History and Hiking
We love learning about the history of the places we visit. And we were incredibly intrigued when we learned that the earliest evidence of human life was found less than an hour away from here, in Orce. Some friends we met here earlier in August went there and we decided we would love to go there ourselves.
We drove out there and went to the museum first. It was definitely much smaller than anticipated, but we still managed to learn a ton! First, you went in and watched a brief 10-minute video that explained what they had found. It was all in Spanish but did have captioning at the bottom. While they speak too fast for me to catch and understand what they’re saying, my Spanish has come back to me enough over our month here that I could read the text on the screen and translate the vast majority of it out loud to Jon and the girls so they knew what was going on.
After the movie finished, we went and looked at some of the remains they had found. The most recent remains we saw were 700,000-year-old animal remains. There were also remains from almost 2 million years ago from Wooley Mammoths. The oldest human evidence was from 1.4 million years ago. It’s unbelievable to imagine people living their lives in this region so long ago! It looks like it was an incredibly hard life they have lived. We also were intrigued by how the landscape has changed in this area over the various eras. While the main museum area was only one room, there was a lot to unpack in that room. It was also interesting to see the partially excavated remains that are below the floor still. Our inquisitive girls asked a lot of interesting questions. And made some interesting observations, including that humans looked a lot more like monkeys long ago in history. This in turn led to us discussing that one of the theories is that we did evolve from apes in the past.
We are so grateful we decided to make our random trip there. It truly was a beautiful little town and we loved exploring it, enjoying one of their many cute little cafes, and hiking along the river. It was stunning! And an incredibly steep walk down to the river and back up! We didn’t have our bathing suits with us, so we didn’t go swimming, but we still loved our hike and running our hands in the water.
After we left here, we tried to figure out where to go to explore some cave paintings, which we understand are somewhere nearby. We never did figure it out. After grabbing lunch, we felt like we might have wasted a day coming to Orce just to go into the one museum, even if it was an interesting experience. Thank goodness for our amazing community back home! I had stopped in to chat with our neighbour, Zohar, that morning before leaving. And she randomly mentioned that another family had been to Castril the day before and LOVED it. You could go hiking, swimming, explore the cute town, etc. We pulled up Google Maps and I decided to see where Castril was. Turned out we were halfway between Oria and Castril. We hopped back into the car and carried on to Castril.
The first stretch of the hiking trail was the most breathtaking and also a little nerve-wracking to walk on the warped and spaced apart wood boards suspended up above the ravine. The suspension bridge was also really fun for all of us to walk across. The girls have never experienced that before. There was also a cave we walked through, a lookout bridge accessed from the cave, and other fun and pretty sights to see. We eventually moved away from the beautiful river to walk more through the countryside before making our way back up a steep hill into the town to explore the town by foot.
We found a beautiful little church and gardens in there, and there was a statue up at the top of the hill next to it. Katia and I were up for walking up there to the top, but Jon and Emmeline didn’t seem thrilled with that plan. So instead we made our way back to the café for granizado and popsicle treats.
We debated staying in town a little longer but decided we should leave and head back to Orce. There was a castle/tower there that the girls had wanted to see, but it was only open from 7 to 9 p.m. and it was already after 7 p.m. The exact age of it is unknown, but they do know it was built prior to the 11th century. We did make our way back to Orce and went into the castle. There wasn’t a ton to see in there, so it was pretty quick. But we were all happy to have seen inside of it.
All in all, we learned a lot at the history museum in Orce and are glad we experienced that. Otherwise, Orce was definitely an unfriendly and underwhelming town. Castril, on the other hand, was a stunning, very friendly, and overall great place to visit. We would not hesitate to go back there for a few days getaway! Not likely to happen in this next year, as our time in Oria is coming to a close. But maybe one day!