Monday 7th April 2025 – Ainsa, Spain

Before we left, we walked into the centre of the village and bought some bread and other supplies. The bread in Spain has generally been rather disappointing – white and not much flavour. However, this bread was the best so far – still white, but crusty, good crumb and good flavour.
Another pleasant drive in sunny weather with beautiful scenery, many castles, reservoirs, gorse and more rivers than we have seen in Spain. We were in another geopark when we arrived at Ainsa, a small, stone-built village next to a castle on top of a hill with the modern town spread around below. We tried to take the only road up to the old town and found that it was closed between certain times. This was one of those closed periods and we had to park in another car park bin the modern town. We were joined by a number of other vans waiting to use the road to get to the aire at the top of the hill. At 18:30 we set off, going round the barriers to find roadwork traffic lights and major work going on to repair a major landslip that had taken away half of the road. We carefully drove past the plant and workers, hoping that there wasn’t another landslip.
The aire is large and pleasant with views of the castle and the surrounding countryside, which included the snow-capped mountains of the Pyrenees. We walked through the castle grounds into the old town. Most of the houses are early 19^th century and are beautifully preserved. This is obviously a big tourist attraction and there are many restaurants but, being a Monday, most of these were closed. We had hoped that we could have a last traditional Spanish meal before went over the border into France, but it wasn’t to be. In the main, very pretty square there was a pizza restaurant and we had excellent pizzas and good wine – not traditional Spanish, but very good nonetheless.
Photos: The best loaf of bread that we had in Spain; Looking back at Cantavieja as we left; An interesting rock formation on our journey; One of the reservoirs that we passed; Ainsa’s main square; The main street of Ainsa at night.