Travel Tuesday: Archaeological Museum of Cuenca, Spain

The coolest artifact in the collection, a Roman brick that a couple of people stepped on while it was still wet. You can imagine the bricklayer screaming at the clueless pedestrian as he walked on it two thousand years ago, only to have a second person do the same thing!

Last weekend we got away from Madrid and spent some time in Cuenca, an hour's train ride from the capital. I'll be writing up this historic town more thoroughly in my usual Wednesday post over at Black Gate. In the meantime, here are some photos from the city's excellent little archaeological museum.

The museum has modest collections from the Neolithic, Medieval, and Early Modern periods and some impressive items from the Iron Age and Roman times. The province of Cuenca has three major Roman towns--Ercávica, Segóbriga, and Valeria, so the Roman section was especially good.

Roman feet!

Maybe the hipsters will make this style popular again.

This little guy is an Iron Age figurine, one of many in the museum's collection.

Travel Tuesday: A Templar Church and Prehistoric Paintings in Soria, Spain

In the Spanish province of Soria there's a narrow valley called El Cañon del Rio Lobos that leads to this, La Ceuva de San Bartolomé. On its walls are faint Bronze Age drawings, so faint I couldn't get a good shot of them. Sorry! They're hard to interpret anyway. They're mostly vertical or zigzag lines, some of which look vaguely human.

From out of the cave you see the Ermita de San Bartolomé, a late Romanesque church from the 13th century. It's said to have been built on an earlier Templar church in the 11th century and was the center for the military order of holy knights who defended the Soria branch of the Camino Santiago. Local tradition says the mystical Santiago (St. James) himself appeared and threw his sword into the canyon, declaring that wherever it landed a church should be built for the Templars.