Where is the castle?
Published by on May 7th, 2009 Comments Off
I have memories of visiting model villages as a child, little did I expect to end up driving around one.
Our typical exploratory excursions, sans GPS, consist of defining a destination or three, making a wrong turn or two, and at least once impulsively detouring to explore something that whispers of old stuff to look around.
On the way to — some place or other, I cannot quite remember now — we spotted a sign easily translated even with our muy poco Español as: Castle of Castles. Both enthusiastic about historic fortifications and ancient sites, we made a rapid u-turn and headed for Castell de Castells.
The village of Castell de Castells, like so many Spanish mountain communities, clings to a steep hillside. A major road passes by its feet, and the promise of the “castle of castles” — with no immediate visible battlements, towers, or walls upon approach — taunts passers-by to head in amongst the jumbled buildings.
Town planning
If there was ever any strategic planning in the layout of a rural Spanish town, then it was surely made over far too many bottles of suspiciously cheap wine, with no further attempt to settle the plans under the assumption they were appropriately laid down the first time.
The streets of Castell de Castells appear to lead you perpetually uphill, taking you deeper and deeper into the clutches of the town with each neck-straining twist and turn. They rapidly transform from ‘quite narrow streets’ to ‘nothing more than gaps between rows of houses’. They become so narrow, that a pedestrian navigating the same ‘gap’ must dive into a doorway recess to allow a car’s passage (I am convinced one woman we saw on two occasions had to breathe-in, too).
You might expect such a constricted passages to have a one-way system to avoid vehicles meeting when travelling in opposite directions. You would be wrong. These were officially two-way roads, as highlighted by a sprinkle of other cars here and there, tucked into corners and recesses, facing in different directions. Thankfully, we were spared the opportunity to negotiate (in Spanish and Bad-Spanish) as to who should reverse and give way. (A negotiation made doubly tricky by the roads being too narrow to exit the car and attempt the exchange in the first place!)
You find yourself on the same stretch of road more than once, but no matter how you try, you are ever facing in the wrong direction to attempt to back-track to your point of entry. Perhaps the other vehicles collected in nooks are simply the abandoned transport of previously entrapped tourists who had similarly never discovered a way out.
There are corners, too
Dead-ends are commonplace. Tangled streets taunt the weary with the promise of escape, only to terminate with an un-drivable incline, or someone’s garage.
After several twists and turns, enough at least to have us make the decision to forget the castle and simply get the heck out of the town, we spotted a street notably wider than the rest. Along it were several parked cars, and some building work in progress. There appeared to be a left turn at the far end. “Hey!” we exclaimed, “This looks like a road people use more regularly.” We turned and found ourselves being forced to turn left into the narrowest street of all.
I suspect you think I am exaggerating, but the 90 degree turn into this street — which after perhaps two car lengths then turned 90 degrees to the right — was barely wide enough to accept our little Ford Fiesta hire car. We sat for a moment considering the options and decided reversing to be the better choice (the other roads were still narrow, but nowhere near as narrow as which lay that ahead).
Decision made, I crunched into reverse, looked in my mirror and saw a van rapidly approaching from behind. Hemmed in! “This is how they get you,” I thought, “trap you in a corner then close-off each opportunity to escape until your hopes of freedom dwindle into mere hopes of survival.” Perhaps the entire village had become infertile and the only way for them to avoid extinction was to trap unwary travellers and gradually transform them into locals. At least I would more quickly become fluent in Spanish.
Our hesitation in negotiating the gap ahead prompted the van driver to emerge. “We are lost!” we admitted in our best phrase-book Spanish, expecting the patient local to suggest how we should reverse and be on our way.
Instead, he reeled off a series of directions that, with no hesitation or concern for vehicle size relative to street width, clearly indicated we should just pop on ahead to the left, make a right, then another right, and finally sweep left. We asked that he repeat, slower, after we informed him of our poor Spanish, and he did so, gesticulating more dramatically to assure us our path lay ahead. I simply stared, eyes front, predicting how our hire deposit was about to be scraped off the sides of the car as we attempted to make our way along what were, to our guide at least, perfectly adequate streets.
I am not sure how we did it
But we did. With wing mirrors adjusted for maximum view of the extremities of the car’s rear, we made out clutch-grinding way around the first corner — I estimate with around a centimetre to spare on the driver’s side — then the almost immediate right turn with a similar margin for error. The final right turn, again a full 90 degrees, posed the additional challenge of being briefly but sharply up hill. Hastily patched house wall corners suggested not everyone had survived the manoeuvre unscathed.
The roads then almost immediately widened. Still not ample space for even the most careful two-way traffic, but compared to our recent experience a veritably motorway.
I realised we were still heading up. Other than a brief descent into the street with the parked cars, we had been nose-up all the while.
Unsure of exactly where this hopeful, wider road might take us, we drove slowly past a group of workmen, waiting for them to begin shouting and gesticulating that we were about to drive into another dead end. But all was well. A sharp, low-gear drop and we found ourselves on a major road once more.
I have driven around many narrow paths in both Spain and Malta, but never have I had to negotiate such ridiculous slivers of wing-mirror scuffing streets. I believe we might have been the talk of the town for the next few days as the tourists that got away.
Castell de Castells
Apparently, the area is a regular focus for walkers and mountain bikers. The castle does indeed exist, and, according to Wikipedia, consists of remains of an old Arabic fortification – I guess that should be more accurately termed Moorish fortification. There are also some nearby rock formations forming a natural arch, and remnants of 5000 year old cave paintings.
There is certainly enough reason there to revisit Castell de Castells one day and look around properly. I hope by the time we return, they have Park-and-Ride.
jEN’s post on Castell de Castells
