Ancient and modern

We went on a guided archaeological tour this morning. We started at the hotel in Cotobro, which has a Roman bath house underneath it. A health and safety nightmare that probably wouldn't be allowed in the UK: the hotel is cantilevered over the remains and a group of 30 people scrambled around the remains and crawled under the concrete supports to look at the pottery kiln, with constant risk of slips, trips, falls, or just banging your head on concrete.

From there we walked up to the "Roman" bridge that is only a few hundred metres from our house. We had already inspected it and decided that though there may well have been a Roman bridge in this location, this wasn't it. Our guide, the town archaeologist, tried his best to say that it was Roman and parts of it had just been "restored", but we weren't having it. Maybe the footings and arch are Roman, but the roadway and parapets must be medieval at best. As you can see there is still a (somewhat more highly engineered) road crossing at this point

Anyway, the group was very interested and a couple of know-it-all guys asked lots of questions/held forth with their own theories, so the tour took a  good two hours in all. Back home we had lunch in a sheltered corner of the terrace (still windy). S made another all-star Spanish salad: lettuce, pineapple, raspberries, mild goat's cheese, caramelised almonds. I eat so much salad here!

This evening, for a change, we popped out to a local bar for an apero -- the free tapas were almost enough for dinner, but we are just filling up on cheese and biscuits.