We stayed in Aguilar for three nights and were lucky enough with the weather that we managed to get out for a walk or ride on each of the three days - much better than we anticipated in the days before we arrived, when we expected to get completely rained out on at least one of our layover days.
I’m going to save some time and mostly let the photos and captions speak for all three days, which I’ll post separately. As a general note on our stay though, we really loved Aguilar. It felt like one of those ‘just right’ destinations for us: an interesting and appealing setting on the Pisuerga River with an abundance of green space along the river; large enough to have a decent selection of facilities (especially restaurants) to support a longer stay, and a rich set of options for hikes and rides that we didn’t come close to exhausting. We were both sorry when the time came to leave and would love to come back someday. It felt like it would be an excellent base for a stay of a week or more.
On the day we arrived we both got out for afternoon walks. Rachael took a seven mile hike west to the large reservoir formed by a dam on the river just west of town and came back raving about the scenery. I took a similar but shorter walk, following the river west as far as the dam before turning back and through town on the opposite bank.
Here she’s walking a few miles long the northeast rim of the reservoir. She’s following the Ovidado Camino, a minor route in the network of ways to Santiago.
The Ovidado Camino is an older and less traveled route that begins in Bilbao and passes through the Cantabrian Mountains before eventually merging into the French Way further to the west from here.
After I’d loaded some of her photos into the post I was reminded that she had loaded those and others from her walk into a slideshow. Might as well include both, as long as the photos are already here.
Photos from Scott’s walk:
The first half of my walk followed the walking path out to the dam along the south bank of the river. Here were in town, looking across the river at the Collegiate Church of San Miguel.
A grey wagtail. Nine times out of ten here, a bird I see in the water is a wagtail; and nine times out of ten of those it’s a white wagtail. Nice to see the exceptional one.
