Castilian medieval architecture: Calatañazor

One of the brightest examples of the fascinating medieval Castilian architecture, which still maintains a good part of its original structure, is this town of Calatañazor, nestled about fifty kilometers from the capital of Soria, a place that occupies a glorious colophon in the golden pages of the history.

It was here, before his old walls, where the famous leader Almanzor reaped a defeat, when he returned from one of his punitive incursions to Santiago de Compostela, which despite being only a skirmish, left in memory the famous saying of : in Catalatañazor, Almanzor lost his atambor, being understood as an atambor - the plain people turned the word into a drum - fortune or good luck.

But in the twentieth century, Almanzor went back to the news, when the great actor and director Orson Welles considered it as the special setting for his unforgettable film 'Bells at midnight', in which he played, in a delicious way, the role of old Fallstaff.

As in most Castilian villages of its style, the steep streets are lined with houses that huddle with each other, in which the primitive material of the stone shines, the cooked adobe, the wood and the tile, coming from in large quantities of hard fields, but rich in clay.

The arcades are also another of the main characteristics in this type of constructions, as well as the cone-shaped pyramid fireplaces, which in the popular slang are known as 'scarewhitches' and are an inheritance of the ancient Celtiberian cultures that inhabited area.

NOTICE: Both the text and the accompanying photographs are my exclusive intellectual property.