Old Castile, its towns, its people, its legendary origins and its everlasting mysteries. I have always maintained the opinion, that there is nothing better, to let the spirit rise in incense of penetrating historical fragrance, than to be carried away to places that, even for the obstinacy that they denote in maintaining their appearance, induce the indubitable sensation that up to the time, indefatigable long distance runner who always arrives at the goal without caring for something as simple as the delay, has made a providential, unexpected and pious high in his path.

Cold, rest assured that I have no doubt whatsoever - and I take the opportunity to ask your forgiveness, for that repeated habit of always touching the redundancy - is one of those places. A place, in which one has the sensation, as soon as one begins to kick his steep streets, that time purposely gave a detour, so as not to hurt or to do too much, to this pearl of plateau, which was undoubtedly born for always remain fresh, as its metaphorical and homonymous Andalusian.

Do not believe, either, that I exaggerate. I do not raise, at all, false testimony, if I affirm that its own inhabitants are guilty of maintaining, as florid as possible, those roots of which they have sucked and will continue to suck for generations, at least while the stout beams of their houses endure.

Based on this, you can understand, as I did that one month of August, of a year that probably does not pass from regular, as far as the wine harvest is concerned and otherwise, as far as the rest was not even better nor worse than those that preceded him, that in the habeas corpus of Frías, count numerous awards and mentions to the best preserved people of that bull's skin, which in Hercules' time was called Hesperia and even Hispania and today, centuries and millennia After the bones of kings such as Geryon and Argantonio became sown of any of the thousand and one winds that come and go, leaving all kinds of memories on the road, it is called Spain.

Spain is to Castilla, what the ring is to the finger. And Castile was for the rest, a mother or a stepmother, but with putative rights of authority, despite the fact that nowadays, the common banners are clamoring for their privileges, shouting through the four cardinal points, what in Mexico shouted Emiliano Zapata: land and freedom.

A similar cry, in front of the powerful Earl of Haro, made this beautiful city and its square, conquered by the Muslims in the eleventh century, in the time of one of the great Castilian nobles, Sancho García, a besieged city

A place and avatars, which fortunately could not win the throat of the voice of that Castilian, who was already old even when the name of Castilla appeared early in places merindales as the not so distant Taranco.

Frías, with its castle dominating the town like a hawk immortalized in the stone, is home, also, of singular characters, attached to the earth and its inextricable ways, as it was well determined in the whole of its magnificent literary work, a burgalés of pro, as it was Miguel Delibes.

To lose oneself, then, in the mystery that surrounds the narrow corridors of some streets that were born looking towards that axis mundi that was then the noble and ecclesial power, makes venturing in its sweet historical mortar, be a pleasure within reach of the backpack.

NOTICE: finalized and improved version of the originally published in my blog MEMORIES OF A PILGRIM. Both the text and the photographs that accompany it are my exclusive intellectual property. The original entry, where you can check the authorship of juancar347, can be found at the following address: https://jc347.blogspot.com/2011/12/frias-encanto-medieval.html