Loire Chateaux: Villandry

The chateau dates back to 1536 and has since been amended both inside and out many times by the successive owners. The formal gardens were destroyed to create parkland in the 19^th century. When the castle was bought by Spanish scientist Joachim Carvallo in 1906 he made it his life’s work to recreate the original formal gardens from ancient plans and documents.

It is these gardens that win universal acclaim, the scale of which can be best appreciated from the upper floors of the chateau. A view of the vegetable garden is below: everything in the photo is the vegetable garden.

The detail is staggering: each of the squares is planted with a different vegetable. A close-up shows how precise the layout is. The beds are edged with box hedging and each area contains a different vegetable. For example, the lollo rosso lettuce give the red colour, and cabbage for the bright green.

Even at ground level the intricate geometric shapes are amazing. The plants look so healthy it’s also amazing that the visitors aren’t helping themselves. And where are the caterpillars?

Looking down from the castle again, this is the Love Garden. It’s made of perfectly trimmed heart shaped box hedging with infill planting.

The water garden is much plainer but just as precise. The water, i.e. the lake, is on the right in the photo, although it looks like grass because of the green reflection. 

Plenty of exact topiary too. These clipped trees could be chess pawns.

It’s easy to overlook individual plants with everything on such a grand scale. This group of irises looked so attractive in the Sun Garden, which was something more of a mixed variety of plants, shrubs and trees.

The gardens as a whole are completely replanted twice a year, using 115,000 plants. Half are grown in their own greenhouses. It’s a staggering enterprise.

The chateau itself, while beautifully proportioned, isn’t as large or impressive as some in the Loire Valley. Still, more cleaning and maintenance than we’d be comfortable with. The moat looks a little soupy in colour- but didn’t smell.

The swans and cygnets didn’t seem to mind the soup anyway.

Inside, the castle feels like an Edwardian gentry house, which was Señor Carvallo’s era. There were some themed designs like the Louis XV dining room. Do I spy butler Jeeves entering by the far door? Disappointingly, it’s only one of the house guides.

One of the bedrooms is preserved as Prince Jerome’s, who owned the castle some years before Señor Carvallo. Prince Jerome was Napoleon’s brother who clearly favoured pink or maybe Mrs J. did. 

The Carvallos collected many Spanish antiques that are displayed around the castle; even a Moroccan ceiling originally from a 15^th century palace in Toledo, Spain. So if you ever visit Toledo, look out for a palace with a ceilingless room.

They amassed enough paintings for an art gallery, that is housed in the castle, and oddities like this model of the castle, made out of 100.000 matches. The builder must have smoked a lot of cigarettes.

But it’s the unique gardens that we’ll remember most. Villandry was only two miles from our campsite so and easy but very much worthwhile visit

Cadaques

We have arrived near the French border,still in Spain, at the bay of Roses. The town of Roses is a modern family holiday resort; for a town with character we need to visit Cadaques, 10 miles away. This is Cadaques- photo below- originally a fishing village that became a favourite artists’ haunt in the 19^th century with tourism following on in our generation.

The narrow streets contain mainly white buildings finished in blue paintwork and draw you around the next corner. It’s probably only a trinket shop but could be a picturesque alley or courtyard.

There are some quite ornate large houses as well as the cottages, like the “Casa Blaua” dating from 1904.

There are small landing stages all around the waterfront that accommodate leisure craft and tripper boats as well as the few fishing boats still operating. Again, it’s all very scenic.

Out of all the excessive number of photos one takes with a digital cameras, the mural on the back wall of the cheap café where we had lunch beats the lot for capturing the atmosphere of the town. 

Threading around the walkways along the sea edge, we spotted an odd object in the water: something like a Royal Doulton plate. It turns out to be a jelly fish; afterwards we notice hundreds in the bay. Clearly they aren’t dangerous as families are bathing quite unconcerned.

Across the hill from Cadaques is a small bay of the tiny fishing hamlet of Port Lligat. We walk there, passing a fisherman’s church, impressive in its simplicity.

The stroll down the hill from the church to Port Lligat reveals a small, peaceful bay fringed by trees. But maybe less peaceful today than in the past.

There are just a few cottages, I suspect now occupied by weekenders rather than fishermen. However, the main reason for our visit is the house below that was the home of the painter Salvador Dali and his wife Gala. He bought a simple cottage here in 1930 and enlarged it over the years into the fine building we see today. He lived there with Gala until the late 70’s.

They had a distinctly odd relationship: for example, he bought her a castle in 1968 so that she would have a place of her own. Salvador was allowed to visit her only with her written permission. Other tales are somewhat too risqué to repeat!

The beautiful coast and clear light no doubt makes it an artist’s paradise. Even the flowers seemed brighter than usual.

So tomorrow it’s goodbye to Spain as we move on to the Loire Valley.

Peñiscola Castle

Peñiscola is a modern holiday resort in the Valencia region with an historic castle. To pronounce the place name without embarrasment, it’s pen-YIS-cola.

This is the resort with its wide, sandy beach as seen from the castle battlements.

Now the castle as seen from the wide, sandy beach! The beach is deserted as the weather is changeable and rain is forecast.

The castle was built by the Templars at the end of the 13^th century on the site of a Moorish fort, and was turned into a papal palace for pope Benedict XIII from 1417 to 1423. It’s a nicely traditional castle in appearance as the next few photos show.

The church of Santa Maria above was built at the same time as the castle on the site of an Arab mosque.

Because of its well preserved and atmospheric structure, the castle has been used many times as a film location, including a current TV favourite Game of Thrones.

The castle hill also contains a small town with narrow alleys and tall whitewashed houses.

With all these visitable treasures come the tourists, and the tourist shops. Plenty of tat here in this pretty street, some of it quite good quality to be fair, but all well overpriced.

Worth examining is the intricate pavement made from tiny, coloured pebbles arranged into patterns. The tradesman who did the work must have been good at jigsaw puzzles. A pair of legs conveniently left in the photo gives an idea of scale. 

Castle done, and a stroll along the prom before going back to the campsite. As previously described, it’s a lovely beach of fine sand – hence the possibility of what we come across next. It’s Leonardo’s “The Last Supper”, carved out of sand. The guy with the yellow back-pack is keeping it moist

by spraying it with water while his assistant on the other side is doing more carving. What a way to earn your supper!

The detail is quite remarkable, by far the best sand sculpture we have seen, illustrated by the next close-up

It is truly surprising what you stumble across sometimes; we had spent a thoroughly interesting couple of hours in Peniscola before heading back to our site.

The Rambla del Cañar

This is the best inland walk, right by the campsite. It’s a dry river bed five miles long with a dirt access track running right through and out the other end. Parts of the rambla are ravine-like, running through barren hills. There is lush vegetation in the rambla itself from the occasional downpour that reawakens the watercourse; in addition, there is  a permanent spring. This is a sample of the terrain. The black hole is the cave of the horseman, a stiff climb for a mountain goat never mind a horse.

Further up, the rambla widens out with a backdrop of 2,000 foot chalk-white cliffs, minus the bluebirds.

There is more water here than in other parts of the region, and even more water in past times so we are told, so there was substantial agriculture in the rambla area. Some of the old farm dwellings survive, the inhabitants still scratching a living as in the photo below; other houses have been modernised and extended as homes for city people or foreigners.

But many have fallen into disrepair, in some cases just piles of stones. This premises has clearly been vacant for many years but retains its structure; it is bigger than it appears from the photo as it extends to the back. The high room on the right is unconnected to the main building and contains a fire place but with alcoves and round windows as in a chapel. 

Some of the roof beams were exposed at the back showing the rough tree trunks used, presumably available locally.

The land formerly cultivated behind the farmhouse is still green, but not planted with any crop, in a really beautiful setting.

There is, in fact, a proper chapel near the top of the rambla, a tiny place of worship attached to a small recreation hall. We sat on the benches outside to eat our sandwiches accompanied by a friendly local dog who thought we might have a spare sandwich.

The spring, mentioned earlier, still flows, and was first recorded in Roman times. This is it, not highly impressive, but it’s at least a reliable water supply.

In the past the spring water was channelled through a network of pipes and gullys for irrigation purposes and also to run a corn mill. This, above all, proves the historic fertility of the rambla. This water channel provided the water power for the mill, located about a mile down from the spring.

This water then drops some 30 or 40 feet down a hole onto a waterwheel connected to the grinding mechanism. Can’t help thinking the hole looks like a medieval castle toilet.

This is what remains of the mill from the lower level. Its description comes courtesy of an information board: you just couldn’t guess what it had been otherwise.

There are some unusual visitors at this time of the year, the bee-eaters who  feed off bees that live in holes in the soft mudstone cliffs to be found in the lower parts of the rambla. 

The bee-eaters are most colourful, like parrots, but difficult to photograph. The next two photos will at least give some idea of their vivid appearance. They are about starling size.

Well, enough of rambling on about the rambla. It’s a fascinating place with always something new to offer. It has a long mining history, for example, but that’s for another time.

We leave here on Thursday, May 3^rd, slowly heading back up the Med coast into France. Will keep posting anything of interest as we go along.