Spain · Old Town
Toledo
Every street on the menu.
Every street in the Old Town of Toledo is a line of dots you collect by walking it. I have been lying in one of them for six hundred years and I am still not finished.
The Old Town
Every street, drawn.
Every lane inside that line is a course. The circles are fruit.
Landmarks
What I would eat first.
Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.
Catedral de Santa María 1,500 points
It hides. There is no open ground wide enough to stand back and look, so you meet it one wall at a time until a lane turns and the whole west face lands on you. Then go right round the outside and count the doors. I have counted them. My number keeps changing.
Alcázar de Toledo 500 points
You will see this one long before you reach it, from half the lanes in the Old Town and from the far bank. A cube with a spike on each corner, planted on the highest ground there is. It is also the shape I am wearing as this level's badge, so walk up and check my likeness.
Mezquita del Cristo de la Luz 500 points
The north tip of the level, tucked in against the ramparts. It is the smallest thing on this list by a distance and you can be round it in ten minutes. Spend them on the brickwork outside instead. Somebody made an entire wall out of nothing but one rectangle, turned different ways.
Monasterio de San Juan de los Reyes 500 points
The far west end of this level, and the walk down is worth it for the cloister alone: two tiers of stonework round a square of orange trees, quiet enough to hear your own feet. Look up at the north side on your way in. Something is fixed to it that does not belong on a wall, and I am not telling you what.
Sinagoga de Santa María la Blanca 500 points
Two doors along from its neighbour, which is why most visitors do both in the same twenty minutes. Do not. Sit down in this one. There is nothing in the room but pillars and shadow, the sound goes strange, and the carving at the top of each pillar repeats and then quietly stops repeating.
Iglesia de Santo Tomé 250 points
A plain little door on a slope, and usually a short queue at it. Behind the door is one room with one thing in it, and the ticket buys you nothing else. Worth it anyway. Look up at the top of the belfry too. It was doing a completely different job before it took this one.
Plaza de San Justo 250 points
A small sloping square that most routes cross without noticing, halfway between the big two. Locals sit on its steps in the evening, which is how you tell a good one. The door beside the tower keeps short hours. Look them up and come back for it. This is the interior nobody mentions.
Plaza de Zocodover 250 points
This is where you will start, because everything arriving in the Old Town arrives here. It is the one wide opening on the rock, and the only spot where I can see more than forty paces in a straight line. Take the arch out of its east corner and look down, then turn back in.
Sinagoga del Tránsito 250 points
Down at the south-west corner, behind a garden of olive and cypress that most visitors walk straight past. The ceiling is cedar and the daylight arrives high up and sideways. Then look at the top of the wall. Somebody put in months up there, on a surface nobody could get near.
Torre de San Cristóbal 250 points
Easy to miss, and almost everybody does. It sits alone at the southern edge of the level, in a lane with no shops and no queue, and the ground beside it drops away to the water. Nobody stops here. That is the entire recommendation. I like a monument with no audience.
Name origin
Why it is called Toledo.
Toledo comes from Toletum, and Toletum is older than the people who wrote it down. It is on coins from the first century BC, it is pre-Roman, and nobody has managed to explain it. The best guess is a pre-Celtic word about height, or a pre-Celtic word about water. This rock is made of height and water and nothing else, so either one would fit.
Sources: toponhisp.org
Why here
Somebody stood here and decided.
Look at the shape of it. The Old Town is a granite dome, and the Tagus has cut a bend round its east, south and west sides, so three of the four edges are a gorge. There is one way in that does not involve climbing. Everything else is a climb, which is why the fortress sits on the summit, why the walls run where they run, and why so many streets here are named after going up or going down rather than after anybody.
Sources: cultura.castillalamancha.es, cultura.castillalamancha.es
Why then
When the first stone went down.
The oldest settlement anybody has found here is on the Cerro del Bú, the hill across the water, and it is Bronze Age. The date in the books is 193 BC, when Marcus Fulvius Nobilior brought the place under Rome and it started being called Toletum. So the founding date is really the date the filing began. People had been living on this bend for a thousand years before a Roman turned up with a name for it.
Sources: cultura.castillalamancha.es
Who ruled
Everyone who thought they owned this.
I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.
- 573–711
The Visigothic kings. Leovigild, who reigned from 573 to 586, made this the capital of his kingdom and a bishop's seat in one move, so the crown and the church were installed on the same rock in the same years. The ground around the fortress was given over to royal residences. That held until 711. Then the kingdom ended. The rock did not.
Sources: cultura.castillalamancha.es, cultura.castillalamancha.es
- 711–1085
Muslim Toledo, which was called Tulaytula, and which is where most of what you walk on comes from. In 932 Abd al-Rahman III had the stronghold on the summit rebuilt as an alcazaba, the seat of the judge. The lanes, the brickwork, the business of getting water uphill and the word alcázar itself all date from these three and a half centuries. It closed in May 1085.
Sources: cultura.castillalamancha.es, cultura.castillalamancha.es
- 1085–1561
Castile, and then an empire. Alfonso VI took the city in May 1085 and Toledo carried on being a capital, which by the sixteenth century meant the capital of the Spanish empire under Charles V. Then in 1561 the court packed up and went to Madrid. Nobody here was asked.
Sources: cultura.castillalamancha.es, turismo.toledo.es
- 1561–
Madrid, ever since. For four and a half centuries every decision about this town has been taken seventy kilometres up the road. What stayed behind was the archbishop, the stone, and me. A capital gets rebuilt every generation. A monument gets repointed. I know which one I would rather be.
Sources: turismo.toledo.es
The emblem
What the shield means.
This is not the shield. Toledo's arms are quartered with castles and crowned lions, a pomegranate at the foot, the collar of the Golden Fleece wound round the outside, the lot of it resting on a black double-headed eagle beneath an imperial crown, with an enthroned emperor on the left and another on the right. Now fit that into a circle the width of your thumbnail. So the icon is the fortress instead: a block of stone sixty metres to a side with a spired tower on each corner, standing on the highest ground in town. It is the one thing here you can still recognise from the far bank of the river.
Sources: es.wikipedia.org, cultura.castillalamancha.es
Emblem: Original artwork for Cobble Gobble — no third-party source
Three facts
Three things I know about this place.
The river runs a hundred metres below the town, which for most of this town's history meant it was thirsty. On 23 February 1569 a machine put together by Juanelo Turriano lifted Tagus water the whole hundred metres up to the palace on the summit. It sent up about eighteen thousand litres a day. There were sixty thousand people counted here. The water went to the palace. One street on this level still carries his name and there is nothing left at all of the machine.
Sources: ejercito.defensa.gob.es
The walls only turn up in the record from the Islamic period onwards, and the line you can trace today is the line they describe. Six sectors, a row of named towers, and the gates: Cambrón, Bisagra, Valmardón, Alcántara. Set into them are corachas, spurs of wall that run down to the water, and their job was to fetch the river up here without anybody opening a gate. A wall that also carries water is my kind of wall.
Sources: cultura.castillalamancha.es
What is protected here is not a building. It is the town. Toledo was declared a historic-artistic monument in 1940, it is listed as a Bien de Interés Cultural, and UNESCO put the city on the World Heritage list in 1986. So every kerb on this level belongs to a listed monument, including the one I am lying in. I have never felt so official.
Sources: cultura.castillalamancha.es, www.toledo.es, turismo.toledo.es, whc.unesco.org
Street words
What the names on the signs mean.
- cuesta
- A slope. There are thirty-two of them: Cuesta del Alcázar, Cuesta de la Culebra, Cuesta de los Escalones, Cuesta del Águila. The same word also means “it costs”. Spanish worked that out a long time before I did.
- bajada
- A way down, which on this rock is a whole different proposition from a slope: Bajada de Alcántara, Bajada del Pozo Amargo, Bajada del Barco, Bajada del Calvario. When a street tells you it goes downhill, believe it.
- callejón
- A little alley, and there are forty-six of them here. Callejón del Codo is the elbow, Callejón de los Dos Codos has two of them, and Callejón de las Siete Revueltas is named for seven bends in a lane you could shout across. My favourite width.
- cobertizo
- A lane with a house built across the top of it, so the street goes straight through the building: Cobertizo de San Miguel, Cobertizo del Pozo Amargo, Cobertizo Santo Domingo el Real. The town ran out of ground and carried on upwards over the road. There are only three, and they are the only shade on the whole rock.
- travesía
- A cross-street, the short hop between two proper ones: Travesía del Judío, Travesía de la Judería, Travesía de los Dos Codos, Travesía del Arquillo. Twenty-six of them, most of them shorter than their own names, and every one has dots on it.
- san / santa
- A saint. San Andrés, San Bartolomé, San Cipriano, Santa Ana, Santa Catalina, Santa Leocadia, Santa Úrsula, and eighty more. One name in four on this level belongs to somebody's saint. There are more saints here than straight lines.
The size of it
One Old Town, measured.
Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.
- 334streets
- 2,175dots
- 33.0km of street
- 43.4km on foot
- 12.4hours at a stroll
Nearby
Old Towns close to this one.
The game
Your first city is free.
Cobble Gobble is a walking game for iPhone. Claim any city as your free one. Every other city is a one-time purchase you keep for good, Family Sharing included, and a city you own plays fully offline.