The Castle and Montgo

We actually got to go inside the castle on Friday, and it was sweet! We have lots of fun pictures, and I actually learned quite a bit. Our guide talked to us about the differences between the Holywood portrayal of castles and the use and construction of historical castles, especially focusing on how historical castles are built for defense, not to be a royal home. For example, you know how they always talk about using battering rams on the doors? That probably wasn’t very common because the doors entrances are built at right angles to the city wall. To get to the door, you have to walk next to the city wall, and there isn’t any room to back up and go ramming into the wall because the road coming up to the gate is fairly narrow and makes a sharp turn.

He also talked about how castles are built on top of each other. When you conquer something or come to a site that was previously inhabited, it doesn’t make any sense to destroy it and start from scratch. Your castle will be much stronger and the work will go a lot faster if you just build around and over top of what was already there. At the gate, you can see gates from the Moors, the ones who built the original castle in the 12^th C and from the various conquistadors in the 14^th and 16^th C’s. The Moorish doors are built in the shape of a horseshoe (Spanish: herradura which literally means “hard iron,” and is my new favorite Spanish word right now).

Saturday morning, Seth and Paul organized a trip up Montgo, the mountain that is right next to Denia. We were going to climb all the way to the top (minimum of 3 hours to the top), but when we got up, it was very cloudy, and we wouldn’t have been able to see the city anyway. Instead, we decided to climb to the Cova de l’Aigua (Valenciano for Cave of Water) which was about a 1.5 hr hike. When we got to the cave, we figured out why it is called the Cave of Water. You have to climb over a pool of water just to get in the cave, and once you are in, you are pretty much walking in mud. Around the corner and in the back of the cave, there is a part of the wall that is hollowed out and you can see a big pool of water about two feet deep that extends back at least twenty feet to where you can’t see it anymore under the rock. On the other side of the cave, higher up, you can crawl in between the rocks (there is about a 1.5 foot clearance) into various smaller caves where a channel was built to gather the dripping water and funnel it into a bigger pool which feeds the pool at the mouth of the cave. Just outside the cave, covered in a metal cage so that people don’t graffiti it, is some Roman writing. There is nothing there to indicate what it says, but it was fun to see it and climb around in the cave for a while. We also sat around, ate our sandwiches, and took lots of fun pictures while we were up there. We have one of “More bars in more places” which is five of the girls all lined up in front of the view of the city. Guess who’s the top bar?

On our way back down the mountain, we stopped at a church which was built next to the home of Pare Pere which is Valenciano for “Father Peter.” He is not a saint, but he is revered in this community as a very godly person who will pray for you whenever you have a problem. The church has a walking garden with twelve stations that show the life of Jesus from birth to ascension.

Unfortunately, my pictures from climbing Montgo are still on my camera, and I can't transfer them until I get back home and don't have internet. So, you're getting the story before you can see it. Hopefully, I can put pictures up as soon as I get back from Barcelona (on Monday).

P.S. Sorry about the weird auto-formatting. For some reason it won't let me change the font or make everything the same color...