Settling In, part 3

We had some weekend adventures in those early days. Mike wanted to see Cuenca, an unusual town southeast of Madrid. The point of interest there was the Casas Colgadas, a group of old houses that hung just on the edge of the cliff on which the town was built. Mike studied the Fodor’s guide, which was becoming our travel Bible for Spain. It was perfect for people with a car, because it provided a route to major destinations for visitors and always described other interesting sites nearby, in case you had the time—and we usually did.

In the case of Cuenca, Mike found that there was a place twenty miles north of the town that he thought might be worth a side trip—Ciudad Encantada, “a series of large and fantastic rock formations erupting in a landscape of pines,” according to the book. “That’ll be good for the kids,” he said. “They can run around and climb on the rocks.” He plotted our route using the Campsa maps, a spiral-bound atlas published by the Campsa gasoline chain. The maps were extremely helpful—detailed and up to date, with a section in the back (in Spanish, of course) listing every town in alphabetical order and every tourist destination in each town, along with restaurants and hotels. Our landlord had kindly left the atlas for us, and it was invaluable.

We set out for Cuenca on a Saturday morning, knowing that we had to be at our destination before lunch. “There’s a museum of abstract art in the Casas Colgadas,” Mike said. “It says it’s open till two, then closes for lunch and doesn’t reopen till four. If we get there by one we can see the museum, have some lunch, and go to Ciudad Encantada—it’s outside, so there won’t be any closing time.”

The day was sunny and warm, and the ride was easy. We had gotten used to following the pink “Casco Antiguo” signs that pointed to the old town of every village, so we picked our way through the small, winding, uphill streets to the uppermost part of the town. We found a place to park the Mercedes and walked past charmingly crooked old houses to the Casas Colgadas (hanging houses). “Oh, Mom, they look like they’re ready to fall!” Lisa said, seeing the way the houses really hung over the cliff, perched above a gorge.

“It gives me the creeps,” Julie said. “Are we going inside?”

“There’s a small museum here,” Mike said. “Let’s just go in and see what they have.” As rickety and antiquated as the Casas Colgadas looked from the outside, the inside had undergone a thoughtless renovation. It was plain, white, modern and boring. So we made a quick trip through the place, with the kids appreciating the bright colors of the paintings much more than they had liked the medieval and classical art at the Prado. Then we stopped nearby for some lunch—we were actually operating on Spanish lunchtime by then—and found another dish Julie and Lisa could bear to eat: sopa castellana (Castilian soup). Though in my view this barely qualified as a soup at all, I was delighted that we now had another menu item to work with.

Made of nothing more than water, garlic, olive oil and paprika, savory red sopa castellana didn’t have much to offend my picky eaters, except that it was always served with a slice of bread floating in the soup and a fried egg on top. Lisa was happy enough to eat the whole package, but not Julie. “I don’t want the egg,” she said before she even began. She lifted it off with her fork and put it on a paper napkin. She ate soup contentedly for a minute, until she found the submerged bread. “This soggy thing is gross,” she said, and she lifted the sopping red mess out of the soup and onto the same napkin. But then she finished the rest of the bowl, and we didn’t hear any more complaints.

After lunch we took the short drive to Ciudad Encantada (“enchanted city”). We parked in a gravel lot, paid a fee at the entrance booth, and walked into a garden of large, fascinating rock formations. “Look at this one!” Julie said. “It’s like a tree with a big hole in the middle.” She and Lisa ran and climbed through and around the rugged beige stones, ten and twelve feet high. Many of them had names based on their shapes—“El Tobagón” (the toboggan), an angled sled-looking thing, and “Mar de Piedras” (sea of stones), a landscape of odd-shaped rocks.

But as unusual as the natural setting was, I was more struck by the other people there—Spanish families out for a walk after the midday meal. Actually, it was the women who interested me, dressed in elegant suits and picking their way gingerly over the turf and through the stones in high heels. We, of course, were in jeans and T-shirts. By now I knew that Spanish women dressed beautifully for work or for shopping in the city or for a restaurant dinner on Saturday night, but I was amazed that they didn’t let down on the style even for a weekend walk in the country.