Europe > Spain > Castilla-La Mancha > Toledo > Articles > In the Hoof-prints of El Cid

“Viva la Virgen de Guadalupe!” And six shot glasses were obediently raised heavenwards for the umpteenth time in honour of the guardian of a remote Spanish province that few of my fellow travellers had ever even seen.

“Viva José Manuel’s mum!” shouted Odu, our German companion. And the responding roar - “Viva!” - was doubled for the lady who had brewed the seemingly endless supply of herb liquor that was filling our glasses.

Our horses looked back from their pony-line with expressions of long suffering patience. They seemed to be aware that the tranquil ‘pioneer column’ of the morning was on the verge of deteriorating into the usual mad Cossack charge of the late afternoon.

Odu would no doubt spend the next couple of hours yelling: “Disciplinado, por favor! Controlado!” I was riding a gleaming black mare whose name came from her father’s Toledo plains but whose penchant for sudden bursts of speed came from her mother’s background as a forty thousand dollar Argentine polo pony. When La Toledana decided to kick up her heels all ‘discipline and control’ were invariably left hanging in mid-air, along with my stomach.

Old Castile has seen its share of rogue riders in times-past and we were following in the hoof-prints of the region’s most famous hero-hoodlum. Much of the Castilian wilderness that we would pass through during our six-day trek has changed very little in the nine hundred years since El Cid and his merry men plotted, pillaged and hired themselves out to whichever Christian lord or Muslim caliph offered the best prospects. The trail we were following – known as ‘the road to exile’ – had taken them from a seriously disgruntled Castilian king to a highly profitable future in Moorish Zaragoza.

The market town of Covarrubias, ‘the cradle of Castile’, has also remained essentially unchanged since those war-torn days. As José Manuel Barreñada, who owns the local stables, explained: “We have a medieval fiesta here every year. It’s really very simple: all you have to do is dress up, throw some straw around and let a few chickens and donkeys loose in the plaza. Apart from the telephone lines El Cid could come back and not notice the difference.”

We had ridden across Covarrubias’s old humpback bridge one morning just as the rising sun was beginning to burnish the rich Castilian stonework and turned along the wooded valley of the Rio Arlanza. Our hooves raised perfumed clouds of rosemary and thyme as we trotted through an orchard, where the first of the region’s million kilos of cherries were beginning to ripen. A deer broke from cover and bounded ahead of us and, higher up the valley, we stopped to watch a plough-horse working an old vineyard - a sight that is all but extinct in modern Spain.

The villages here are still guarded by the stone flogging-posts that had once acted as deterrents to wayward vagabonds like us. In one abandoned hamlet the clatter of our hooves on the cobbles was answered only by the staccato clack-clack-clack of a pair of storks, calling from their nest on a crumbling church tower. It took us all day to cross the powerfully scented woodlands of Sabinares del Arlanza. This is the last of the world’s great juniper forests and there are trees here that were already over a thousand years old when El Cid rode through.

We stopped for lunch in a meadow where we watered our horses before sitting down to eat. The support vehicle had arrived half an hour before and Jorge, its driver, already had a great cauldron of olla podrida bubbling on a fire. The literal translation (‘putrid pot’) does no justice whatsoever to this wonderful stew that combines bacon, loin, chorizo, black-pudding, ham and beans in a rich sauce. Dessert and coffee were in turn followed by several glasses of herb liquor…and the usual round of toasts.

Jorge is a man of many talents. Back home in Bulgaria his 6’4” stature had no doubt come in handy to the ‘businessman’ who employed him as a bodyguard, but it was his invigorating, joint-cracking massages that endeared him to six weary saddle-tramps in the Spanish wilderness.

We had realised from early on that this trip was designed to combine horses, history, and honest-to-god gluttony in equally generous measures. From the first introduction to our trusty steeds it was clear that the horses could not be faulted - Odu rated his pearl-coated albino, Santa Claus, as the best he had travelled with in more than thirty riding holidays. History had surrounded us throughout the trail and was a justification, should any be needed, for our tireless immersion in local cuisine and viniculture.

From the hillside, the red-tiled roofs of Silos village are dominated by the tower and fortress-like walls of Santo Domingo monastery which has traditionally had a major place in the religious psyche of much of the country. More recently, the Gregorian chants of Santo Domingo’s ‘pop star’ monks have won the hearts of a totally different crowd of worshippers in nightclubs from Ibiza to New York.

The storm-clouds that had been threatening all day finally broke as we left evening mass but, in the bar at Hotel Tres Coronas, we found solace in several glasses of good Castilian tinto and a badly dubbed video of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Beside the bar, a diminutive old man with a beret and a glass of Fundador was laughing uproariously - and totally irrelevantly - as the drama unfolded on the screen. The barman explained that Tio Paco here was one of the local extras in the film. We turned back to see Clint Eastwood lynching Eli Wallach in the Castilian graveyard that we had cantered past that afternoon to José Manuel’s bellowing western soundtrack.

The following day we discovered that we had travelled from New Mexico to Siberia as, to the tuneless whistling of a new theme-tune, we broke through a curtain of vegetation onto the railway line (now thankfully disused) that once doubled as a Russian winter landscape in Doctor Zhivago.

Later on, as we crossed a particularly picturesque plateau covered in deer-browsed pines, José Manuel told me about the first time he ever rode a horse. He was already in his mid-thirties and was so shocked at the thought of all those ‘lost years’ that he had gone out that same afternoon to buy his first horse…and continued buying until he is the owner of three stables and over a hundred horses (including some of the best Spanish pure-bloods in the country).

He insists on leading all his tours himself - despite the fact that he brings professional show-jumper Jesús Pérez Agromayor along for backup - and in the last eight weeks had taken time out of the saddle only to go to Madrid to collect the ‘Best Active Tourism’ award for his El Cid trek at FITUR 2004, the world’s premier travel fair.

As he racks up hundreds of miles on horseback every year José Manuel is happy that that he is finally catching up on all those ‘wasted’ horse-less years. We rode in silence as I sulked with envy at the thought of such a lifestyle but José turned the conversation to the trolls and gnomes that are said to inhabit this woodland…and I realised that there could be certain serious disadvantages to so many long, thoughtful hours in the saddle.

Between this ‘enchanted forest’ and the posada rural that would be our last night’s lodgings there now lay only a twelve-mile stretch of Cañón del Rio Lobos National Park. As we rode through one of Spain’s most astounding landscapes African hoopoes and flycatchers swooped past us and gemlike kingfishers dived into crystal-clear ponds that were deep enough to swallow our horses and us with them. We splashed through the shallows as the trail wound across flowery glades and through shadowy pines where the soil had been rooted by wild boar. Vultures wheeled on the thermals and their fledglings stretched ragged wings in the caves that pockmarked the cliffs. Any doubts that there were still wolves in ‘Wolf River Canyon’ were brushed aside by an old shepherd…and two ferocious mastiffs, wearing the iron-spiked collars that are rarely seen outside of rural museums these days.

As the canyon walls loomed steeper and we had to dismount to lead our horses along narrow ledges, we imagined that Wolf River could only be flowing out of the Alaskan wilderness. In the last six days we had saddle-tramped our way through Mexico and Siberia. We had galloped across highland plains that could have been the Andean páramo, over blossoming ‘Alpine’ ridges, and through immense forests of juniper that could have been…well, they couldn’t be anywhere else but Castile.

We had now reached Soria province and, though El Cid still had a long way to go to the looted treasures and plundered villages of the Mediterranean, we asked for no more than a reviving shower, some soft cushions and a few more glasses of herb liquor, raised in honour of the Virgen de Guadalupe…and to José Manuel’s mum.

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