Wined, dined and rested.

Well actually, slightly under 14….. I’m talking about the very tiny village of San Pedro de Rozados. It’s physically quite close to Salamanca, but oh my goodness it might as well be a million miles away.

Salamanca, in case you didn’t know, is just over 130 miles from Madrid, towards Portugal. It is a very famous old university town, rather like Cambridge and Oxford rolled into one. For that reason it is usually crammed with tourists and language school students at every time of year. It is beautiful but crowded and often impossible to enjoy because of the large groups of students pouring themselves happily from bar to bar in the main square.

In this year’s Covid-19 restrictions things may be different there, but we are travelling carefully, and deliberately seeking out small places for our few nights on the road, and places preferably a little out of the way, so we gave Salamanca a miss in favour of somewhere smaller.

Well, bullseye this time, with knobs on. San Pedro de Rozados could not be more different from Salamanca. For a start, to guide us there Miss Google took us on a wonderful route through (and nearly across) yellow ochre fields of cereals and cattle….

… and all with that wonderful huge sky for which Salamanca is famous. So there we were, enjoying the colours, oohing and ahhing as we bowled along. The road was becoming a little narrower, and the tarmac’s condition rather more, er, worn….

… until we began to wonder if we had slipped back through a wormhole in time and perhaps our mighty diesel chariot was about to disappear in a pffff of dust and become an ox cart. To be honest, an ox cart might have been better suited to the ever-deteriorating road…..

.. but we had reached the point, after a long drive from Marbella (and how different are THOSE two worlds?), that we were hysterically loving the adventure so we threw ourselves backwards trustingly into the comforting arms of the lovely Miss Google and just kept on going, albeit at about 10 km/h.

Eventually we reached the tiny hamlet of San Pedro de Rozados (population 307, apparently) and nearly got lost trying to find our place of rest for the night, the interesting-named “VII carreras” (the 7 highways – we couldn’t find even one, but we learned that this was a historical reference – like pretty much everywhere in mainland Europe, the village had been more important a long time ago).

We pulled ourselves together from the shame of getting lost in a village not much larger than our garden and were greeted by the wonderful MariCarmen who really deserves some kind of medal. She is currently running the place by herself, with help only with cleaning the rooms (our room was spotless and pretty)….

… so she cooks, she serves drinks at the bar and she welcomes everyone. And at the moment she wears her face mask permanently and wipes down every single item she hands to you.

There had been mention on the site I used to book the VII Carreras of a pool, which admittedly had been something of an attraction for me. In actual fact the pool in question was the municipal pool (municipal pool! In a municipality of 307!!) but because of the dreaded Covid19 situation this had been closed so in order not to disappoint her guests, MariCarmen had installed a pool in the inner courtyard.

Do you laugh or do you cry? Its bulging blue presence in no way affected our enjoyment of the €10 dinner (because the courtyard is also the summer dining room) and really it was just a symbol of how much the delightful MariCarmen tries to please her guests.

We had salmorejo followed by fried meat with vegetables, washed down with a really quite nice local red wine called “La Zorra”, and instead of the desserts that we saw being offered (the charming Dutch couple next to us ordered “chocolate ice cream” and were ceremoniously handed a Cornetto each) we opted for cheese, at which we were given a beautifully presented platter of little triangles of delicious Manchego cheese. Mari Carmen apologised for the lack of membrillo to go with it (membrillo is a quince paste that is traditionally served with cheese) because, she said, 3 of her 4 children were still at home and they ate everything that was not locked away. However she gave us a little dish of really delicious local honey, which went perfectly with it.

We had a lovely, memorable evening. We enjoyed the craftmanship that had clearly gone in to refurbishing the building – a stonemason had clearly worked with love and skill, using multiple local stone  –

and the next morning we enjoyed breakfast, included in the vast €42 we were paying for our night’s stay, only disappointing MariCarmen once (and you feel like the worst person in the world if you disappoint this kind, generous person) because after 2 huge hunks of bread with lashings of jamón ibérico plus a fried egg and two cups of delicious coffee each we said we really couldn’t manage any more.

What a lovely, relaxing stay, and what huge luck to have found this unique place; it just goes to show that there are still so many individual places to be discovered, and so many fascinating experiences that can make you smile, even in these dreadful times.  We left refreshed and ready for our long journey to the Pyrenees the next day; I hope we’ll return to the miniscule village of San Pedro de Rozados one day.