Ancient city of Toledo & the plains of Castillia de La Mancha

Ancient city of Toledo

Our first out of town trip combined time in the old city of Toledo with a visit to a winery in the La Mancha wine region.  We met up with our guide by the Mercado de San Miquel.  From there our group of 13 that included a family of 5 were off to Toledo.

Ancient walled city of Toledo in background

Toledo was the capital of Spain at one time.  There is an old town and a new modern area.  The old town is what we explored.  The city has the nickname "city of 3 cultures" because of the cultural influences of the Muslims, Jews and later Christians.  It is a walled city and is located on the Tagus River with one of the key architectural sites being the San Martin Bridge.  Our guide walked us around for about an hour and then set us free to explore and to eat something before we headed to the winery.  One of the interesting parts of the old city is its "quarters" so there is a Jewish area with lots of Hebrew signs embedded in the road and walls and a Muslim area with former mosques and later a Christian.  Each area had a gateway and a note on the street.  If you were not of that religion, you could not enter that area.  

Walled city & San Martin Bridge

San Martian Bridge in background

The Christian section of the city has a gorgeous old cathedral - Cathedral Primada.  It is full of golden structures, and I do mean full.  We only did the short view at the end of our time so we did not get to see a lot, but what we did was quite impressive.  Our guide pointed out to his American tourists that all the gold there came from the Americas.  There is also a monastery for nuns in the old town.  Actually there were a couple of monasteries for nuns there.  We bought some marzipan (a Toldeo specialty) at a store selling items made by the various local monasteries.

Cathedral

Cathedral 

Cathedral 

Shop sold baked goods from monasteries

Left and top are Monastery, bottom right is adjacent church

There are many impressive old buildings in Toledo including former synagogues and mosques converted into churches and an impressive fortress plus several plazas.  From the trivia questions on the ship, we had learned that from Roman times to now Toldeo is the place in the world for sharp knives and swords.  We saw many shops with all sorts of swords and knives in their windows.

Toledo is famous for its knives and swords
They are capitalizing on the popularity of Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings

Old city streets of Toledo

On a softer side, the painter El Greco loved this area and painted many works of the area. He resided here 37 years until he died in 1614.  There was a famous sculpturer who too liked the area so some nice art was floating around too.

The plains of Castillia de La Mancha is the setting for Cervantes novel, The man of La Mancha.  Cervantes lived for a time in Toledo.  He is remembered with the statue below.

Statue of Cervantes who lived for awhile in Toledo

Finca Loranque Winery in the Castillia de La Mancha wine region

From Toledo we drove to the Finca Loranque Winery,   The last part of the drive was down a dirt road.  We are in the La Mancha wine region.  I didn't understand our guide completely, but there were a lot of restrictions on what could or could not be done with the countryside in the area which was the reason for the condition of the road and why we could not get out of the van to take pictures.  Jeff and I commented that our rental car said no dirt roads so we were hoping that not all Spanish Wineries are down dirt roads!  We get to the main buildings and are surprised to find very nice facilities including a building to host wine tastings and events.  

A representative from the winery shows up and he starts to proudly show us the winery.  We start in a modern room with large stainless steel tanks that we learn have refrigeration bans on them to keep the wine cooler to slow the fermentation process.  We then walk through a doorway and enter the old storage area.  This area is from the 1800s and was strategically built to keep a constant year round temperature.  The walls are a 1 1/2 meters thick and there are windows up high that can be opened for ventilation as necessary - seems very necessary at certain parts of the fermentation process.  We ask what some large clay pots that kind of look like oversized bee hives are for and learn that they were the vessels for wine fermentation at one time.  While there has been a winery owned by a single family here since the 18th century, the current owners have only had it since 1982.  When they bought it, they were determined to bring it back to high standards and to move on from local wine tastes to more international.  Their first vintage was 2002.  

Left is cellar from 1800s

One of the things they have chosen to do is to implement an ecological/organic process.  One thing that stood out to both of us was that they drop lots and lots of egg whites into each holding tank to pull out all the little pieces of debris (stems, skins, etc).  Neither of us had ever heard of egg whites in your wine!  Then it was on to the wine tasting.  We had 2 different tempranillo wines and one that was a blend of tempranillo and merlot.  We asked why they blended the tempranillo with merlot and the answer was that merlot is better known in the States so they hoped that would help sell the wines to the US market.