When you study geography at school, it is easy to become interested in the subject, one of the most interesting if it is explained well, if you practice with trips and projections. In this way, you end up understanding space, which is initially somewhat magical. In order to finally achieve an imago mundi that is certainly different from what you initially thought at the beginning.
I am writing this in connection with a discovery made this summer, among the more than ninety million foreign tourists that we will eventually receive in Spain; plus a mobility of local inhabitants, among whom we have included ourselves for only a few very intense days.
With these preliminary notes, I would like to refer to the readers of La Razón, of our column “Planet Earth”, what was a round trip through Old Castile, as we mentioned before. For this we took as our departure base the railway station of Palencia, after a journey first from Madrid to Segovia with two tunnels that must add up to more than 40 kilometers; crossing the Sierra de Guadarrama.
The tourist circuit from Palencia will take us north to Molledo, in the Castile of Santander, homeland of Leonardo Torres Quevedo, an engineer who invented many interesting gadgets, precursors of artificial intelligence. One of them was the automatic chess player. And also the most innovative cable car, installed more than a hundred years ago, and which continues to function perfectly as a “Spanish shuttle” that flies over the Niagara Falls area to the admiration of all.
My trip provided a good opportunity to pass through the Canal de Castilla several times, a navigation route from Valladolid to Alar del Rey, where the jump from the Cantabrian mountain range was to begin, to reach the sea in Santander. In the 18th century it was thought that the cereals from the plateau would be exported to Spanish America.
We will return to the journey next week with the continuation.