Today we continue our journey through Castile in August, visiting the Roman villa of La Olmeda, in the municipality of Pedrosa de La Vega, near Saldaña, province of Palencia. Where we had the opportunity to admire a series of formidable mosaics.
The tiles are arranged like carpets in large rooms of a high-income “Romanorum” house, with figures of existing and imaginary animals of the highest pictorial value. A monumental display of almost two thousand years, discovered by the owner of the property and later patron, Don Javier Cortés Álvarez de Miranda.
After the village, we had lunch at a good friend’s house in Alar del Rey, with good quality food, but a lot of noise, an issue to be resolved. And from there, we headed to Molledo, with a wonderful setting, with large leafy forests, a mixture of beech, holm oak, etc. True “fairy tale places” of the Grimm brothers, where Hansel and Gretel got lost (see you in the forest).
Fortunately, there are still some tree masses free of eucalyptus plantations. These trees produce excellent wood, but are not well regarded because they have replaced the ancient and beautiful Cantabrian forests. The same thing happened in Galicia and Asturias, where the cellulose companies have invaded large territories to turn them into monotonous landscapes without their former rich fauna.
Part of our trip was spent on some sections of the Camino de Santiago, seeing, among others, the most beautiful churches in the transition from Romanesque to Gothic. And there we had lunch at Villa de Fromista, a restaurant run by Doña Erica with her husband and son; constituting, in itself, a first-class gastronomic attraction: for the excellent lamb, perhaps the best product made from the Castilian countryside of yesterday and today.
Next Friday we will finish our tour of Castile in the middle of summer, when the crops already shine like old gold.