This was to be our day to travel back to Madrid from Toledo. But there was no hurry, as the trip by train was only a little more than half an hour. Also, after eating breakfast we still had two hours to check-out time from our hotel, so we decided to use some of that time to look around in Toledo a little more. On the previous evening we'd returned to our hotel by bus, on the way following part of the wall along the northern boundary of the Old Town. The wall looked interesting, so we decided to get a closer look on foot. Or to be more specific, Philip and I decided to look at the wall, as Nella wasn't feeling well and wasn't interested in doing much of anything. So Philip and I set out from the hotel.

The view of the wall is much better from the outside of the Old Town than from the inside, so we somehow had to get through the wall. There are only a few places where you can get through, each of these being one of the city gates. Fortunately one such gate was not far from the hotel, reachable from the Calle de los Reyes Católicos on which the hotel was situated. We walked up the street, past the synagogue and the monastery, briefly getting a nice view of the Tagus River along the way.

Eventually we reached the gate, called the Puerta del Cambrón (a cambrón is a twisted, spiny bush). It's not clear exactly where this name came from – maybe there were some cambrónes in the vicinity when the gate was being named. The gate has also historically been called the "Gate of the Jews", no doubt for its proximity to the Jewish Quarter. The inside of the gate is decorated with a figure of St. Leocadia (martyred in Toledo in the 4th Century) above its archway.


The present Puerta del Cambrón was last rebuilt in 1576, a long time ago but well after the establishment of the city wall. A wall was originally built by the Romans, but it was expanded outward under the Visigoths and again under the Moors, each time to accommodate the growth of the city. Its last expansion took place under Alfonso VI, who reconquered the city for the Christians. In each expansion, it is thought that material from the previous walls was used in the new walls.

We followed the wall eastward, noting the occasional towers embedded in it.


As we walked farther to the east, the slope on the other side of the wall became more pronounced. At one point there was a large structure high above us, with an apparent escalator, embedded in the hillside, leading up to it.

We continued along the wall and shortly came across a parking lot full of cars in front of a simple doorway above which a sign was displayed, reading "Hacienda del Cardenal". This is apparently a hotel and a nice place to hold events, but we didn't go in to poke around, as we weren't sure what it was or whether we would be welcome (and our time was limited).

Just past the Hacienda and its parking lot we found two more historical-looking gates, both called Puerta de Bisagra as it turned out (a bisagra is a hinge in Spanish, but the name apparently comes from the Moorish Bab al-Saqra). You're probably thinking that two gates with the same name could lead to confusion. The Toledans thought of this too, and solved the problem by naming them "new" (Nueva) and "old" (Antigua). The first one we came across was Puerta de Bisagra Antigua. When they called this the old one, they weren't kidding – it was built by the Moors in the 10th Century, and functioned as the main gate into the city.

We continued toward the Nueva gate, on the way passing a statue of Alfonso VI.

We didn't quite reach the second Puerta de Bisagra, as there was an entrance to the city just before it. We peeked in and noticed an interesting-looking church.

The church and this part of the city looked like a can of worms we didn't have time for, so we turned around and went back the way we came. Also, we had our priorities – we really wanted to ride that escalator.


The large building at the top of the escalator was the Provincial Council Building. From next to it we could see a church up the hill that turned out to be the Church of Santa Leocadia, dedicated to the saint whose figure we'd seen back on the Puerta del Cambrón. The church is supposed to have been built on her birthplace.

We headed back in the general direction of the hotel. Eventually we found a Hebrew tile in the pavement, indicating that we were entering the Jewish Quarter, and that we were getting close to the hotel.



On returning to the hotel, we found that Nella wasn't feeling much better, but that she was game for moving on to Madrid as planned. We packed up a few loose objects we hadn't already packed and made ready to leave.