The 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.
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. From the inn window, a sharp-eyed lobster might make out the strange early 13th-century church of Vera Cruz, on a rocky platform amid rough grazing land. The exterior is 12-sided, and within a 12-sided upper church sits above an undercroft. Coaches stop with Da Vinci Code tourists who are told this was built by the Templars, in their breaks from worshipping a disembodied head. In truth this isn’t a Templar church, but its shape does represent the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, where the body of Jesus once lay, as his body was believed to become present each day on the medieval altar here.
Outside, the stony ground among the wild mallows is a good place to look back at Segovia stretched out on its height, like a ship, some say – the Alcázar at the prow and the tall cathedral tower the mainmast. The ridge hides the oldest wonder of Segovia, the Roman aqueduct.
To the west of where we stand, the Peñas Grajeras – Rook Rocks – rise above the river. The rooks, so the traveller Richard Ford supposed in the 1830s, fed in ancient times upon the bodies of criminals cast down from the heights.
Below the rocks, echoing to the percussive cry of the rooks, is tucked an exuberant Baroque church, like something opulent in Venice. It is the shrine of Nuestra Señora de la Fuencisla, patroness of the city, whose image also stands high on the aqueduct, where in Roman days stood a statue of Hercules. The Virgin’s altar in the church is enclosed by a fine reja of black iron and gold leaf.
Zamarra is a pre-Roman word, probably Basque. But the name of the village, some say, is really from Arabic, zamaran Allah, God’s watchtower.
As we begin the long slope up to its prospect point, a cleft in the tawny pasture reveals a high wall enfolding a garden. It is the Carmelite Monastery where St John of the Cross lived in the 1580s. The poet and mystic, the trustful explorer of the soul’s dark night, helped build this wall with his own hands. He spent nights in prayer in a niche in the rocks, with the sound of the river and the wind in the trees. His friend, the humorous St Teresa of Avila, nicknamed the diminutive friar Jilguero de Dios, “God’s Goldfinch”. The goldfinch is said to have gained its splash of red when, out of compassion, it pulled a thorn from Christ’s brow at the Crucifixion.
Here in a little church by the garden is the tomb of St John. The cool whitewashed walls are a reservoir of silence. It takes a few minutes to realise the lack of noise. Something perhaps is here still of John’s faith in the God hidden by a nothingness – nada – that the human mind cannot penetrate.
But we must be off, up the final stretch to Zamarramala. It’s not much when we get there, a few dusty streets with tractors. The view back to Segovia is why we came.
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