Avila is a strange place for the visitor. It has one outstanding attraction, but little else. This oddity has long been noted, in 1964 the travel writer Jan Morris described it as “like an aged nut, whose shell is hard and shiny still, but whose kernel has long since shrivelled.” The shell, of course, being the famous castellated defensive walls, one and a half miles long with eighty-eight towers and ten gates – one of the most complete survivals of medieval city walls in Europe.
These draw huge numbers of visitors, aided perhaps by day trip proximity to Madrid, and their extraordinary state of preservation. The walls look brand new, there is so little weathering to the granite structure and the composition is so unaltered that you almost have to pinch yourself to remind one that it is not a stage set. Started after the re-occupation of the city from the Moors in 1090, it took, astonishingly, just nine years for them to be completed by Muslim prisoners. They were never to see action, even in the Civil War the Nationalists took the town without resistance, hence their remarkable state of preservation. Now, visitors can walk the walls for the best part of a mile, taking in the expansive views over the surrounding countryside and the rather disappointing views within.
For one of the strange things about Avila is the emptiness of the city within the walls. Around the Cathedral there is a concentration of historic buildings, attractive squares and narrow streets, but as one moves further inside, the buildings thin out and gaps appear between them until large areas of open, semi-derelict land start to dominate. This is no recent development. In 1964, Jan Morris wrote “at first the shell feels full enough, as you wander among the mesh of medieval streets inside, through the arcades of the central plaza, and down the hill past the barracks; but presently the streets seem to peter out, the passers-by are scarcer, there are no more shops, the churches tend to stand alone in piles of rubble and the little city becomes a kind of wasteland, like a bomb site within the walls, several centuries after the explosion.”
The life of the old city has been sucked out into the new development outside the city walls and, for some reason, no new development has come in to fill the vacuum. Why this should be is a mystery, for Spaniards are generally good at maintaining the life and vitality of their ancient cities and it is a surprise that the city authorities have not been more pro-active to regenerate this potentially prime area of real estate. The result for the visitor is that there are the walls, the Cathedral and a tiny area of medieval streets around it to see and little else. The benefit for the traveller is that all the tourist traffic is essentially day tripper and if you stay overnight, you have a small Spanish city virtually untainted by tourism.
Oldgreytravel stayed in the spectacular, but faded, glamour of the Palacio de Valderrabanos next to the Cathedral. Prices are very reasonable.
