Puebla de Sanabria: Untouched by Time

Puebla de Sanabria on its rocky outcrop over the Tera
juts into the tourist's imagination.
Photos in this post 2018 and 2019 Jessica Knauss 

It was the winter low season in Puebla de Sanabria, with no festivals or pilgrimages scheduled for months, but my traveling companion, Daniel, felt lucky to grab the last available one-star hotel room in the historical center. Puebla is one of the official Most Beautiful Villages in Spain, a France-inspired list that began in 2011 as a way to promote rural tourism. It’s working.

Still can't get inside.
Photo 2019 Daniel Sanz 

We’d come to see Romanesque buildings, but quickly found that the churches on my bucket list were closed for visits until Easter week. We were left with buying souvenirs or walking among the pristine streets to admire the popular architecture.

It wasn’t a bad consolation prize, because aside from the occasional car and a dragon-faced rainspout the residents couldn’t resist, the old town of Puebla looks as it must have in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Tawny stones fit together in pleasant haphazard puzzles, noble crests adorn palaces, and extended eaves and colonnades provide shelter from wet weather. We aren’t the only visitors to get the sense that this is a place untouched by time.

The view from the castle 

After the climb to the robust, legend-filled castle at the top of Puebla’s dramatic rocky outcrop, we stood at the gusty vista point to gaze down at the river and newer part of town below. We read a plaque that advocates a tenuous connection between this place and Miguel de Cervantes, then headed west on streets lustrous with slate paving beneath balconies made of hand-carved wood.

It wasn’t long before we arrived at the other side of the rock, a parapet facing a green valley and the setting sun. A line of yet more historical homes cozied up to the bottom of the rock, but one caught our attention because the roof, near our eye level, was a timber grid, and stacks of slate tiles awaited placement.

Slate roof 

“They’re really doing that up right,” said Daniel. “It’ll fit in with the other houses, and it’ll last forever.”

New "old" construction. 

A cat darted across the parapet, shooed by a woman in house slippers and a T-shirt farther down the street. “Sorry,” she said as we approached. “The cats get into my plants!”

Pots and vases covered the parapet in front of her house, which she said they’d built in the 80s with high hopes. “It’s really big,” she said. “It’s only this wide, but goes way back, and it has two stories and the attic, which we were allowed to build because the house that was here before had one.”

“This was only built in the 80s? It looks much more historical,” said Daniel.

“The city makes us use traditional materials. See, the window frames are wooden. The sun batters the façade in the summer—it gets to be 40 degrees Celsius right here.” I believed her. At sunset in February, my jacket already felt heavy. “And in the winter, the frost comes and splits the wood, no matter how hard it is.”

“They make PVC that looks a lot like wood now,” said Daniel.

“I wish I could use PVC, but the city won’t let me. It has to be authentic for the tourists.”

Black mascara that must’ve once matched her hair color ran down her cheeks in the tracks of old tears. Her husband had passed away five years before. The children had all moved away, one as far as Valencia. They encouraged their mother to convert the grand family inheritance into a hotel, like many of the other homes in the old town. Otherwise, it was headed for neglect and ruin, with no one there to care for it. It looked as if the woman wanted to tell us she would live forever to personally take care of this legacy.

When we said our goodbyes and moved on, I spied the shadow of someone waiting for the woman at the end of the hall. A sister or cousin, as bent by time as she, hadn’t made it into her loneliness narrative. But I was relieved she had some company in her battle against the two fronts of history and progress. Puebla de Sanabria is touched by time, after all.