my travels: Zafra 3rd November

Zafra

I would be surprised if Zafra appeared on many “top ten places to visit in Spain” lists. In fact I’d be very surprised if it rated a mention in many tourist’s itineraries, however, that aside, despite freezing and wet weather for our visit, I reckon it isn’t such a bad little town. We walked around its not overly interesting streets and found enough to entertain us for the best part of a morning. We visited a museum in a cloistered but not silent nunnery/convent. It had an interesting video about a day in the life of a nun, (where Hilary saw, with glee, the nuns in full dress playing basketball) and some other interesting treasures associated with the convent. The chapel was small, but beautiful, and we enjoyed the experience and seeing something different very much.

We wandered through the old town looking at interesting buildings including a large castle which is now a posh hotel, before stopping for coffee at a small café and bread at the supermarket, on our way back to the truck for late lunch.

We had intended staying the night in Zafra again as the place we were at was OK, but after spending the afternoon doing our own things in the truck, and listening to the rain fall, after dinner we decided to head the 100kms or so up the road to Merida, which is a bigger town with a well preserved Roman history.

There was a place in our camper stop book to stay in Merida, thankfully it was easy to find on the map, and relatively easy to locate though we missed it the first time and ended up doing a huge circuit on one way streets to get back again. It actually turned out to be a large carpark and though it said it the book “gratis” when we left the next afternoon we discovered it wasn’t gratis at all. It wasn’t the greatest place to stay, a large sloping asphalt car-park with all sorts of cars around, many with bumps and scrapes, and most with a least one flat tyre?? We wondered if it was a council pound for cars? Don’t know, but at least it was handy to many of the Roman ruins we wanted to visit, and secure, so we parked up and settled in for the night.