M&G's Blog: Monday 2 March – Zaragoza and Mallén

Where’s Bertie? He spent last night in the motorhome parking area in Zaragoza and tonight he’s in a little Aire just outside of the village of Mallén.

Weather: Yesterday: sunny and warm. Today: overcast first half of the morning, then clearing to sunshine and gradually warming up to around 17 degrees.

We weren’t in any rush to leave the Aire at Morella yesterday morning. Having paid for 24 hours, we thought we may as well tarry a while and take advantage of having electricity. We weren’t entirely successful in our tarrying, and just before 11 we got on the road to Zaragoza.

We’ve driven past the city a few times now, so thought that on this occasion we'd stop by to have a look at the place, killing two birds with one stone by also making our mandatory trip to a Decathlon store.

The motorhome parking area is on the north side of the city (we usually pass to the south) and we arrived* to find it busier than expected, but managed to nab one of two empty spaces (out of, I think, 50, although there were plenty of motorhomes parked elsewhere in the large car park too).

Being gone 1pm by then, lunch was our first priority, then I mixed the dough ready for a fresh loaf of bread. Once that was done, we thought it was a bit late to be heading off into town, so instead we filled a backpack with laundry and walked the 1.3km to the nearest laundrette.

The smallest washing machine they had there was 13kg. We had a 5kg load with us. Bit of a waste, and possibly the most expensive wash & dry we’ve ever done in Spain (€10 for one wash cycle and one dry cycle). Arguably, I should have just continued to wear my smelly running gear, and bought a few more pairs of pants!

Whilst it had been a semi-overcast start to the day in Morella, we’d driven out into clearer conditions, enjoying wall-to-wall sunshine and a warm afternoon in Zaragoza. With the forecast being the same for today, we were looking forward to good sight-seeing conditions…

…we awoke to a heavily overcast morning! Perhaps, with hindsight, we should have lounged around for most of the morning, but we didn’t think to do that, so it was only just gone 0930 when we donned warm jackets and gloves and wandered the few paces to the tram stop. The trams run frequently, and we had no wait at all - just as the ticket machine spat out our tickets, a tram pulled up; ten minutes later we were in the city centre.

First on the agenda, having walked past some of the city’s Roman remains, was the Basilica, which is a mightily eye-catching building from afar. It had a good smattering of bling and features inside too, but wasn’t one of the most awe-inspiring interiors I’ve seen.

Next was the Goya museum, except it turns out that it’s closed this year for complete renovation. Harrumph! We might have gone to the city museum instead, except that is also currently closed. So we wandered around a bit, saw another church and the adjacent mansion, wandered around the market, then ducked into a bar next door for coffee (and to warm up – it was somewhere between 8 and 12 degrees out, depending on which display you believed).

At that point, we decided we’d seen enough of Zaragoza. It’s a bigger city than either of us had realised, and although we only saw a bit of it (we probably saw more of the suburbs than of the centre, with our walk to the laundrette yesterday and our further wanderings whilst the washer was washing), we liked what we saw.

We walked back to Bertie, via a big shopping centre that housed Decathlon. There we were restrained, coming away with just a new fleece for each of us.

The sun had won through and we were overheating in our jackets by the time we got back to Bertie, whose interior was also toasty warm with the sun on his windscreen. We might then have sat around for the rest of the afternoon, to move on tomorrow morning, but the Aire is neither attractive nor in the quietest location, being metres away from a busy road, along the middle of which runs the tram. Thus, after a quick lunch, Bertie rolled back out of the car park and came, via a detour to a Lidl, to Mallén, which is just a stone’s throw away from the motorway.

We’re just outside the village here, but it’s only a 1km walk to the church, so for another leg-stretch as much as anything else, we wandered up to see it. As with almost all churches these days, it was locked, and the outside wasn’t interesting enough for me to trouble to take a snap. However, we did get the impression from our walk there, together with an information sign we found showing the location of five or six mansion houses, that this used to be a prosperous place. On the street we walked, we noted some very grand historic buildings, with their lower walls bulging outwards, other old houses in a similar but worse state, intermingled with far newer buildings that have obviously replaced some of the former category. It made me wonder whether there had been an earthquake hereabouts to cause all the structural degredation and such an extensive programme of replacing the old with new (rather than the expected renovation of the old).

(*As we arrived in Zaragoza there was a marching band practice in progress in the car park where the motorhome parking is location. I feel that if there was to be a bingo card of things that we often encounter on a trip to Spain, a marching band practice in a car park where we're staying is one of them.)