Old and New Castile

Old and New Castile Travel Guide

For all the variety in the towns and countryside around Madrid, there is an underlying unity. Castile is essentially an endless meseta (plain) -- gray, bronze, green, and severe. Over the centuries, poets and others have characterized it as austere and melancholy. There is a distinct, chilly beauty in the stark lines, soothing colors, and sharp air of these breezy expanses.

Stone, a dominant element in the Castilian countryside, gives the region much of its character. Gaunt mountain ranges frame the horizons; gorges and rocky outcrops break up flat expanses; and the fields around Ávila and Segovia are littered with giant boulders. Castilian villages are built predominantly of granite, and their solid, formidable look contrasts markedly with the whitewashed walls characteristic of southern Spain. The presence of so much stone may help to explain the region's rich tradition of sculpture -- Castile has one of Europe's most significant stashes of sculptural treasures, many on display in the unrivaled National Museum of Sculpture, in Valladolid.

Castile is more accurately labeled Old and New Castile, the former (Castilla y León) north of Madrid, the latter (Castilla-La Mancha) south -- known as "New" because it was captured from the Moors a bit later. Whereas southern Spaniards are traditionally passive and peace-loving, Castilians have been a race of soldiers. The very name of the region (in effect, la región castilla, the region of castles) refers to the great east-west line of castles and fortified towns built in the 12th century between Salamanca and Soria.

Faced with the austerity of the Castilian environment, many have taken refuge in the worlds of the spirit and the imagination. Ávila is closely associated with two of Europe's most renowned mystics, St. Teresa and her disciple St. John of the Cross, and Toledo was the main home of one of the most spiritual of all Western painters, El Greco. Escape into pure fantasy is best illustrated by Cervantes's hero Don Quixote, in whose formidable imagination even the dreary expanse of La Mancha became something magical. Many of the region's architects were similarly fanciful: Castile in the 15th and 16th centuries was the center of the plateresque, an ornamental stone-carving style of extraordinary intricacy, named for its resemblance to silverwork. Developed in Toledo and Valladolid, it reached its exuberant climax in the university town of Salamanca.

Burgos was the 11th-century capital of Castile and the native city of El Cid ("Lord Conqueror"), Spain's legendary hero of the Christian Reconquest. Franco's wartime headquarters were established at Burgos during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), possibly as much for symbolic as for strategic reasons. Even today the army and the clergy seem to set the tone in this somber city. León is a provincial capital and prestigious university town with a cosmopolitan flavor. Northwest of León, the medieval Camino de Santiago (Way of St. James) leads Christian pilgrims out of Castile and into Galicia as they wend their way toward Santiago de Compostela.

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