Michelin Travel Guide Andalucia Book

I downloaded this the night before setting off for a four-day trip to the province of Guadalajara. We had planned to spend three nights in the medieval town of Sigüenza but on our way there we would traverse the Alcarria region, renowned for its flora and fauna. Its honey is as legendary as its castles.





Camilo José Cela (1916-2002) undertook a walking journey through this Alcarria region in 1946. He spent around nine days visiting various small towns, sleeping in local inns and talking to those people he met during his wanderings. He noted down his observations and then produced his Viaje a la Alcarria.

I had only read his La familia de Pascual Duarte, and am not sure I have the courage to read his much harder La colmena. Cela had the ability to capture the misery and sordidness of the difficult years in Spain in the prolonged postwar (post civil war and post WW2) period. When he received the Nobel Prize in 1989, the jury awarded it in appreciation of his 'restrained compassion' and his 'provocative vision' of human suffering.



My experience in reading Cela's account of a visit about seventy years prior to mine was close to electrifying. It felt like a travel more in time than in space. Although his time was considerably earlier than mine, I could recognize, with dismay, the aspects or elements that have now considerably changed or disappeared. Even though I like reading books on history, Cela's testimony made me realize, more perversely than anything else I have read recently, the actual process of time passing. Scarily and acutely.

Cela feels for children. 'The traveler' (el viajero) often expresses the empathy he feels for several of the many children he meets, particularly those let loose or gone astray or suffering from poverty. He is, however, less kind with animals. But the traveler discloses very little and remains a somewhat detached observant. He remains mostly an onlooker and we do not even learn why has he set out on such a voyage or why has he chosen la Alcarria. There is one point, however, when the traveler identifies himself in passing. He includes his name, and the place where he was born, in one of the couplets, which he intersperses in his prose.

Dice llamarse Camilo
Y ser su pueblo Padrón .




I did not visit all his towns, but did stop in Torija, where they have now founded a small museum in a few of the rooms in the castle. There they keep the original manuscripts written in notebooks not too different from those I have used in school in my very early age.




We also spent some time in Brihuega, where we had an excellent lunch and where in spite of the rain managed to visit a couple of the Romanesque churches, a castle, and sections of the old wall. The old inn where Cela spent one night has now been converted into a more grand accommodation and restaurant. But that is not where we went.



When coming back to Madrid, after leaving behind the scarcely populated small towns and valleys I was engulfing myself back into an urban agglomeration, seeing the almost threatening large modern building on the outskirts of the big city, I again felt as if I were traversing the tunnel of time.

I will count the days until I can set off for the Alcarria again, and visit the cities further to the south, such as Cifuented and Pastrana. In the latter they now have a Tapestry Museum where they keep the 15century Flemish tapestries that Cela denounced for their having been transferred to Madrid. Pastrana owes their recovery to the writer.