Fortunately, there are still worthy testimonies of those other worlds that are also in this one, as a well-known member of the Surrealist movement claimed, which, despite the realistic harshness of their fate, reaffirm us in the melancholic assumption that also led the cultivated playwright, Calderón de la Barca, to describe it as three key words about the true meaning of life, which also attack that defect that is always vanity: dream, illusion and frenzy.
A few kilometres away from that substantial medieval city, which, after all, continues to be Molina de Aragón and within the municipal area of a town called Herrería, the melancholic remains of a thousand-year-old Celtiberian fort survive, named ‘El Ceremeño’, whose warriors, possibly excited by the fiery nationalist speeches of leaders like the betrayed Viriato and even possibly, by coincidence and because, deep down, blood always pulls, did not hesitate to lend a hand to their neighbours from Numancia, when the Roman legions of Scipio Africanus put into practice, in the Hispania of that time, their cruel tactics of harassment and demolition.
Less prominent, perhaps, than the Numantian embers to which the famous ‘Santero of Saint Saturius’ used to climb to meditate when the wind blew, as is evident in the iconic work of José Antonio Gaya Nuño, the romantic remains of this other ancient Celtiberian city of Guadalajara, let us guess, in its constitution, as well as in the solid walls that protected it, an idea of architecture, both civic and military, from which the main towns and cities of a later period, no less intense and interesting, such as the medieval period, would later take a good example, which, like it, also knew the impressive need to protect themselves and withstand all kinds of harassment and assaults behind their walls.
But the place where it sits, unusual, in the background, since, generally, the Celtiberian forts used to rise on top of hills, not only to dominate the environment from their watchtower, but also to make their assault difficult, also offers us a variety of landscapes, which, far from those fields that today the flooded farmers comb with their tractors, also hide fantastic scenarios, where nature and its most staunch allies, water and wind, have shaped strange worlds.
Worlds not exempt from fantasy, which, in addition, have the fantastic quality of transporting the imagination of the curious spectator to such distant periods of History, that make its forgotten chapters, an open door to speculation and where still, after the millennia that have passed, they keep unimaginable secrets of cultures and civilizations that were already beginning to feel the anguish of an openly hostile world.
A walk along these paths, where the erosion of ancient rocks has drawn strange shapes that, in the form of pareidolias, directly affect the imagination, can also become another form of cultural adventure that leads us to understand, as far as possible, the characteristics and peculiarities of those other worlds that once stood proudly on the face of the earth and that today are barely a simple memory in some manuals that hardly anyone is interested in.
Stones half-hidden by vegetation, which, responding to the popular name of 'painted stones', contain, barely legible, the message of disappeared cultures that preceded us and that, in some way, also manifest that vital need for all humanity: to communicate.
In short: a cultural adventure that, together with the beauty of the surrounding towns, can also teach us to look with different eyes at the environments and places we visit and to think that life, as Calderón said, is nothing more than that: dream, illusion and frenzy.
NOTICE: Both the text and the accompanying photographs are my exclusive intellectual property and are therefore subject to my Copyright.
