Here’s a belated quicky.  Drove through Avila en route from Salamanca to Segovia. Leslie keeps calling these three hill towns, and actually, I think Avila is one. (A hill town.) Lots of folks like this place and rhapsodize about it being the quintessential Castillian village. I can’t really say. It was about a million degrees that day and everyone was too heat-blasted to even get out of the car.  Managed to walk a few hundred feet, but after a short while it was too much.  There seems to be not one drop of shade in this entire place.

The walls you see here are the biggest tourist attraction of Avila. They were built in 1090, and are the longest, largest, best-preserved stretch of medieval fortifications in Europe.  Note that Avila was one of the first towns to fall to Christianity at the beginning of the Reconquista.