Wined, dined and rested.

Having survived the dangerous journey through Aragón, sanitising ourselves every few minutes and virus-spraying every flying insect that made it in to the car (how? We had the windows closed. Do flies have a tiny little transporter beam, à la Star Trek…. “beam me up, Bluebottle, there’s an English car – I’m going in!”) we were heading to our next stopover, chosen because it is in a small town in the province of Cuenca, which is in the middle of deepest La Mancha, the spiritual and literary heart of Spain.

 

We knew this would be the place for us when we read a traveller’s review that marked the hotel down because the village “didn’t have any shops or bars”. Sorry, mini rant here – what is wrong with people who leave idiotic reviews of hotels based on whether they liked the town it was in? Leave a review of the town by all means, in a different place, but you can’t blame the hotel for being located in a place where you would prefer to have 24-hour Macdonalds and a Ministry of Sound nightclub on every corner.

 

Fortunately for us, the lovely Belmonte has neither of these things. It has a classic 15^th century castle, all crenellations and solid round turrets…..

……. which was used as a setting for the classic film “El Cid” with Charlton Heston and more recently for a Spanish film of “don Quijote”.

 

There is a quiet, fortified old town full of streets with squat stone buildings designed to protect the inhabitants from the strong La Mancha sun.

 

Just behind our hotel is a magnificent Gothic church with famous carved choir stalls made originally for Cuenca cathedral. We could only have a discreet glimpse at the inside because there was a service taking place, but that gives us a reason to return….

Around the old town there are life-sized cut-outs of famous inhabitants from the town’s history.  For example there is one of Fray Luis de León (an important religious writer of the 16^th century), and one of don Juan Manuel, the grandson of the king at the time, who was given Belmonte as part of a compensation package in about 1305 when his other lands were given to the king of Aragón.

[Can you imagine the scene round the Christmas tree that year as the king gave out presents to the grandchildren – “a train set for Pedro, a skater-dude Barbie for María and for Juan Manuel (gosh, this was hard to wrap!) a few towns near Cuenca”.]

 

Don Juan Manuel built the wall around the town and started on the Alcázar or inner fortified palace, which is now a spa hotel. However poor old Belmonte then went through a stage of being given to a series of people as payment for services rendered – it was given back to the king of Aragón, to a Portuguese nobleman, then it came back to the Spanish aristocracy, then at the beginning of the 19^th century its castle was used as a prison by the French when they invaded, and the castle was used again during the Spanish civil war as a prison by the Republicans. (Prisons are a bit of a theme of our travels.)

 

But let’s return to the hotel, the Palacio Buenavista Hospedería.

We have stayed in “palacios” before (of course, dahling, I wouldn’t stay anywhere else) and they usually have pretty interior courtyards with galleries – this lovely building was no exception.

It has been beautifully renovated, plus it has a lift – useful when, as we were, you are given a third floor room. The rooms are simple, but spotlessly clean and with comfortable beds.

 

We had a a simple but tasty meal of tapas on the terrace behind the hotel where they have created a pleasant space with a view of the Gothic church of San Bartolomé behind it and a mural that makes a pretty good attempt at trompe l’oeuil.

Finally I have to say that in these days of Covid, the personnel at this hotel were impressively scrupulous – we never saw any employee without a face mask, every surface was constantly being wiped down and sprayed, and at breakfast the next day masked and hand-sanitised staff gave us whatever we wanted from the ‘buffet’ breakfast table, with no-one but them allowed to touch anything on the table itself until it reached us.

Yes the little town was very quiet, but this was just what we wanted. No, there are no supermarkets in the old part of town, but there was a really good bakery. And Belmonte makes a very good stop between France and southern Andalusia, so a perfect place to stay. I think we may return.