Saturday June 22

 Castle of Peñafiel  

Notice the cute bull crossing sign, not sure how often bulls come running through town but I imagine that it isn´t cute.



Construction work for this medieval fortress commenced in the 10^th century by the Arabs to be a defense along the Duero river, and it was restored in the 1400s.





This is the front entrance to the castle.  It houses a very popular wine museum that receives an annual 100,000 visitors.

  

We went on a little tour of this castle, but they didn´t show us much more than this courtyard and the top of the tower.   From the castle you can see another castle out in the distance that is currently being used as a hotel. 

 

The Castle of San Esteban de Gormaz 

This was built by the Arabs to defend the passage of the Duero River on its right bank, from being used by Christians.  It is nearly completely ruined because of the War of Independence in 1808 and demolitions made by the City Council since it threatened to fall on the wineries that were just below.



The houses below the castle ruins were built right into the hillside or the rock as the case is with the one in the picture below.



Unfortunately we didn´t see any hobbits around.  This may have been built just to house the wine.



Of course we still went up to explore the one wall ruins and got some great shots from up above.

It´s hard to tell in this picture but there are some houses/ wineries built into the hill all around and in that partial hill on the left.



And off to the next castle!

Fortress of Gormaz

This was built shortly after 756 AD also by the Arabs to control rich landowners and peasants, as well as to try to govern and protect the Central Marches against the Christians to the North.

This was one of our favorites castles.  We loved that we could just roam and explore on our own.  I´m not even going to add captions for most of the pictures since there are quite a few. 

Of course this was not the most dangerous thing Morgan climbed here! 

 

The Basilica of Our Lady of El Pilar,  Zaragoza

We didn´t have much time here.  It took us about an hour to drive from this bridge to get to the Hotel that was in walking distance of here.  The streets were packed and it was difficult to find and when we finally found it we were informed that our "apartment" rooms were a couple of blocks away but we still needed to find overnight parking (this picture was taken after parking and eating).



By the time we finally parked and walked up out of the parking garage the Basilica was right in front of us.  Our "apartment" rooms were about a block away from this.  As you can see in the picture it was getting dark by this time and so we barely had time to drop off our stuff and eat dinner. 



The Basilica is one of the biggest and most important churches in Spain. The church was built between 1681 and 1686 by King Carlos II. In 1725 the church commissioned the architect Ventura Rodriguez to transform the building to the Baroque style.   It has two domes that are painted with frescoes by Goya.



The  beautiful Basilica is in the background with the Ebro River in the foreground.  Although this is not a castle, there is one here but unfortunately we didn´t realize it until after we got home. 



We were quite exhausted by the time we went to bed and thought it would be a quiet night since we were on a less traveled street, but we heard people talking and walking by all night long and we are quite sure we heard fireworks in the middle of the night.