We’ve moved north from Andalucia to Extremadura, to visit the towns of Merida and Caceres which are famous for Roman ruins and medieval town centres.
While we were wandering around the town of Caceres we spotted a bunch of signs with a shell symbol and/or an arch. No words, just symbols.
Each of these signs had an arrow pointing down a street indicating that the mysterious yet interesting thing was down that way. Not being able to resist a mystery we followed these signs to see what the special thing was. The shells took us through the winding alleys of the old town, then through the walls into the modern town and kept going. We went past churches, old interesting looking buildings but none of them were the final stop.
We followed the shells for quite a while until we were coming up to the edge of town with no landmark in sight. The next sign was pointing down the main street out of town. It was at this point we decided to do some research to find out where this shell actually was leading us.
Turns out it marked the pilgrimage route from southern Spain to north-west Spain, which can take a few weeks to walk the full length. Needless to say, we decided not to continue and began the long hike back to the centre of town.
The Roman ruins in Merida are pretty impressive, and I geeked out when I found a section of the aqueduct that I could climb up to see how it worked.
It’s impressive how archaeologists can find random bits of rubble or pots and somehow find some of the other missing bits and put them all together to make a full pot or statue or plaque. We saw one large plaque where they had found 8 tiny pieces and somehow they had managed to work out what the inscription was. It’s the equivalent of trying to put together a giant jigsaw, which has been mixed with pieces from 50 other jigsaws, left on the floor in a busy thoroughfare so that most of the pieces go missing, and most of the rest chewed up by a dog and spat back out. And after all this, the archaeologists still manage to solve it and work out what the original picture looked like.
Extremadura is also the home of Jamon or Spanish ham. They raise a special breed of pig for the ham and the highest grades of ham are from pigs which have been fed on acorns. We even saw groups of black pigs roaming around in large oak forests as the bus drove along the highway. When they sell the ham, or serve it in a bar or restaurant they keep the hooves on the leg of ham so you can see that it comes from a black-hoofed pig, which is the highly prized one. So while we were there I made sure to properly sample the local produce. I’m still not sure I’ve tasted enough acorn-fed ham and mixed-fed ham to tell the difference, so I’ll have to continue my research until I can make a final conclusion.
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