennae in frustration. On the menu, they cost 10 times a full portion of pig's ears. This is the Mesón San Marcos, the first of a triangle of mesones that shape this walk. A mesón is an inn, from the same Latin word that gives us mansion.