New aromas from Northeastern Spain

by Elisa Andueza (Spain)

A leap into the unknown Spain

In the summer of 2019, my partner and I started a little road trip to Aragón intending to discover some of our heritage hidden treasures. Olite, our first stop, is a quaint medieval village in Navarra. We were surely impressed with “Rúa de la Judería” Street´s modest rural houses which have been faithfully guarding its ancient cobblestone pavement since the Middle Ages without scarcely any changes. An elderly waitress at a local bar agreed with us while serving our table surrounded by the warm, appetizing smell of typical Aragon food: cardoons bathed in a sweet almond sauce for starters, and migas for the main dish. This is a simple recipe which shepherds created in order to make use of the scraps of stale bread by adding garlic, olive oil, sausage and also some fresh grapes. After that, there was no more room for any dessert, so we appreciated her kindness in explaining the origin of those delicious dishes to us. Walking to the end of that road, we looked up to admire Olite´s Royal Palace, the greatest project commissioned by Carlos III El Noble from 1387 to 1425. Definitively, it does not look like any other Spanish castles which tend to have more robust and rectangular walls than Olite´s. Quite the opposite, it looks like French buildings with dynamic and stylized structures, comprising towers and hanging gardens at different heights, as well as galleries connecting sumptuous staterooms. Its balconies framed by ivy leaf and trees could remind visitors of romantic stories. For a moment, I could hear the thundering beat of the heart from The Lovers of Teruel, the main characters in a Spanish legend that is similar to Shakespeare´s Romeo and Juliet. These stories must reach a breathtaking, even mystic atmosphere when a theater troop plays them at the palace’s patio at nightfall during The Olite Classical Theatre Festival every summer. However, we could not know it, because our trip was calling us to leave that special place behind us. As the afternoon fell, we drove through the Monegros desert. Its name means Black Mountain in Spanish because, in the past, there used to be a large dark pine forest, but indiscriminate logging, wind erosion and droughts have shaped the area into an arid landscape. Farther into the desert, there are some disseminated forgotten bunkers, one of them named after the famous writer, George Orwell, who served as a militia volunteer during the Spanish Civil War. Nevertheless, rather than looking for any of them, we spotted a rustic Mexican style chapel, called Saint Michael, at the top of an isolated hill, far away from the national road. It turned out that it is the starting point of a hiking route. Luckily, we were able to find its path in Wikiloc, and its short-estimated duration encouraged us to take it, because we did not have too much time until sunset. Suddenly, a kind of déjà vu carried me back to a distant memory when I was sixteen years old, and I smelled peaches going through a Catalan desert area with my family. Someone told me that it was the famous Mediterranean peach tree Orchard, but I am still skeptic about that being real or imaginary. As we were walking and laughing about peaches, we were pleased that it was not too hot. There were also some bushes flanking the route and despite the hiking marks, we ended up getting lost. Nevertheless, we were able to reach El Tozal de la Cobeta, a huge rock formation similar to Arizona´s Monument Valley ones. The shape resembles a camel and the top of the formation looks like a menhir; therefore, it was impossible to climb higher. From this point, there was an outstanding panoramic view of the coppery-colored landscape bathed by the last shining rays of the twilight. After taking a deep breath, we realized that the powdery path that we had lost was near there. On the walk back to the car, we joked about how incredible, and yet fitting, would those sights had been if a tumbleweed had passed rolling thought as in a western film. Undoubtedly, losing our way had allowed us to enjoy another perspective of the desert.