Spain 33 - Lugo, a lost parking space and just a bit of a view of some roman walls

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It is odd how all things feel back end this holiday. Perhaps it has something to do with going a week later. The weather is still holding out and it seems to feel better here in Spain in late September than it does in Britain in high summer. We woke early with the larks as we always do. Why can we not sleep in when we get chance to? We filled up Suzy with water and set off for reception to pay. According to the young girl yesterday we could pay at 8. However the place was dead. As they had our passport copies there was no way we were leaving without paying. Not that we would. I walked around the bar areas , into the toilet blocks and then knocked on the window. I could see the mornings bread and croissants had been delivered and where waiting to be collected . So where were Senor or his wife . The wife turned up. An elderly lady with a very grumpy face on her. She was still wearing a dressing gown. One of us had got opening time wrong and I don't think it was me.

Anyway after paying we set off for Lugo. What can I say about Lugo? My next door neighbour was born there. We should find it as the city was surrounded by enormous Roman walls with towers every few hundred yards. I think after losing Ponferrada we thought we could lose anything. Sat nav set with co- ordinates for parking which should be easy to find and would accomodate Suzy for an hour or two whilst we took in the walls and the city within.

I have taken to the habit of deciphering Sally Sally Sat Navs instructions for Glenn as he drives. He cannot watch what she is showing whilst driving and sometimes she gets her knickers in a twist and we end up following the wrong road. A few miles out of town when civilisation starts I begin with how many kms we have to go before we reach our destination . This counts down with the kilometres. I tell him the road names of where he should be heading and how long we have left until we reach our parking spot. In theory this should work . So I started and continued as we weaved our way through early morning Lugo traffic. One thing I realised early was sometimes co-ordinates are way out and you end up somewhere totally different to what you expect. Even looking on Google Earth can cause problems as the overhead shots can be years out of date and the street mapping completely different from reality on the ground. We have searched for aires which have since Google Earth mapped them disappeared and no longer exist . Roads can be barred to traffic and so it was with Lugo. I saw the sign for parking up a side street . The problem is that you dont know if it the right one or how far it is from where you want to see. Sally told us we had further to go so we blindly followed her until we came to the sign for parking. No through road !!!!! Followed by no entry !!!!! There was no way we could get to the car park this way so we had to drive through the busy centre , passed the university until we got to the end of the road again. The plan was to find the original car park but instead we were too far up the road and were going round the same way again.

Only choice to take pictures of the fantastic walls and the gateways to the city as we drove as we had no intention of trying to find a car park which was proving impossible. In a car you can park up on the side of the road on parking metres but Suzy is too long and overhangs . She is too wide too and butts out into the street so sometimes we have to do the best we can, make the most of what we can see and move on.

So to Lugo and its walls. These were constructed in the 3rd century and are largely intact. They stretch over 2 kilometers around the historic centre of Lugo. and are said to be the finest example of late Roman fortifications in Western Europe. They did look pretty impressive too. Which made it even more sad that we could not get in to see them properly nor to walk on top of them. The walls were built between 263 and 276 and formed part of a complex of fortifications which also included a moat and a clearing between the walls and the city. The entire length of the walls is around 2,120 m, enclosing an area of 34.4 hectares. Not all of the town was enclosed by walls: much of the southeastern part of the town remained unprotected, while in other places unused areas were enclosed by walls.The width of the walls is around 4.2 m and the height of the walls varies between 8 and 12 m. The walls consist of internal and external stone facing with a core of earth mixes with gravel, pebbles and worked Roman stone recycled from demolished buildings, cemented with water.

There are 10 gates in the walls: five dating to Roman times and five added after 1853 to accommodate the expanding town population. The best preserved of the five original gates are the Porta Falsa and the Porta Miña, the latter of which still has the original vaulted arch set between two towers. I think one of these gates must have been the one I photographed. There are 49 towers and another 39 partially retained.

I guess like Ponferrada this is another one like the fish that got away from us. So sadly yet again not many photographs just the ones I managed to click click out of Suzys windows.

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Photos

one of the great gateways we didnt manage to get through .
Suzy cant squeeze in there