Monday 28th April

Toledo is a city full of churches, mosques and synagogues where all faiths were once tolerated, but then in 1478 along came the monarchs Fernando and Isabel, establishing the city as the centre of the Catholic Church in Spain.  They subsequently decreed their ethnic cleansing program aka ‘The Spanish Inquisition’, where the choices for other faiths were; become a catholic or get out of town (Spain), the latter option being the best call, the life chances of those choosing option one were doomed to torture and slow death.

So if church bling is your thing then look no further, todays Toledo is one big catholic treasure chest that includes paintings by El Greco, Zurbaran, Caravaggio, Titian and Raphael just to name a few.

Approaching Toledo

Bridge into the city

Toledo Cathedral

Japanese pilgrims chilling

Moving on south into the heart of La Mancha we traversed the vast plains with big sky vistas; our trail crisscrossed the path of Cervantes' fictional knight Don Quixote where hill tops are studded with the pepper pot windmills that so haunted him.

Our final destination for the night was an oasis campsite in the National Park de las Lagunas de Ruidera, where a most unusual series of turquoise coloured lakes (lagoons) are joined together by cascading waterfalls secreted away in an otherwise featureless landscape.