From Valencia to the Pyrenees

When I get to a place I tend to spend at least half a day walking around just soaking everything in and looking at shops and watching people.

While in Valencia I walked past a jewelry shop, which really caught my eye. The jewelry was bold, bright, contemporary but classic. It stuck in my mind so I went back to ask if the designers where Spanish.

Trinidad Gracia Bensa and her husband Jose Maldonado are the jewelry designers and Trinidad is from a third

generation of Jewelry makers. They both have degrees in fine art and Trinidad went to do a course in West Dean. She now also spends time teaching video art at the art college and she works with the art department allowing students to use her shop as a gallery.

The Shop is unusual because you can see the jewelry makers at work, I think there are three in total.

Also there is a wonderful safe room in the basement which Trinidad showed me.
My photographs are not very good, if you want to see better images of their work have a look at the website: www.trinidadgracia.es

On Saturday morning I picked up my good friend William Smalley from the airport and we headed north for the weekend. I have wanted to see a small village called Albarracin, outside Teruel for many years,

it is a bit of a tourist destination and I think I read about it in a book by Laurie Lee called: ‘As I Walked out one Mid-summers' Morning’, not sure...

Anyway we went north specifically to see it and here are a few pictures of the village

…. and Will. It is wonderfully atmospheric and the drive there is also great, you suddenly start descending from a very dry flat landscape into a gorge with a fast running river at the bottom, green and leafy, you look up to see this village climbing up the side of the cliff above you and it is exactly as it was in the 14th century, it even has the gutters running down the middle of the narrow streets. We saw a lady empty her bucket into the drain just as the villagers have always done.


If you have been hearing about the many fires Spain is suffering due to the very high temperatures, then you may want to know that although we where in the Teruel area, we did not see any smoke! The heat has been impressive and I am looking forward to going up into the mountains.

I dropped Will off the next day at the train station in Zaragoza after a very quick lunch and I headed into the Pyrenees, quite a long drive but stunning scenery.

Driving through flat barren countryside towards lush green mountains.