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Toledo
Just south of Madrid is Toledo which we reached easily and quickly by the motorways.
The motorways have been extraordinary whenever we have used them - though we tend to drive on small roads and back roads most of the time. When Spain was riding high financially, before the GFC, it seems to have ploughed an enormous amount of money into infrastructure and motorways seem to have been the biggest recipients of pots of money. Our recent map doesn't even cover all of them, nor does the latest download in our GPS, and often it's quite an effort to avoid getting on to them - it can take a very long time to get off again! Around Madrid, they loop and cross like Los Angeles freeways and can be confusing to poor tourists like us. It seems though that many were built just because they could. More than once we would find ourselves on a motorway stretching off into the distance in both directions and we would be the only car on it! A little worrying - had we accidentally drifted onto a road not yet open?? But no, many of them are simply roads with hardly any traffic! But I digress...
Toledo is yet another lovely old hill-top town surrounded by a looping river that encloses it on three sides. Great defences in days gone by. The town has a mixture of Christian, Jewish and Moslem elements and we again wandered around till we found what we were looking for. In the Jewish Quarter, the Museo Sefardi Sinagoga de El Transito is very beautiful with its now restored building showing fine carving and elegant decoration in a stunning ceiling. A church with a calm and peaceful white interior has its own twin towers which we climbed for great view over the city. And the Mezquita Cristo de la Luz is an old Mosque later converted to a Christian church and now being restored - quite small but with interesting Moorish interior architecture and remnants of Christian frescos on the walls.
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