Spanish Motorcycle Diaries - Day 9. From Portalegre (Portugal) via Estremadura to Avila. (28 June 2017)

The Yamaha as good as new, with the weather thankfully cooled down after it reached 40 degrees in this part of central Portugal over the last two weeks, causing the horrific forest fires some 150km north that took so many innocent lives.  Pat settling well into the pillion seat.

A trip through many empty landscapes, steppes, mid-sized mountain ranges, passing sleep provincial towns, before reaching imposing Avila, a UN World Heritage site, and for some good reasons.  A no-man’s-land during the Reconquista, it was finally won by the Christian side in 1088.  The town is also known as Ávila de los Caballeros, Ávila del Rey and Ávila de los Leales (Ávila of the Knights, the King and the Loyalists). 

Its conqueror, a son-in-law of Alfonso VI of Castile and Leon, commissioned the wall with its 88 12-metre high towers as a frontier fortress, with the gothic cathedral integrated into the ramparts.  It was never re-conquered by the moors, leaving the walls standing to this day.  In the 15th and 16th century, it was closely associated with the reign of the reyes catolicos, as Isabel of Castille spent a significant part of her childhood in the province, and as her fraught accession to the crown saw a competing king declared such by the nobility in Avila (whence the Avila del Rey title).  (See Giles Tremlett’s recently published biography Isabel of Castille for a good account).

On towards Madrid today.