I like to get lost in the towns of Spain, like Childe Harold -who knows, if in fact the avatar or the egregor of Lord Byron, in my humble opinion- did for those Hellenic lands, of magisterial philosophies, today empires forgotten, eaten by the dust and the rapine.

Like them, this old bull's skin-Hesperia herself, where Herakles came to steal the golden apples and also steal Geryon's oxen-is full, filled, I would say, with past glories and ' popular philosophies' and although in many cases, their peoples do not reach the greatness of those incommensurable polis where Homer and Ulysses played the hero and the chronicler, do not detract, even though modern real estate attack their medieval foundations with the Trojan horse of brick, aluminosis and concrete.

But in Atienza, there are still remains. Pluperfect remnants of a pretérito that if not perfect, at least was vivacious of walls for inside; cricket and cicada distributing fallow and labor; of multicolored ethnic groups, which still retain in their banners, in the blood of their veins and in the pools of their memory, the greatness that comes from less than the three cultures of the Book.

Atienza, halfway between the 'pastrana' Guadalajara and the 'alfonsina' Soria, is one of them. Perhaps the Duero does not lull her in her melancholy way, nor, like the pure Soria, head of the Castilian Extremadura, does not have, on the edge of her roqueño castle, a Monte de las Ánimas that ignited the live pen of a poet of the Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer's carving.

But glorious hullabaloo is its celebration of the Caballada (festivity with horses), colorful Risus Pascalis that goes back to those misty centuries of the XII century, in which, once evicted the square of the garrison dwells that kept it, Muslim buffs bent the backbone to raise the most ancient of its churches, the one of Santa María -in whose laborious cover, it seems that time had licked and licked the stone, until turning its enlightened figures into mere ghosts- leaving evidence of its origins in Arabic script, that anyone can admire in its North cover: that one, eternally shadowed, that is left voluntarily seduced by that unrepentant and mocking spirit, which is that wind that the ancients called Aquilón.

His once powerful churches are now museums. As a museum that the hours of time burn with languor, as the poet Verlaine would say, are also the remains of its walls and streets in whose houses that spirit excels, not mocking, but familiar, called Tradition.

What a pleasure, the traveler's, to lose himself in his straits; feel helped in summer by the benevolent shadow of its balconies; to feel that their footsteps are traces on the cobblestones of History, small knuckles on the ineffable door knockers of that Dangerous Castle, which is called Time.

Atienza, also remembers his Comuneros (rebel forces) and does not forget the terrible defeat of Villalar. And likewise he intones, with a whisper, lost forever the oriflames that rippled on top of the tower of his roqueño castle, that sad, sad stanza that said: 'and since then ... Castilla never went up again'.

NOTICE: Both the text and the photographs that accompany it are my exclusive intellectual property.