While Zaragoza (Saragossa) is not a super-busy city, the noise from the large avenue the hotel was in woke me up early enough to be amongst the first customers at Pannitelli Original Bakery. I had a toast, orange juice, and a coffee, then set off to the not-so-easy task of retrieving my car, driving back to the hotel, getting my deposit returned, and going on my merry way. It took a while, but once that was taken care of I could drive off. Getting out of Zaragoza was easier than getting in had been, and there were few cars on the road. One of them was the traffic police, so every driver seemed on their best behaviour…
Once in the speedway, the first stop of the day was a petrol station, as there was no way I made it home with one quarter of a tank. Unfortunately, there were no low-cost fuelling points on my way, so I had to use a big-name one. Thirty euro don’t take you as far with branded fuel…
To be fair, I could have driven home the previous day, but I thought that after such a week, an extra night of sleep could only be beneficial. Staying also allowed me to see the Asian treasure exhibits in the Lonja and make a stop on the way. My first idea had been going downtown to see the Natural History Museum, but it closes at the weekend. That was why I asked about the visit during the course, and it turned out it was doable. Thus, in the end, I decided to make a stop in a small palaeontological site that I would not travel to otherwise. Furthermore, the site popped up during the course twice – the signage had been handled by Paleoymas and the Natural Science Museum had quite a few specimens from there.
The Yacimiento Paleontológico de Murero palaeontological site holds remains from the Cambrian Period, extremely important because there are around eight million years’ worth of fossils (511 to 503 million years ago) preserved in the strata. Palaeontologists have found about eighty species of trilobites, along with echinoderms which had not yet developed five-way symmetry, brachiopods, worms… It is mainly composed of shales which allow for soft-bodied organisms to be fossilised along the hard bits like shells or exoskeletons. The site is famous because it allowed researchers to identify sexual dimorphism in trilobites – they were able to describe two distinct types of animals within a same species, which are interpreted as male and female. What they don’t know is which animal is which sex.
I left Zaragoza using the A23, then turned to a national, smaller road (N234) that crossed over to the A2. The site and the municipality it technically belongs to, Murero, lie halfway through this road. As mentioned before, not somewhere I would purposely travel to, but since I was literally in the area, it was a convenient stop. The regional road was all right, but the local one was narrow and the curves were very sharp and steep. I was thankful that all of the cars I saw passed while I was hiking or taking photos of the site, and none while I was driving. I decided to only stop at the area which had a small parking lot so it was safe for me and any potential driver.
To be honest, I expected to see more in the palaeontological site. The signage has either weathered out or been vandalised and nothing is readable. It is a short walk up and down a hill where you can’t really see anything except for a box at the top where people leave what they find, but there was not a chance to see anything in situ. I guess the palaeontologists and the amateurs have taken out everything that is worth anything already – or left it well buried so it can’t be pillaged. I wouldn’t even consider it a nice hike because broken pieces of slates made the path extremely slippery (I forgot my hiking boots in the car…).
And oh, the temptation to steal a trilobite from the display box was strong! I resisted it though, and headed back to the car after an hour or so. I undid the path towards the N234 road and continued onto the A2. I made a stop in-between for some caffeine and a snack, but I was home for Spanish lunchtime. I have to admit I had pondered stopping somewhere along the way, maybe Daroca, Belchite or Calatayud, but considering that I still had to drive back, I decided to leave it for another time.
On my first solo road trip, I was surprised by the sheer amount of people who like driving at the same speed all the time. A bunch of drivers in the regional road, with limits of 90 kph, did 70 kph even when they drove through 50 kph towns. The same happened in the speedway – some people drove at 110 kph, both at the 120 kph or the 100 kph stretches. There were also those who liked aligning their cars with the markings that separate the lanes, effectively occupying both. The lorries were more manageable on the way back than towards Loarre, as it was a Saturday morning, and because the speedway feels more “downwards”.
Once home, it hit me how tired I was, so I guess it was a good thing that I had not made another stop. Checking Murero out was a good idea as it broke the trip in half and was a small hike that helped me keep alert, but more would have been overdoing it.
As a recap of my experience with the course Técnicas de restauración en paleontología a través de la preparación de los huevos de dinosaurio de Loarre: Palaeontological Restoration Techniques through the preparation of Loarre dinosaur eggs, I can say that all in all, it was amazing. The professors were extremely knowledgeable, they made learning effortless and entertaining, and the group was fun and easy-going. The course was way more hands-on than I had expected, literally covering everything from geological analysis to the fate of a dug-up piece, either in display or in storage within the museum, including working with the fossils themselves. It was not cheap, mostly due accommodation choices, but booking in advance probably made it better – and honestly, decent hotels were a must. As Loarre is a small village, food options were limited. Though there was a bakery / shop, we were out doing stuff while it was open. However, I made do with crisps or nuts for dinner, as I had a good breakfast. Probably lunch in Ayerbe was the weakest, and most awkward since it involved getting to know each other (and ten bucks for a frozen pizza was daytime robbery).
The whole trip involved driving around almost 700 km. It did show me that I (and my coffee-maker of a car) can manage the long drives better than I had expected, even during a “peak” time such as a holiday-period opening date. I am more comfortable on the road than in towns, though, even when caught in a jam. Was it the smartest idea to head to Loarre directly after work? Probably not, but if I had to do it all over again, I probably would – it was the only actually available option. And knowing that not all the course openings were filled, I would not have stressed as much over the University’s lack of efficient sign-up.
The only downside I can find is the lack of mental reset – I was constantly learning new facts, and I did not get much me-time. It was extremely fun, but not really a holiday where I could plan and do stuff at my own pace. Would I do it again? Well, the University of Teruel runs a similar summer course using Dinópolis resources, and sign ups open in February…
I woke up and for the first time in days I put on “person clothes” (for the city) instead of “scarecrow clothes” (for hiking & working in the field). Before setting off on the trip, I went to the sales to buy some jeans that would work for sitting on rock or walking through thistles and dry grass, and while they are not particularly nice, they are comfortable and resistant. Saragossa / Zaragoza was still waking up as I headed for breakfast to a bakery close to the hotel, Pannitelli Original Bakery, which I had chosen for two reasons. One, they opened at 7:30, which gave me plenty of time to walk to the university afterwards and two, they had waffles, I had seen them online. I wanted waffles, and a big coffee. I had both (and some orange juice, just because I could).
It turned out that not driving to the university Universidad de Zaragoza had been a great idea. Though it had been my first thought (dump the car there, then walk to my accommodation), I was lucky that in the end I was able to reserve my parking spot with the hotel. It happens that access to campus is restricted to working staff. Students can drive into the parking lot ten times in the school year. And on top of that, there was a farmers’ market for some reason.
Having 20 minutes to walk, I was the first one there, and I sat down in the rock garden of the Earth Sciences building to wait for everyone else for the last day of the course Técnicas de restauración en paleontología a través de la preparación de los huevos de dinosaurio de Loarre: Palaeontological Restoration Techniques through the preparation of Loarre dinosaur eggs. By 9:00, when class was to start, I was the only one besides the teachers who had managed to arrive. Everyone else had either got lost, left Loarre late, or was taking forever trying to park. So yay me being lucky for once (and for the 20 € which the hotel parking cost for the whole stay).
The first chunk of the morning was a tour through the Rock and Hard Material Preparations, 3D Printing and Scanning Service (Servicio de preparación de rocas y materiales duros, impresión y escaneado en 3D) in the university. They have two main lines of work. One is to make thin translucent sections out of specimens so they can be studied under the microscope, and the other is digitalising and making 3D models and copies of items so they can be lent or studied through a computer. The inner works of the department were explained by Raquel Moya Costa, who not only described in detail all her complex machinery, she also gave each of us a 3D printed T-Rex charm from the Dino Run Game!
We then moved onto the Petrology lab to look at thin sections on the transmitted-light microscopes – preparations of a sauropod eggshell, a crocodilian eggshell and an iguanodon eggshell. There were other preparations we could snoop around if we promised not to take pictures and publish them. We also got to play with the 3D copy of one of the first eggs recovered from Loarre. Much less heavy than the real thing, for sure.
Then a bit of chaos ensued as we got distracted by the shiny exhibits of the Palaeontology department, and a couple of post-docs offered to show us their lab and what they were working on. Having finished all the activities of the course, the coordinators had organised an extra visit to the Natural Science Museum Museo de Ciencias Naturales de la Universidad de Zaragoza (which might have actually been my fault as I asked how come that would not happen, considering that most of the region’s fossils are officially deposited there). A few people left first, but some of us got delayed looking at the lab specimens, and then we had to hurry to the museum…
Once we were at the site of the Museo de Ciencias Naturales, we were taken on an express visit of the palaeontology ward by Ester Díaz Berenguer, curator of the collections. The museum is located in one of the historical buildings of the Zaragoza campus. Designed by Ricardo Magdalena in 1886, it was erected with academicist criteria, in brick, with large windows and striking symmetry. It opened in 1893, and during the 20th century, it served as Faculty of Medicine. When the university moved to the newer campus, the building was refurbished as cultural spot and seat of the government body. The basement was turned into the exhibition site of the Science Museum, which has three main areas – palaeontology, natural science, and mineralogy.
The palaeontology ward of the museum comprises nine rooms. The first one is an introduction to the science and the concept of fossilisation, and the following ones run through the Earth’s history, from the Precambrian to the Quaternary. The Precambrian is the earliest “calculated” period in geological time, and spanned from 4567 to 539 million years ago (give or take). Though we cannot pinpoint when life actually originated, it was already there when this “supereon” gave way to the Cambrian. During the Ediacara Period, at the end of the last Eon of the Precambrian, the Proterozoic, the earliest complex multicellular organisms that we know about thrived in a state that has been called “The Garden of Ediacara”. The word “garden” tries to evoke the idea of the “Garden of Eden” as there was no active predation and life just… existed.
The next rooms focus on the “Cambrian Explosion”, a term used to refer to the point in geological time when living things took over the planet. At first, this brand-new life was comprised of ocean-dwelling invertebrates. In the room there are impressive trilobites from the Murero Palaeontological Site, which I had actually planned to drive through on my way back. But not only animals appeared, so did plants – organisms which produced a new toxic gas that would change the planet forever: oxygen. To the side of this area there is a curtained room, the “aquarium”.
Here you can see the cranium of Carolowilhelmina geognostica, a fish which lived around 392 million years ago, during the Devonian period. It was a placoderm, a group whose main characteristics were being covered in armoured plates, and having developed an actual jaw and true teeth. The specimen is not just the holotype, it is the only known fossil of the animal. The cranium alone measures almost 45 cm, and by its shape, palaeontologist speculate that the animal was probably a predator of invertebrates. A first fragment of the fossil was found in Southern Aragón in 1971 by palaeontologist Peter Carls. Carls kept returning to the site to search for the rest of it every summer, until in 1986 he unearthed the rest of the skull, which was finally extracted in 1993.
The following room is devoted to the Mesozoic, and it hosts another of the museum treasures, the skull of the holotype and only specimen of Maledictosuchus riclaensis, the “Cursed Crocodile from Ricla”. This crocodilian lived in saltwater around 163 million years ago, during the Middle Jurassic. It had flippers instead of legs, and probably ate fish. The fossil was found during the construction of the high-speed railway between Madrid and Barcelona in 1994. It earned the name of “cursed crocodile” because despite the fact that it was the oldest crocodilian found in Spain, exceptionally preserved on top of that, it took 20 years until someone could tackle its study and description. The “curse-breaking” researcher was Jara Parrilla Bel, one of the post-docs who shown us her lab work at the university.
Of course, the “stars” of any palaeontological exhibit are dinosaurs. The museum hosts several iconic pieces, amongst them replica of the feet of the first dinosaur ever described by researchers belonging to the local university Universidad de Zaragoza, Tastavinsaurus sanzi (a titanosaur), a whole specimen of the Mongolian Psittacosaurus (a small ceratopsian), and a good part of an Arenysaurus ardevoli, a hadrosaur which lived in the Pyrenees area around 66 million years ago, during the early Maastrichtian; the rest of the specimen is located in Arén, where it was located, and which is one of the museum’s satellite centres, just like Loarre’s museum-lab. In the same room there were trunks of fossilised wood that could be touched, and a skull of the extinct crocodile Allodaposuchus subjuniperus.
After a small room with an audiovisual representing the impact of the meteorite and the K-Pg mass extinction (which we skipped due to time constraints), there was an exhibit of the spread of mammals. The specimen of honour in this exhibit is the ancient sirenian Sobrarbesiren cardieli (holotype, and the topic of our guide’s thesis). This species lived during the Eocene, around 45 million years ago. Sirenians (manatees and dugongs) are a type of marine mammals whose closest relatives are elephants – and not other ocean-dwelling mammals. After life spread through land, a number of mammals went back to water, and it looks like this species is a snapshot on the readaptation process: it was already completely aquatic, but it still had four functional limbs. Its hind legs had started reducing and its tail was getting flat. It was a strict herbivore, eating sea grass, but less efficiently than current sirenians.
There was also an impressive aquatic turtle of the genus Chelonia, several remains of Gomphotherium angustidens, an elephantimorph, and smaller pieces including crabs, sea urchins, gastropods and even insects. Several of these specimens are holotypes, too.
The final area was almost contemporary considering when we had started. It hosted remains of cave bears (Ursus spelaeus, 40,000 years ago), the skull of an aurochs (Bos primigenius, a species that actually lived until the 1600s), evidence ancient hyena nests, micro-invertebrate bones, mammoth defences… These animals coexisted with human beings, whose skulls comprise the ending room before moving onto the “nature collections” which we did not visit because a) the course had after all to do with palaeontology and b) it was closing time – quite literally, museum security was turning off lights behind us since the museum shut down at 14:00.
We had a mini closure “ceremony” in the hall of the building – coordinators Miguel Moreno Azanza and Lope Ezquerro Ruiz thanked us for attending, we clapped and thanked them back. Then we all went off to have a drink, a snack and a chat. A bit after 16:00, when most students had already left and the professors had been joined by university staff, I took my leave.
Hopping from shadow to shadow to avoid the sun and the heat as much as I could, I headed downtown. On my way I made an exception regarding the walking in the shade when I found the only remaining gate of the original Medieval Wall, today called Puerta del Carmen. Calling it “original” is a bit of a stretch though. While it is in the same place as the first gate, it actually dates from the early 1790s, and it follows Neoclassical patterns.
I also stopped at Starbucks for a Vanilla Frappuccino – I’m on a bit of a matcha remorse trip due to the alleged shortage, so I’ve reverted to my old drink of choice. With a temperature of around 38 ºC, I reached the most important square in town, Plaza de Nuestra Señora del Pilar, where the namesake basilica is. I kid you not, what was running through my head was “I’ve got a 0.5 zoom on my phone now, I’ll be able to take a nice picture of the whole building with its towers…”. Only to find said towers covered in scaffolding. I was able to take the picture, but it could have been nicer. I entered the Cathedral-Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar Catedral-Basílica de Nuestra Señora del Pilar, a Baroque / Neomudejar catholic temple which is considered the first-ever church dedicated to the Virgin Mary. I sat at the chapel for a little bit, but when I was ready to have a walk around the church, there was a call for mass, so I did not do it out of respect.
Instead, I strolled to the former exchange building Lonja de Zaragoza, which has been turned into a free exhibition centre. The building is Renaissance with a touch of Neomudejar, and it is considered the most important civil architecture construction erected in the whole area of Aragón during the 16th century.
I had read that there was an exhibition on Asian culture called Tesoros. Colecciones de arte asiático del Museo de Zaragoza – Treasures: Asian art collections from the Zaragoza Museum. At the moment, the Zaragoza Museum is closed and has loaned a few of its artifacts to be displayed elsewhere. This one exhibition displays items that were originally part of personal collections and were donated to the museum. The Colección Federico Torralba, comprises religious items and art pieces from China and items from Japan. The Colección Víctor Pasamar Gracia and Colección Miguel Ángel Gutierrez Pascual have woodblock prints – landscapes, noh [能], kabuki [歌舞伎], even modern ones. The. Finally, the Colección Kotoge displays lacquered tea bowls (chawan [茶碗]). There are also modern calligraphies, paintings, and the compulsory samurai armour. The regional government has undertaken buying artefacts to engross the Asian collections. Though they looked a bit out of place in the historical building, the items were fantastic – and you could even make your very own “woodblock print” at the end.
Though the exhibition was the reason I had wanted to go downtown, after I left the (nicely air-conditioned) Lonja, I still had some time to do stuff. I wandered back into the cathedral for a bit – between the 17:00 mass and the 18:00 mass, and left before the second one started.
I continued towards the Roman Walls Murallas Romanas de Zaragoza, which sadly have had to be fenced off because people have no respect (I vividly remember a mum letting her toddlers to climb all over them one time I visited). At the end of that square stands the marketplace Mercado Central de Zaragoza, a wrought iron architecture building designed in 1895 by Félix Navarro Pérez. Being a Friday evening, in the middle of summer, many of the stands were closed, so it was not crowded.
I continued towards the Fire and Fireforce Museum Museo del Fuego y de los Bomberos, where a nice gentleman wanted to give me a guided visit which I declined. Honestly, I just wanted to look at the old fire trucks (and actually, support any initiative by firefighters if it helps fund firefighting). It is a little quaint museum located in part of a former convent, the other half is an actual fire station. The exhibition covers documentation of historical Zaragoza fires, firefighting equipment, a collection of helmets, miniatures, and quite an impressive collection of vehicles used to fight fire. There were two immersive rooms, one which showed damage to a house and another about forest fires. I really enjoyed it, though I only had a quick visit – they closed in an hour, and I was the only guest along a family.
On my way back towards the hotel I walked by CaixaForum Zaragoza, where they were running the Patagonian dinosaurs Dinosaurios de la Patagonia. Seeing the Patagotitan on the balcony made me want to go in, but I had already seen it, and I knew I was just on a palaeontology high.
I headed back to the hotel – crossing a couple of quite unsavoury neighbourhoods – and bought some fast food dinner again. It was stupidly early, but after eating I could have a shower and relax on the bed while I studied the route for the following day. Furthermore, it was so hot I really needed that shower, and I knew I would not be going anywhere after taking it. Thus, I showered and plopped down to watch the Natural Science Museum’s YouTube Channel after I had learnt how to get out of the city.
I got up around 7:30 and got dressed. I finished packing and before breakfast I took my luggage to the car, as I was leaving Loarre in the evening and I had to clear the room. Since I was outside, and the sky was clear, I went to explore the village a little more. There were some fountains and older farmhouses – one of them had been transformed into the rural hotel which never replied to my query. Some buildings had decorated their windows with cute homemade mascots.
At 8:30 I went back to the Hospedería de Loarre for breakfast. Since there was nobody at reception, I asked the lady at the restaurant what to do with the key when I left the room. I had my coffee(s) and toast, grabbed what I needed for the day, dropped off the key, and headed to the museum-lab for the third day of the course Técnicas de restauración en paleontología a través de la preparación de los huevos de dinosaurio de Loarre: Palaeontological Restoration Techniques through the preparation of Loarre dinosaur eggs. Today was the day when we would work hard at the laboratory.
Once again we got divided in three groups. One group opened a cast jacket using a radial saw – no way I was going to try and operate heavy machinery. Opening the jacket is the first step to study what it has been protecting, now that it is safe in the lab. The cast is removed in layers, and the rock is processed so the matrix (everything which is not actual fossil) is removed from around the eggs. Afterwards, there are two jobs. One is going through the discarded matrix / sediment for any and every interesting thing that can be found. The second is cleaning up the fossilised egg or eggs from any extra sediment to reveal their actual shape and colour.
I started with the cleaning crew (again). Under Ester Díaz Berenguer’s guidance, we worked on chemically removing sediment from a fossilised egg using alcohol diluted in water and brushes. It was a slow but very Zen work – wax-on-wax-off kind of thing. The others in my group sounded a bit frustrated with the task, but I guess it’s because they were younger people and more impatient? I know that I did not finish cleaning one shell fragment after an hour, but I was just… aware that fossil prep was a slow process?
My second activity was also cleaning, but this time mechanically, using an air pen to remove as much of the remaining matrix as possible without damaging the general structure. This step would actually happen before chemical clean-up. The air pencil is a pneumatic tool so you really don’t have to press against the rock, to see the sediment peel away. It’s even more Zen than the chemical clean up – unless you’re working on a fragile bit. The important thing is to always clean away from the shells. I worked on that for another hour or so, and I even got to use some gluing materials to make sure a crack did not cause a problem – that was the bit that was more stressful, worrying I might damage the fossil.
We had a short break which I used to go to the car to organise the car boot – I had thrown all my things there, but a classmate had asked me to drive him to Saragossa, and I had to adjust for his luggage to fit too. Then my group moved onto studying the removed matrix from a jacket, under the direction of Manuel Pérez Pueyo. This consists on checking bags upon bags of broken rock bits to find anything that could be an eggshell. Though the main find of the Santa Marina site are the sauropod eggs, there are eggs belonging to other species – crocodilians and theropods. You weigh some sediment, spread it on a tray and move it around until you’ve taken out anything that can be useful to science. You have a microscope handy in case you need it. I am proud to report that during my three rounds, I did not miss anything key (before you discard your sediments, you call an expert to recheck). I did not find anything out of the ordinary, but I pulled out a couple dozen egg shell fragments.
At the end of the morning, I snooped around what they were doing on the opened cast jacket, and someone was using the air pen on it, trying to locate the eggs. The jackets are opened upside down, so there’s a bit of detective work to find the fossils again. In order to protect the eggs, the casts are made big enough to protect them from any saw, so casts may be huge (and of course heavy). Thus, a lot of cleaning work is required at the lab, which translates in an insane amount of time. The palaeontologists must find an equilibrium amongst protection, weight, and lab-work when deciding on the size of the cast.
For lunch, all of us went to Casa Lobarre, the village restaurant, I think a concession from the town hall, as it is in the same building. The inside is decorated with reproductions of Romanesque frescoes and painted to look like a castle, as it was used as the set in a film some time ago (Kingdom of Heaven, 2005 I think. Don’t quote me on it). They offered a set menu with the choice of a (hearty) starter, a main course, and a dessert, drinks included. It was a big lunch! I ordered stuffed courgette and assorted grilled meats. The food was quite all right, especially for the price, and the desserts were handmade.
Afterwards, we had two lectures. One was given by Manuel Pérez Pueyo, who explained to us the hard science data of the Garum facies, which could be the key to understanding the last dinosaurs surviving in Europe. He also talked about the K-Pg limit and dinosaur extinction. He also made a comparison between the little Santa Marina site with the American Hell Creek formation – as the presentation said… size matters. That’s why there have been so many dinosaurs found there, compared to the more humble sites in Spain.
The final lecturer was José Ignacio Canudo Sanagustín, the director of the University of Saragossa’s Natural Science Museum Museo de Ciencias Naturales de la Universidad de Zaragoza. He explained how a museum works (I was reminded me of the visit to the inner works of the geomineralogical museum in Madrid), and the museum-lab status. The Saragossa Museum, as an institution, is the custodian of the Loarre fossilised eggs, even if they stay in the Laboratorio Paleontológico de Loarre. This is not unique to this village, as there are several similar schemes in place all throughout Aragón, known as “satellite sites” or “remote halls”.
Canudo also talked about counterfeit fossils – a reason why I only buy my fossils during Expominerales or Expogema, I don’t trust random vendors. Then, he moved onto the topic of the Museum itself – how it works, what kind of items they hold, how they came into the museum, and a little pride-flex, that they are home to a whooping 319 holotypes (the specimen that is used to describe a species), mostly from the Aragón region. The museum only exhibits a tiny proportion of the treasures that are deposited there for their protection and research.
Towards the end of the evening, we hopped onto the vans yet again to head to the middle of nowhere for some amazing views of the castle. No, really. We were headed to another “palaeontological site”. It turns out that a few years ago, a farmer was ploughing his land and found a few slabs of rock which he discarded to the side. These slabs held footprints from hornless rhinoceros from maybe 15 – 10 million years ago. The slabs are haphazardly stacked with the footsteps on the underside, which is great for conservation. Also, the way is so unkempt that nobody would get there to damage them for kicks and giggles, which is good too. We had to waddle through thistles and dry plants about hip-height to get there, then climb up the rocks so all of us could get a look. Afterwards, we found a shaded spot to talk – and the professors brought cold drinks (and chocolate) again for the hike. They were crazy prepared.
Here’s the thing with the rhino footsteps – scientifically, they’re out of place, so they have lost a good part of their intrinsic / purely scientific value. But legally, they must be protected and conserved. So, what to do with them? It would be expensive to move them, and once they were transported, where would they end up? Neither the lab nor the museum were willing to take them on… Each of the coordinators told us about pros and cons of different actions. In the end, what we were brought to realise was the big discrepancy between what must be done (considering the law), what should be done (considering the science) and what can be done (considering the money). The museum-lab has an idea or two about what to do with them, and I wish they succeed. I really hope the rhino footsteps become well-known some day. That way I can boast I knew them before they became famous…
Technically, the day was over then, but the coordinators asked for our help with some stuff – getting the jacket we had extracted from Santa Marina into the lab, and moving one of the display cases to change the exhibit inside. We happily complied with both, being the first to see the new display in the museum. Are we special or what?
Afterwards, my classmate and I set off towards Saragossa Zaragoza. We arranged that I would drive him to my hotel and he would get a taxi from there. The drive from Loarre to outer Zaragoza takes about an hour, but once you get into the city itself, all bets are off. Furthermore, Google Maps had given me some strange instructions to enter Saragossa, but fortunately, traffic was light, as I had predicted / hoped. The hardest part getting to the hotel parking lot – I had to go to the hotel first (and find a parking spot for that) to check in, and get the key to the parking lot, then drive there. Of course, the only place I could drop off the car near the hotel was a one-way street in the opposite direction from what I needed, with no convenient turns allowed. In the end, it took 20 minutes to be able to leave the car, but it was really the most convenient option. Zaragoza is really not made for visitors to park in the streets, even if the hotel was far from the centre. It was the closest to the university as I had been able to find so the next day was nice and easy.
It was insanely hot, sticky hot, and I needed some dinner. I found a nearby fast food place and headed back to the hotel room with take-out. I finally had a long shower – this was a bit of a theme during this trip, wasn’t it? The room was small and a bit claustrophobic (honestly, it reminded me a little of a prison cell), and the air-conditioning machine was right above the bed, so it was a bit tricky to find the correct temperature / fan combination. I was tired, but stupidly alert, so it took a while to fall asleep.
In our second morning in the Loarre course Técnicas de restauración en paleontología a través de la preparación de los huevos de dinosaurio de Loarre: Palaeontological Restoration Techniques through the preparation of Loarre dinosaur eggs, we met at 9:00 in the museum-lab Laboratorio Paleontológico de Loarre. The first thing we did was pick up our PPE – glasses, earplugs, facemask and work gloves. For the day we would be cared for by Miguel Moreno Azanza, Lope Ezquerro Ruiz, Ester Díaz Berenguer, Manuel Pérez Pueyo and Laura De Jorge i Aranda.
Miguel Moreno Azanza and Lope Ezquerro Ruiz are the course coordinators. The former is holds a PhD in Geology and is a Postdoctoral fellow in the Saragossa university Universidad de Zaragoza. He is the egg expert and the leader of the works in Loarre. Ezquerro Ruiz is now a Lecturer at another University, Universidad Complutense (Madrid), but he has not lost contact with the dino-egg world. He is the expert sedimentologist, described as an “all-terrain geologist”. Ester Díaz Berenguer did her doctorate about ancient manatees, once dug a sauropod skeleton all by herself, and is the Natural History collection curator in the Natural Science Museum of the University in Saragossa. Manuel Pérez Pueyo holds a postdoctoral position in the university Universidad del País Vasco and is currently away in Romania, studying the same kinds of sediments the Loarre eggs are found in – he is the K-Pg Limit expert. And finally, Laura De Jorge i Aranda is the de facto boss – she is the main restorer and conservation expert in the lab, so what she says, goes. If she ever stays still for long enough to finish saying it, because she must be related to the Duracell bunny…
We hopped onto the vans, and drove / bounced off towards the actual palaeontological site: Yacimiento de Santa Marina, the outcrop where the eggs were first found. Around 6 km away from the village, the area of the site is around 500 square metres, and eggs could be found from the surface (originally, those have been excavated now) to almost 2 m deep. It is mainly comprised of red clays hardened into actual rock, whose age is disputed between around 70 and 66 million years ago. Fragments of egg shells can be found on the surface, easy to tell apart. While the clays are mainly reddish, the egg shells are dark grey / blue, three millimetres wide, clearly rounded and with clearly-visible pores on the outer surface. And no, finding one of the dozens of them that we saw never got old. They have found six or seven groups of eggs there, so the upcoming steps are extracting them and working out if the groups are actual nests or just casual accumulations due to transport or other causes.
There were three jobs to do around the site – cleaning up an area where eggs had already been found to check for more, repairing a cast jacket which had been damaged, and extracting a cast jacket which was ready to be transported to the laboratory. I started with the clean-up team. There, we used the “small” equipment (cleaning brushes, paintbrushes, and screwdrivers) to remove sediment and small rocks trying to see if there were more eggs around or underneath the one that had been removed. It was a definite maybe.
The professors had brought Coke, Aquarius and pastries for breakfast at the mountain hut next to the hermit church Ermita de Santa Marina, which lends its name to the site, and thus we had a break around noon – the museum-lab team had brought us snacks and drinks. Afterwards, my group moved onto recasting a jacket which protects what could be a whole nest inside. The whole thing is massive and thus heavy, so difficult to move. While the logistics for that are being taken care of, the cast jacket protects the fossils inside, and the whole thing is kept buried to prevent weathering.
In Spanish, the cast jackets are called momias, mummies, as they are wrapped in gauze or similar before. Unfortunately, that degrades with time and weather. In order to protect the fossils, three of us applied a layer of cellulose (read: wet toilet paper) first, while the other two made burlap stripes that would go between the cellulose and the plaster. Later, another group would make and apply the new cast, and the following day the professors came back the next day to rebury it for extra protection.
My group’s final job was breaking a plaster cast off the ground. As we worked on the other two spots, the other groups had taken a hydraulic hammer and a giant drill to the rock surrounding the cast to get it ready for extraction.. I got to work on the drill – while one of my peers pushed the tool into the rock, I was in charge of keeping the drill bit steady. Afterwards, I could hammer one of the stone-splitting wedges into the holes we had drilled, and a group-mate hammered in the other two. The cast was labelled and extra information was written on it: level, north, which side was up. After that, the whole thing was torn off the stand (by sheer blunt force, aka someone pushing it) and rolled onto a net that had to be hauled up the outcrop and then into the van, all that under the incredulous look of a herd of free-range cows which grazed nearby.
The strongest people around loaded the cast and carried it out, then put it in the van. They needed someone to take pictures of the process and I volunteered for that. By then, it was way past 14:30, which meant we were too late to have lunch in Loarre, where apparently it is only served between 14:00 and 15:00. Calls were (sort of desperately) made to find somewhere which would feed our large group lunch. We ended up in the restaurant at the campsite Camping de Loarre, which happily let us have some food there. They offered stuff to share, but we preferred to have individual plates. I think we all wanted something we really… wanted, so we just chose from the main dish options.
I ordered fried eggs with ham and chips. While I prefer my eggs runny, they were adequate. Since I had drunk a Coke for breakfast, I had an isotonic drink instead, and some of the communal water. As I was finishing, I overheard that they had ice cream inside… watermelon ice cream. It was exactly what I needed for dessert. While I was paying, the waiter asked something about whom to charge for the water, so I took care of that. It was still cheaper than buying all the soda and snacks the professors ended up providing.
After lunch, we headed back towards the village, where we had a lecture by Laura De Jorge i Aranda on the theory of fossil restoration, conservation and preservation. One of the most important things she mentioned was documentation – as we had seen with the cast we had broken off. Once in the laboratory, the plaster is opened, the sediment classified for later study, the eggs cleaned mechanically and chemically, and any crack sealed with special glue. Every step of the way is documented. Finally, the fossils have to be packed for transport or preservation, and the sediment must be combed for anything of interest it might be hosting, such as loose egg shells (from either titanosaurs, crocodilians or theropods).
We moved then to the museum-lab to apply what we had just learnt in our first hands-on visit to the restoration laboratory. We were provided with a bunch of fossils (newly-discovered spinosaurid bones, so new that they are unpublished and thus cannot be shown) and Ester Díaz Berenguer guided us to make fossil beds with polyethylene covered with tissue. These were to go into fireproof drawers for conservation in the Natural Science Museum in Saragossa. The fossils are laid out on the polyethylene, traced, and the bed is carved for them with scalpels and cutters – remembering to also carve spaces for fingertips, so picking up the item is easier in the future.
After that, Miguel Moreno Azanza showed us some of the prepared eggs. One of the specimens was a couple of eggs stored together (one of them might have a baby inside!). These were found in another site, Collado de la Tallada, which apparently is “easier to dig in”, but we were playing level pro in Santa Marina. Another was a group of five eggs together, which could have been a nest. They are criss-crossed by mini-faults. We were able to snoop around other eggs, as the professors chuckled something like “Don’t worry, you’ll work on them tomorrow”.
When I signed up for the course, I expected that the “practice” would be standing there while an expert did something. Maybe we would all get one egg shell to touch and share amongst us. That would have been really cool already. But by now I had dug, protected, drilled, pushed, and held fossils. I was ecstatic. The course had blown up my mind already, and there were still two and a half days left.
I went back to the hotel Hospedería de Loarre to shower, have a snack, and pack all my things as I had to clear the room the following morning. I also studied off the route to get to Saragossa in the evening after the course. During the planning stage, I had considered whether I wanted to go to Saragossa on Friday morning before the lessons or Thursday evening after them, and in the end I decided to drive on Thursday.
On the one hand, it meant driving after the whole day of class, probably tired, and around dusk. On the other hand, it allowed me to do the drive without a time limit constraint, park directly at the hotel, and it might mean less traffic. Furthermore, sunset was at 21:00, and it should be bright enough for a bit still after class. In the end, I decided in the end that it would be less stressful. Thus, Wednesday was my last night in Loarre.
I woke up around 7:30. After I had stressed out so much about reaching there, I almost could not believe I was really in Loarre, at the feet of the Pyrenees mountain range. I lounged around until breakfast started at 8:30. I went down and the choice was limited but adequate – fresh bread (still warm, the bakery was literally under my window, and it had been making me hungry for an hour), tomato spread, Spanish omelette, cheese, sausages, pastries, coffee, milk, and an assortment of jams and butter. The coffee was weak, so I had a couple of cups, but the orange juice was freshly squeezed and awesome. I made myself toast with cheese and omelette, loaded up on the caffeine and went on my way. At 8:58 I was at the museum-lab Laboratorio Paleontológico de Loarre (Oodinolab). And there was my name, on the attendance sheet for the course Técnicas de restauración en paleontología a través de la preparación de los huevos de dinosaurio de Loarre: Palaeontological Restoration Techniques through the preparation of Loarre dinosaur eggs. Everything was going to be all right. I have to admit I was 100% ready to show all my emails and confirmation should any problem have arisen… but it was all right (which… I should have known due to the email received previously… but I am an overthinker by nature).
After signing attendance and checking details for the certificate, we received a tote bag with postcards, notebooks and pens. The course started with a welcome and introduction by Miguel Moreno Azanza, who is the Universidad de Zaragoza researcher in charge of the lab. The most important goal of the course, he transmitted, was empowering us with knowledge about every step involved in fossil-handling: from digging to commercial exploitation, including geology, conservation, restoration, study and museumification.
The course kicked off with the guided visit of the museum-lab that is usually done for kids and families, including pulling out crates for our backpacks. Thus we learnt about the story of the discovery of the eggs – a fellow researcher of Moreno Azanza’s, José Manuel Gasca, a geologist, runs mountain trail. In 2019, he was training with a few colleagues when during a break he looked at the ground and saw what it looked like a fossilised dinosaur egg. And that is how one of the largest egg-dinosaur sites in Europe was discovered.
From the science standpoint, we also heard about how hardshell eggs played a key part in the evolution of animals coming out of the sea, as they allowed reproduction on land, without having to return to water. There were (are) different strategies to take care of eggs, and spherical eggs mean that they were (are) buried. From fossil tracks, we know that the dinosaur females that laid their eggs in the area buried them for protection using their back legs. We saw two cast jackets too, ready for research, on display.
Fossil eggs are categorised as oospecies, unless or until it can be proven which animal laid them. The Loarre dinosaur eggs are tentatively classified as Megaloolithus siruguei (sometimes spelt Megaloolithus sirugei), laid by a species of titanosaurian sauropod – some candidates are Garrigatitan, Ampelosaurus and Lohuecotitan. Sauropods were plant-eating dinosaurs that moved on four straight legs, and had long necks and tails, such as Dippy, the Diplodocus (and other copies, such as the one in Madrid or Paris). During the Cretaceous period, the dominant group of sauropods were the Titanosaurs, the last surviving long-necked dinosaurs until the extinction of dinosaurs – in South America there was Patagotitan; another example is Qunkasaura pintiquiniestra, which I saw in MUPA and MARPA exhibits.
The first dinosaur eggs ever registered were found in the Pyrenees – on the French side though – by Pierre Philippe Émile Matheron in 1846, and described in 1859 by Jean-Jacques Pouech. In 1967, Pierre Souquet documented dinosaur eggshells around the reservoir La Peña, some ten-ish kilometres from Loarre (had I known in 2021…). These were the same oospecies as the ones in Loarre – since the fossil layer is the same, it makes sense.
We were supposed to have a video-conference inauguration with someone from the university, but she decided to come in person, and that was moved to 19:00. So instead we hopped onto the vans that the organisation had provided and drove towards the geological formation called Mallos de Riglos, in the village of Riglos (hence the obvious name). The Mallos are a number of vertical domes conformed by reddish conglomerates. I had actually seen these geological structures before, from the other side of the River Río Gállego – not up close. The wording of the email “a slight ascent” had not made me suspect at first we were going to climb all the way up in the heat. Looking back, it was not that bad but a) I was not mentally prepared for it, and b) I have a new backpack, and it’s comfortable but… differently-shaped, so my centre of gravity was all off. There, Lope Ezquerro Ruiz (honourable mention to Manuel Pérez Pueyo, who cracked jokes and held the whiteboard) gave us a few good pointers on geology which made me wonder where he was when I was first studying geology at university.
Simply put, if one assumes that the natural laws have not changed with time (Uniformitarianism), then three things happen that define geology: strata deposits are horizontal, deeper strata are always older, and if they are not, it is because something new has eroded or deformed them. Of course, the Pyrenees mountain range is anything but flat.
On site, we learnt about the Garum facies, the result of the sedimentation of fluvial and marshy red clays. The layer started forming during the Maastrichtian (the latest age of the Upper Cretaceous, 72.2 to 66 million years ago. Both the Maastrichtian and the Cretaceous ended with a literal bang – the Cretaceous–Palaeogene extinction event, when non-avian dinosaurs went extinct, marked by the K-Pg boundary (formerly K-T boundary), a layer of sediment rich in iridium which probably came from a meteorite impact. The deposit of Garum facies continued through the first age of the Paleocene, the Danian. This means that the K-Pg boundary is somewhere inside the layer, which is pretty cool. And even cooler? There are dinosaur eggs there, obviously from before the mass extinction.
We learnt about this literally standing on the Garum itself. We talked about the time when the a lot of the Iberian Peninsula was a shallow sea with scattered islands, and then sat to try and “see” the processes of folding, faulting and erosion that created the Pyrenees mountain range as the African tectonic plate pushed against the Eurasian plate.
Every now and then, a vulture flew above us, in wide circles. We were apparently not appetising, because it flew away every time. Once we tackled the descent, we headed towards Ayerbe, where we split up for lunch. At 16:00 we met up again so professor Lope Ezquerro Ruiz could demonstrate how strata bend and break using a model and sand. Afterwards, we drove back to Loarre.
In the modern town hall, we had the first lecture of the afternoon, by José Luis Barco, Manager of the business Paleoymas, a company specialised in protection, development, management and use of cultural and environmental assets, with a strong emphasis on palaeontology and geology. One of their work lines is monetising projects related to palaeontology, as opposed to the “research-focused” stereotype. Between a palaeontological discovery and its communication or exploitation for the general public, there is a gap that can last over a decade.
Paleoymas is responsible for the project Paleolocal, which created the museum-lab in town, with the idea of studying the fossil eggs almost in situ, which would develop a touristic resource and help the village profit from it. The museum-lab is technically part of the Natural Science Museum Museo de Ciencias Naturales de Zaragoza, which has custody of the fossils according to the regional law. However, keeping the eggs in Loarre is a way to involve the community into protecting the palaeontological site, as well as to create a tourist flow to the village itself. See: yours truly, who spent 240 € in lodging there.
The second lecture was given by Miguel Moreno Azanza, who talked about the Theory of Excavating a Palaeontological Site, as one of the activities in the course was working on the field. The summary could be: “forget Alan Grant with a paintbrush, think hydraulic hammer”, but the important lesson is “do not dig up anything you cannot take with you, and register any and everything you see / do / touch”. Also, regarding egg shells, it’s important to write down whether you find them concave up or concave down. This can help decipher whether the egg has rolled or not (for example, if several eggs are found together, were they in a nest, or where they moved there somehow? Did a baby dinosaur break the eggshell?).
Around 19:30, we had the official inauguration of the course, with a representative from the university, Begoña Pérez, and the mayor of Loarre, Roberto Orós, who was nice enough to buy us all a drink afterwards. Not one to turn down a free Coke, I tagged along for a while, and when people started taking their leaves, I returned to my room. I had some crisps in lieu of dinner, took a long (and I mean long) shower, scribbled down some notes and lay down till it was time to sleep.
The closer the day came, the more nervous I got. First, there was the drive. It would be a long drive on my own, during the pre-holiday rush, and I had to go around Zaragoza (Saragossa), which has a notorious knot of connections. I had studied the route up and down with both Google Maps and my Sat-Nav. However, I could not control traffic nor other drivers. And secondly, that weekend there had been torrential rain alerts in the area. The last thing I needed was a flash flood.
I pumped fuel before I went to work in the morning as I had a cheap petrol station on the way. When I finished at 15:00, wrapped up, said my goodbyes, and headed off. I had a swing of water and set on the road, with the goal of taking a break in an hour or so. I had over 360 km to drive through, most on the A2 speedway, then a national road, and a final local road. The first 20 km or so were the worst, with lots of traffic and lorries because I was right in the middle of a logistics hubs. For the next 100 km or so, as I went north, I had the pleasure of getting caught in a few “lorry overtaking lorry” instances (sometimes even “lorry overtaking lorry overtaking lorry” ones, when there were three lanes), with the slowest lorry going at 110 kph and the overtaking one at 111 kph on a 120 kph speed limit.
I was surprisingly not tired, but I forced myself to make a stop around 17:30 to have a caffeinated drink and one of the sandwiches I had prepared, then continued on. I found some construction work which created a traffic jam that got us to a near stop for about 20 minutes around 18:00, maybe. I managed the Zaragoza exchange and drove successfully onto the following speedway (A-23) – from there, it was about another hour. When I reached Huesca, the exchange was easier, just a turn left into the national network (A-132). The last 34 km were on the local road (A-1206 – the lower the number, the “better” the road is), and took a bit longer than expected due to getting stuck behind a tractor and a harvester for the last stint. I finally reached Loarre around 19:20. I found a convenient (and legal) parking spot in one of the outer streets, and walked to my accommodation.
The hotel Hospedería de Loarre is located right in the Main Square of the village, roughly a three-minute walk away from the street where I had parked, and four minutes from the main road. When I checked in, the worker made some conversation and asked me why I was in town. Upon explaining that I had come for the course Técnicas de restauración en paleontología a través de la preparación de los huevos de dinosaurio de Loarre: Palaeontological Restoration Techniques through the preparation of Loarre dinosaur eggs, I was told that I was “the one from close-by”. Considering that I had driven for over 360 km, that shocked me. The worker explained that the previous people who had checked in before me, who were also there for the course, came from Chile and Mexico! I was the one from close-by indeed, and one of the three people from the course staying at the Hospedería. The network Red de Hospederías de Aragón comprises a group of hotels in historical buildings within areas with high tourism potential. The Loarre one is located in a palatial house, the former town hall, which was rehabilitated recently.
After check-in, I went for a walk for an hour or so. I saw the church Iglesia de San Esteban and the cross that marks the end of the village Cruz de Término. I also found the laboratory or “museum-lab”, Laboratorio Paleontológico de Loarre, which is a tiny building painted in bright colours and silhouettes of sauropods (though it shall soon move to a bigger one).
The castle Castillo de Loarre was not too far away (walking route was about an hour). I had visited it before, so I did not need to see it again, but I would have liked a picture of the walls that I was unable to get due to a lack of perspective. Unfortunately, as I considered the hike, a storm cloud rolled by. There was ominous thunder, and a few raindrops fell. If I continued on my walk, I was sure I would get drenched. If I decided to go back, the second I got out of the shower and into the pyjamas, it would stop raining. The area had been on alert due to rain and flash floods all weekend too…
A huge thunderclap helped me decide to head back.
When I pulled up my toiletries, the sun lotion had not been well-closed, so I had to wash all the stuff. At least my chapstick wouldn’t get sunburnt? Then, I headed into the shower, and when I came out, it had indeed stopped raining. However, the cloud was still there, and I did not trust it… Oh, well. There would be other chances, I thought.
Sometimes I get weird ideas stuck in my head. I usually let common sense override them, but this time the temptation was too great, so I allowed myself to do something slightly insane. I don’t regret it one bit.
Until a few years ago, my work projects rarely extended past June. Lately however, I’ve had to work well into July, which means I have not been able to sign up for any summer university course. Especially, one summer university course from the university of Saragossa Universidad de Zaragoza called Técnicas de restauración en paleontología a través de la preparación de los huevos de dinosaurio de Loarre: Palaeontological Restoration Techniques through the preparation of Loarre dinosaur eggs. Until now, I had been working through both editions of the course – usually until the very same day the four-day course finished. However, this year my last day of work was the day before the course started.
I started mulling… what if? What if I signed up? What if I directly drove from work to the site of the course? What if I did something crazy and went to Loarre? It would mean driving for a about four hours through the late afternoon / early evening of the 14th of July, the day before lots of holiday periods kicked off… right after a whole work session. It was not the best of ideas. It was not the most reasonable thing to do. What if I did it anyway?
I made up my mind – I would do it, sanity be damned. My family also offered to subsidise part of the course and accommodation as my birthday present, too (thanks!). I found out all the information and decided to try for the course on the 27th of April. Now, I just had to wait for admission to open, sign up, be accepted, and pay. It seemed to be a simple process, like any other course I’ve taken before.
Except, it was anything but simple.
Sign-up for the Saragossa Summer University, Cursos de Verano UNIZAR usually opens the first Monday of May. That did not happen this year – because 2025 is special? Once I located the correct website, I checked every day – like keeping tabs on concert-ticket information – until a tiny banner reading “sing-ups will open on the 12th May” appeared. Since enrolment did not open a midnight, I deduced that slots would open at 9:00, so I was ready at the computer at that time. The online forms opened indeed around 9:20, but there were only five courses listed on the website, and none of them was mine. The rest opened gradually, but only as numbers… I kept refreshing the webpage until I finally saw my course just after 9:40. I filled in the information, and the webpage said that I would receive an email with confirmation and further instructions.
That email never arrived.
I gave the university a couple of hours, then phoned them up around 13:00. I was told there was a problem with the system and to call the following day if the email had not arrived. Thus, I called around 9:15 on the 13th of May, when I was informed that they had forgotten to activate sending the confirmation emails but not to worry.
On the 15th of May there was a webpage update, saying that the email that had never arrived held confirmation and paying instructions, so I rang the University again. They told me that they would send the information “manually” and “later”. Maybe. The conversation was not really reassuring in tone. I explained that I needed to book accommodation, and they checked again – I was number seven in the list, which meant I was in. They also informed me that there was a partner accommodation on the website – not really, there was a coding error and it did not display. I told the lady so, and she said she would update the webpage. I asked again if she was sure my enrolment had gone through, she insisted that I was in, and the email would come later. Definitely maybe.
I went on Google Maps to check for accommodation in town. Loarre is a 350-inhabitant village famous for its castle and since 2019, its palaeontological sites, where around a hundred sauropod eggs have been found. These eggs were the star of the course Técnicas de restauración en paleontología a través de la preparación de los huevos de dinosaurio de Loarre: Palaeontological Restoration Techniques through the preparation of Loarre dinosaur eggs, from the 15th to the 19th of July 2025. If everything worked in the end…
The accommodation recommended by the University was the campsite, but that was a bit out – it meant driving to the village every day, or a 35-minute walk each way. And that would be nice in the morning, but not after the whole day out. I sent an email to a nice rural cottage which never replied. Then I realised that the course actually was held in Loarre only for three of the four days, the last one would be in Zaragoza (Saragossa) itself. I tried to book at the recommended accommodation, but when they had not confirmed within 48 hours, I just went on a third-party site. I booked a place to stay in the heart of Loarre and a hotel near the university in Saragossa. Of course, a few hours later, the recommended accommodation replied, so I had to cancel. I still reserved everything with full cancellation, just in case. Can you tell I had little confidence in the whole process?
Of course, in between, work tried to change my schedule (already chaotic), because someone needed one of my days in exchange for the 15th of July, which I had to regretfully decline. I hope they don’t hold that against me, but after all the planning and the stress, I did not want to give up the chance to take this course to do someone a favour. On the 13th of June (Friday), the sign-up email arrived, with a payment deadline on the 23rd (Monday) – the course fee was 190 € (160 € discounted). I transferred the money right away, since the following day there would be a bank outage. I also sent proof of payment and a copy of the documentation that entitled me to the discounted price. A few minutes later, someone wrote to me to ask for the discount paperwork. I sent it again.
On Friday the 20th of June, I got a phone call from a long number at work. I rang back. It turned out to be an admin from the summer university asking me if I was still interested because I had not paid yet! I said I had transferred the money, sent the receipt, and the documentation. The person on the other side of the line was surprised for a second, then updated bank data or something, and it turned out that my payment had indeed gone through. Magic! Guess who emailed the University again to have confirmation on writing… It should not be so difficult to… enrol in a course from an establishment that has been offering them for literally almost a century.
To be honest, I was not 100% confident I was really enrolled until I saw my name in the roster the morning of the first day. But it was. Actually, that is a bit dramatic, as on the 7th of July 2025 I received an email from one of the course coordinators, Lope Ezquerro Ruiz with some information. In that email, he explained that some people had contacted them to try and organise transportation, so they were offering to drive people from Saragossa or Huesca on the first day, and back to Saragossa for the last session.
The truth is that public transport to Loarre was a nightmare. That is why I had decided to drive, even if I don’t like it that much, especially in the middle of the holiday rush. Had I known transport from and to Saragossa was a possibility beforehand, I would have planned accordingly. I might have considered taking a railway round trip to Saragossa instead of driving, but by then it was too late to rearrange and change the whole accommodation planning. Furthermore, it allowed me to pack for all kinds of eventualities (yay boot space). In the end, it was way more convenient to have the car, so I don’t regret it.
As the day approached, the weather predictions were al over the place. I decided to pack a bag for Loarre, and a different one for Zaragoza (Saragossa) that I would swap, I also prepared an isothermal bag with frozen water bottles, drinks and snacks – of course, the ice would eventually melt, but I had to leave the car outside while I was at work (and when I came back at 15:00, the the temperature it marked was usually 43 ºC), and I wanted to make sure no fizzy drink exploded. I finally readied an extra bag for “maybes” – extreme cold, extreme heat, rain, extra headwear…
Both the village of Loarre and the city of Zaragoza are located in the area of Aragón, a region of Spain which has gained a lot of traction in the palaeontological world due to the impact of Dinópolis and their exploitation of anything that can be even vaguely related to dinosaurs.
One of the things that surprised me, however, was how Loarre wants to attract tourists but does not seem to be willing to carter to them. I packed snacks for dinner because I was not sure I’d find a place to eat or a shop, and I was right. On Wednesday, we were too late for lunch and had to find alternative plans, and the Hospedería decided that they would not offer food in the evening because the cook had hurt her foot.
If you are interested in the “hard science” of what I learnt and will summarise here, I recommend these sources (in Spanish) by part of the course professors:
Moreno-Azanza, Miguel; Ezquerro, Lope; Pérez-Pueyo, Manuel & Gasca, José. (2021). Huevos de dinosaurio en las Sierras Exteriores de Huesca. You can read it here.
Díaz Berenguer, Ester & Canudo, José. (2024) El Museo de Ciencias Naturales de la Universidad de Zaragoza. Revista PH. 10.33349/2024.113.5663. Available here.
Pérez-Pueyo, Manuel; de Jorge, Laura; Ezquerro, Lope; Laita, Elisa; Moreno-Azanza, Miguel; Díaz Berenguer, Ester; Núñez-Lahuerta, Carmen; Barco, José; Cuenca-Bescós, Gloria & Canudo, José. (2023). Paleontología de proximidad: cómo fijar el patrimonio en el medio rural. Found here.
The museum-lab Laboratorio Paleontológico de Loarre website.
The company that manages the private side, Paleoymas website.
The Saragossa University Natural Science Museum Youtube channel.
It was my last day in Malta. My return plane was mid-afternoon, so I had to head towards the airport at noon the latest. For that morning, I had planned a leisure stroll along the beaches towards the east of Saint Julian’s | San Ġiljan and Sliema. I had breakfast, grabbed my backpack, and set out along Ballutta Bay, Exiles Bay and St Julian’s Bay.
There is a watch tower at the edge between both towns Saint Julian’s Tower | Torri ta’ San Ġiljan, built to protect the bay in 1658, though today it is a restaurant. After looking at the waves for a while, I walked along the coastline until I found the Roman Baths, which to my disappointment, are not Roman but Victorian artificial pools, from the time Malta was a British colony – they were upfront about this though, unlike the Birżebbuġa ones.
I can look at waves for hours, and that’s exactly what I did. I passed by Sliema Point Battery (now also a restaurant; I would have liked to try it to be honest, just because it looked cool) and eventually reached the Sliema Promenade. There, the scenic ferries leave to take tourists around the bay, and the actual ferries sail off to Valletta, which can be seen across the water from the Panoramic View Of Valletta point. There is a cute little building, the Sea water distilling monument, the remains of Malta’s oldest water distillation plant, used after its construction in 1881 to provide drinking water to the population. Fresh water was obtained by boiling sea water to separate the actual water from the salt.
I still had a little bit of time, but I was next to the correct bus stop, and it was almost time for it to pass. Thus, I decided to take it, get to the airport, grab a coffee, and visit the Observation deck.
As I stopped by the airport’s Costa Coffee I got talking to a couple who had just landed and were figuring their way out after a change of plans. When they heard I was going home, they immediately asked where my next adventure was. I found it both endearing and hilarious – do I look that travel-minded? I should have told them that I planned to go dig dinosaur eggs or something…
I drank my vanilla latte at the Observation deck, then I went through Security and checked the book shops for a copy of The Little Prince in Maltese for my parent. I found a quiet place to sit – and damn it was freezing, so I ended up wearing all my layers until I boarded the plane.
In the end, I carried my bathing suit for nothing, but I have to admit that despite the inconveniences on Saturday, I had a blast in Malta. While it had never been on my radar as a potential destination beforehand, I am really glad I chose it. I did not miss having a car, because the public transport was convenient enough, and the weather was superb. Gozo was not as spectacular as I expected, but I wouldn’t mind coming back to the country to explore the rest of the temples – especially the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum – and the one main city I did not visit – Mdina. Next time around though, I don’t think I’ll book any tours and organise everything myself. Given some time, I think I can make a great itinerary for a second visit. Oh, and I will try to find a hotel in a non-party area or destination.
I had booked a second tour, in order to get to know the Island of Gozo. This time around though I had a very clear pick-up point, which I hoped would work out, unlike the previous day. Fortunately, the instructions from Gozo Tours were extremely clear and I knew exactly where the pick up point was, without any non-working links. There were other people from my same hotel, so we got nervous together. The driver was not too late though. We were driven in a mini-van towards the passenger terminal in the north of the island, Cirkewwa. There, we waited for pick-ups from other parts of the island. We had a charter high-speed boat that crossed the Gozo Channel and dropped us off at the Mgarr Harbour terminal in the second-biggest island of Malta (country).
Gozo | Għawdex is less urban than the Island of Malta, so I had decided that maybe the Full Day Jeep Safari Of Gozo could be a good way to get a feeling of the island, without having to plan much and depend on public transport. In hindsight, it was probably unnecessary but it eliminated the need to plan. All in all, the tour was convenient, but not something I would choose again – the landscapes were beautiful and dramatic, but not as crazy as I had expected.
I became really amused at how many people (read: most everyone) were unaware of the speed a speedboat reaches. I was glad that the boat was so fast; it glided over the wind-waves, and there was no swaying. That was good, because said wind would have made the trip miserable at a slower speed. However, there was a group of Italian girls who were absolutely petrified.
We reached Mgarr Harbour in Gozo and separated into small groups for the different jeeps. I was placed with four Londoners and an English guide, which suited me just fine. I don’t remember whether I actively chose the English-speaking tour, or I got assigned to one because I used the English webpage. There must have been tours in other languages. Apparently, all the jeeps go to the same spots at different times of the day so they don’t run into each other, so we followed a bit of a zigzagging route, with specific spots in different cities and towns. The information said there would be a “swim stop” during summer, I was just not sure whether the 25th of May would count as summer. I carried my swimsuit and towel anyway.
The first stop was barely five minutes in: Qala Belvedere, a panoramic spot in the town of Qala, which allowed us to catch sight of Comino, the third-biggest island in the archipelago. Afterwards, we got back on the jeep and headed off towards Ramla Bay in Xaghra. As he was describing the landscape, the guide at some point mentioned volcanic rock, which threw me off, as I believed that the islands were sedimentary. I thought maybe he meant there was some tuff. However, everything I have read about the geology of the islands agrees – the whole of them is sedimentary rock, in five main strata. From oldest, at the bottom, to newer, these are coralline limestone (Żonqor), globigerina limestone (Franka), blue clay mudstone (Tafal), greensand sandstone (Ġebla s-Safra) and coralline limestone again (Qawwi ta’ Fuq).
The Upper Coralline limestone formation (the most recent) is pale and grey, and it is embedded with biological structures. The most important rock is the globigerina limestone, which is golden and between 23 and 14 million years old. It is called so because it contains a lot of globigerina – a type of plankton – fossils (I did see a lot of shells in the rocks, but I was not carrying anything to dig the fossils out). This is the majority of building material in the country, even in a lot of the prehistoric temples. It has been designated a Global Heritage Stone Resource, something I did not even know existed until now. The blue clay is also key in Gozo as it is the one that allows for the creation of freshwater aquifers through the filtration of rainwater. The thing with limestone is that it erodes very dramatically, creating very capricious forms which are the base of the striking landscapes in the island.
The shore of Ramla Bay is one of the few sand beaches in the country. It is called Ramla il-Ħamra (Red Sands) because of its reddish colour due to the presence of iron clay in the area. The beach is locked by two rocky formations / cliffs that protect it from the waves – unfortunately, not from real estate developers.
We continued towards Xwejni Bay in Żebbuġ. It has a small beach of pebbles, with a promontory to one of the sides, and a dramatic walk along the other side which leads to the salt pans. Unlike the ones from Birżebbuġa, these pans are commercially exploited. Between May and September, each pool is filled, individually and manually, with sea water which proceeds to evaporate and leave behind the dry salt crystals. With good weather, salt can be harvested once a week, and it is sold as flakes without further processing – rather nice, I’d say. We also were shown to a small shop that had tastings in hopes you bought stuff, and I did try the salt and the oil.
We drove by Basilica of the Blessed Virgin Of Ta’ Pinu | Santwarju Bażilika tal-Madonna ta’ Pinu, though we did not stop. The current building is Neo-Romanesque – construction started in the 1920s – and it looks like something from a fantasy cartoon. However, it is a serious Catholic temple, dating back from the 16th century at least, even if it kind of stands in the middle of nowhere.
We crossed the town of Għarb and made a short stop at the SG 8 globigerina limestone quarry. It made me sad that the SG did not stand for “Stargate” but what can you do? The quarries through the island extract the rock which is used as construction material in many buildings through the country.
Instead of going to the other side of the galaxy, we headed off to San Lawrenz to see the Inland Sea | Qawra, a lagoon connected to the sea through a cave fault in the cliffs. When the weather is nice, there are boats giving you a ride past the archway and out to the sea, but not this time around – there were some pretty decent waves coming in, so it was too dangerous to sail the crossing.
We drove through Għarb again, where I could catch a glimpse of the Basilica and Collegiate Parish church of the Visitation of Our Lady, and continued towards Xewkija where we were to have a “three-course course light lunch”. This consisted on a Ricotta Pastizz (pastry stuffed with ricotta cheese), Maltese Bragioli | Beef Olive (stuffed beef roll), and vanilla ice-cream, along with wine that I did not have, I went for water instead. Food was all right, I was not hungry so it was fine. Afterwards, the guide offered to take us to a gelateria to have “the best ice-cream ever”.
Before that, we crossed the scorching square to see the Rotunda St. John Baptist Church | Basilika St. Johannes der Täufer, which had recently been struck by lightning. This is a Baroque church established in 1678, though the building was erected in limestone in the mid-20th century. The new building actually encased the original church, which now is a small chapel to the left side of the main altar. St John is the Spiritual Seat of the Knights Hospitaller.
The next stop was Xlendi Bay and the beach town of Xlendi. There stands Xlendi Tower, built by the Knights in 1650, restored in 2010. The natural landscape was stunning, but the town itself was just a touristy beach town. The promised ice-cream parlour was a chain called Gelateria Granola, where I decided to try the cookie ice-cream, because it was something I had never come across before, and I had next to no time to choose, it felt – I have no idea how I ended at the front of the crowd.
Ice-cream happily consumed, we drove off. We stopped in Fontana where there is a natural water spout called the Knight’s Wash House, halfway between a historical landmark and a local fountain. As a curiosity it was all right. We continued to Victoria, whose historical seed is called The Cittadella | Iċ-Ċittadella, the Citadel. The area comprising the Cittadella was first inhabited during the Bronze Age, and it probably went on to become the Roman acropolis and eventually a castle in the Middle Ages. The castle defences were reconstructed in the 17th century, but they were not considered the best – the Cittadella actually surrendered in the 1798 French invasion and counterstrike, without much resistance either time.
Our allotted time there felt too long for just a walk and too short to the whole thing, unfortunately, so I could not snoop around the museums. Furthermore, the Cathedral of the Assumption – The Matrix, Parish Church, Sanctuary, Collegiate and Cathedral of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into Heaven | Parrocca Matrici, Arcipretali, Santwarju, Kollegjata Insinji u Katidral ta’ Santa Marija Assunta was closed. The whole area looked like it would be awesome to be able to sleep over there – especially because walking uphill to visit it would be hard in the sun.
The hour approached to head back to the quay. We started making our retreat with two short stops on the way, in the town of Għajnsielem. The first one was for the guide to take our pictures with the Monument to the bench in the village square, a metal bench showcasing a pair of grandparents, a young woman with a smartphone and a cat begging for attention. The bench is located in front of the Għajnsielem Parish Church. The second stop was a panoramic view of Gozo Straight and the Church of the Madonna of Lourdes | Knisja tal-Madonna ta’ Lourdes. There was no swim stop in the end, so late May is not summer yet. All in all, we started off around 10:00 and were done by 16:00, and it cost 80 €.
We made it back to Mgarr Harbour, where we took the speedboat back, first to drop off some passengers in Comino, which gave us a peek into the Blue Lagoon there. Again, I was glad for the speed, because the waves would have made a leisure trip miserable. Afterwards, we were driven back our points of origin. Back in my hotel, I snacked on some salt-and-vinegar crisps from my favourite British brand that I had found in the supermarket.
Around sunset, I went out to explore Saint Julian’s | San Ġiljan a little further. I had considered some of the typical restaurants there, but since I ate the crisps I was not hungry. What I did was walk around Spinola Bay, along Spinola Slipway and Saint Julian’s Promenade, and past the Fisherman Monument – with yet another cat begging. I tried to reach the marina, but it was all uphill and taken over by the luxury hotels.
Instead of dinner, I had another snack, and then headed off back for a shower, some sleep and… yes, another 5:00 wake up call. Talk about jet lag without changing your time zones!
The group of drunk people was back again, at 5:00 once more. Joy. However, this time I could not get an early start because I had booked a Megalithic Tour with a company called Visit Malta, as at first it had felt more convenient than navigating the buses. They confirmed and sent me a ticket saying that pick up was at my hotel, and a Google Maps link that did not work. Thus, I assumed that they would pick me up at the hotel. I tried to contact them via email previously, but I had no reply, so I told myself not to be paranoid, and trust them.
Twenty minutes after the pick up time, I called them. They yelled at me that I was in the wrong place. I informed them that my ticket read “pick up at the hotel”. They told me there was nothing they could do for me. So I was upset for about 3 minutes – that was 50 € down the drain. However, it was only 9:30 in the morning, so I had time to take matters in my own hands and go see the temples on my own. And I could even squeeze an extra one! I felt… I don’t know… gleefully spiteful. I was going to see the temples out of revenge! I know it sounds strange, but it took me back to what happened in Cappadoccia, when there was nothing I could do to fix the issue. This time around, I had lost some money, but I would not miss on the experience.
Of course, this would have been much more efficient if I had organised the visits originally on my own, since the Ħaġar Qim and Mnajdra Archaeological Park | Il-Park Arkeoloġiku Ta’ Ħaġar Qim u L-Imnajdra is in Qrendi | Il-Qrendi, quite close to the Blue Grotto. Conversely, that also made it easy for me to get there, since I knew the bus route already. But I decided not to dwell on the inconvenience and just “save back” the lost 50 € back not buying whims or mementos.
The Megalithic Temples of Malta are a World Heritage site, and it still blows my mind that they are older than either Stonehenge or the Giza Pyramids. The Ħaġar Qim and Mnajdra Archaeological Park | Il-Park Arkeoloġiku Ta’ Ħaġar Qim u L-Imnajdra might be the most well-known complex, or at least it was the one with most tourists.
The temples Ħaġar Qim and Mnajdra are located very close to one another, and they share an entrance with a small museum, thus forming one archaeological park. Both were first officially described by officer J.G. Vance of the Royal Engineers (British Army) in the 1840s. Unlike Ħal Tarxien on Thursday evening, these two were packed with visitors – more than a few of them happily touching the stones out of curiosity or for support as they walked. I got there in bus 201 and reached the entrance just before a big tour bus entered. The guide lady tried to go past me, but my face must have told her that I was not in the mood to be messed up with, and my turn was respected. The museum mostly had information about the environment, and pieces of pottery that had been recovered from the sites – similar to what the Archaeological Museum in Valletta.
Ħaġar Qim was erected using the ever-present globigerina limestone, a soft sedimentary rock, golden in colour, formed around 23 – 14 million years ago. As this and other temples have weathered out, they have taken a more reddish or brown colour. To protect the remains from deterioration, many have been covered with protective tents.
The temple has several inner chambers within a retaining wall that can be crossed through a trilithon. The whole site has a keyhole shape, and it has been associated with fertility rituals. The main temple was built between 3600 and 3200 BCE, with remains of older ruins. As construction went on, the shape became distorted. It holds the largest stone in any of the Maltese temples, and an altar probably for animal sacrifices. It was hard to get into the magnificence of the temples with so many people swarming them after the Ħal Tarxien experience. However, the structure is quite impressive in itself.
Mnajdra | L-Imnajdra is made from coralline limestone, a harder kind of stone, so as a construction material, it can be used in smaller blocks. Mnajdra might be the most representative temple in the archipelago, as its altar is depicted in Malta’s 1, 2 and 5-cent coins – though it is not the one which kickstarted the Unesco protection. Mnajdra consists on three temples arranged in a clover-leaf disposition. The structures are joined but not connected. They were erected between 3600 and 2500 BCE – so they could be over 5,600 years old. Even with the sheer amount of people around, there was something special about the complex. The temple plays light tricks on the equinoxes and solstices, and the decoration of one of the stones could be interpreted as a lunar calendar (with a lot of imagination, if you ask me). Probably, out of all the temples I visited, this one was the one I found more impressive – even if the first one I saw will forever remain my emotional-favourite.
I was done before schedule, so I went back towards the bus stop. I returned to the airport and then took another bus (119) to Birżebbuġa. There I could see the Għar Dalam Cave and its museum. The Cave is home to some of the oldest evidence of human presence in Malta, around 7,400 years ago (the oldest comes from Mellieħa Cave, dated as 8,500 years old). Għar Dalam Cave is about 144 metres in length, and it also contains remains of animals that have been long extinct in the island, found in distinct layers of sediment at the bottom of the cave.
There is a base layer of clay, older than 167,000 years. Over that lies the “Hippopotamus layer”, showing remains of two extinct species of hippopotamus, deer, dwarf elephants… One of the hippos, Hippopotamus melitensis, was a “dwarf” hippo (only 900 kg) endemic to the island. The remains are very mineralised (almost fossils) and worn down. This is also called the “Breccia layer”. Breccia is a rock composed large angular fragments of minerals cemented by a fine-grained matrix, only in this case the fragments are ancient hippo bone.
Covering the “Hippopotamus Layer”, there is a band of pebbles, without any remains. Over that one lies the “Carnivora Layer”, with remains of several of the previous animals along with foxes, wolves, bears, and smaller creatures such as voles, shrews, bats, turtles… These range from around 167,3000 to 151,200 years ago, and are less mineralised and worn down, just like the following band: the “Deer Layer”. Here there are remains of three different species of deer, some bovines, equines, and small animals. The two upper layers, starting 7,200 years ago, hold remains of small wild animals, domestic animals – sheep, goats, pigs, cows and cats – pottery and other human artefacts, and human remains.
Għar Dalam was first investigated in 1865 by palaeontologist Arturo Issel. Subsequent researchers expanded the excavation and knowledge, identified an all-new species of dwarf hippopotamus, and systematised the museum adjacent to the Cave. Said museum, called the George Zammit Maempel Hall presents hundreds (thousands, maybe) of the remains dug up from the cave. However, the most important ones, amongst them the skull of a Neolithic child, were stolen in 1980. The Cave itself is creepy and damp, and the excavation shows the different layers for the spectator to see. One wonders what lies beneath the end of the visitable area… I would believe the cave be haunted much easily than the Grand Master’s Palace.
Across the valley from the Cave, you can see the remains of a ruined Roman villa Ta’ Kaċċatura, but it cannot be reached, and it’s hard to distinguish rocks from the actual ruins.
By now, I had seen all the temples included in the original tour, so I had a bit of a victory moment. And yet, I had more to do. I loaded up on sun lotion, then headed towards the nearby Borġ In-Nadur, barely ten minutes away on foot – plus some extra to cross the street so you are on something similar to a pavement to walk on. Borġ In-Nadur is another small megalithic structure, with a cemetery, and the remains of a Bronze Age village, with remains ranging from the years 3000 to 700 BCE. Entrance to the Megalithic site was included with the visit of Għar Dalam. The temple was first excavated in the 1920s by archaeologist Margaret Murray. It is the most dilapidated site I visited, but I was again alone – except for a couple of chickens from an adjacent farm. You are allowed to go into the niche or stone circle, and unlike the other temples, it is not covered (yet?).
Near the temple, at the limestone beach of St George’s Bay | Il-Bajja ta’ San Ġorġ, I found silos and cart ruts, also thought to date from the Bronze Age, and Roman Baths directly carved into the limestone. They are not really Roman baths, as in dating from Ancient Rome, these are artificial pools were excavated into the rock during Victorian times. And yet modern people think they’ve invented something…
Not far from there, I found the bathing beaches, the commercial harbour and the salt pans, a traditional way to produce salt letting sea water evaporate from shallow pools in order to harvest the salt crystals. They did not seem in use though as they were either full of litter or used as sunbathing spots.
I still had some time and energy, and decided to invest them on getting to Birgu. This Medieval city is located across the Grand Harbour from Valletta, and it was the first place where the Knights Hospitaller settled. It has a bunch of historical palaces and museums. I would not get there before closing times, but at least I could see the town layout and some buildings from the outside. These included the Gate of Provence, the Inquisitor Palace, the Birgu Waterfront and Maritime Museum, and finally Fort Saint Angelo, a key fortress during the Siege of Malta. Today, use of the fort has been granted to the modern version of the Knights. There was a sign reading “Jurassic World: Dominion” was filmed here, but I did not recognise the backdrop.
I found a convenient bus to head back to Saint Julian’s | San Ġiljan. I freshened up and headed for dinner. At first, I tried to get a table at a restaurant right at the entrance of the hotel. Since they decided to ignore me and give the table to someone else, I moved along. I found Salt & Pepper, a nice grill with an ocean view and an outdoor sitting area. There, I was able to try Stuffat tal-Fenek (fried rabbit in garlic), a typical Maltese recipe (considered the national dish, actually) – pan fried rabbit, simmered in wine, tomato paste, garlic, peas and olive oil, served with roasted potatoes. I wanted to try it, but at the same time I was a bit reluctant, as I am not a big fan of neither garlic nor wine. In the end, I have to say I enjoyed it more than I thought (as long as I kept my mind away from it being actually… rabbit).
Afterwards, I walked around Spinola Bay for some nice views before I turned in for a shower and some sleep… only to be woken up at 5:00. Again. But hey, this time it was a group of girls.
Around 5:00, I was woken up by a group of guys singing, and I thought they were outside, drunk and going back to their hotel. It turns out that Saint Julian’s | San Ġiljan is a party area. I had absolutely no idea – I would like to chalk that up to the improvisation again, but to be honest the concept of a “party town” is one that had not even crossed my mind till then. I did not sleep much afterwards, so a bit after 7:30, when breakfast opened, I headed there, then I took the bus towards the capital, Valletta.
My first stop was a compulsory one – the City Gate | Bieb il-Belt which I had to cross to walk into the city. The capital of Malta was declared a Unesco World Heritage in 1980 under the name City of Valletta because with 320 monuments in 55 hectares, it is one of the most concentrated historic areas in the world. The city was erected by the Knights Hospitaller around a watch tower that was demolished to create a large defensive fort. After said fort fell during the Great Siege of 1565, the Grand Master of the Knights Hospitaller Jean de Valette decided to build a grand fortified city with plans by Francesco Laparelli. Neither Valette nor Laparelli saw the city complete, which happened in the 1570s, when it became the capital. The Gate is the entrance to the fortification itself, separating Valletta from the city of Floriana. Protected by its the walls, Valletta thrived and though 17th the century it became filled with manors and palaces, some of which have now been repurposed as hotels or museums.
One of such buildings is the National Museum of Archaeology, which hosts artefacts from the Neolithic (around 5900 BCE) to the Phoenician period (circa the 6th century CE). On the ground floor they have all the items that have been removed from the Neolithic temples for protection, including some of the carvings from Ħal Tarxien Prehistoric Complex. A tiny clay figuring called The Sleeping Lady captured my attention. It was a lovely detailed little representation from the so called Temple Period of Maltese history (4000 – 2500 BCE), which was recovered from the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum. There are also headless bodies and bodiless heads found at other temples.
I proceeded upstairs, where there is a small exhibit on “cart ruts”, a network of tracks in the rock. The analysis seems to show that they were made by carts with wooden wheels eroding the limestone. However, there are no… traces of whatever pulled on them – no tracks, no trails, nothing but the wheels. There is another room displaying Phoenician civilisation, and one showing some amphorae from a shipwreck off Xlendi Bay in the island of Gozo, at a depth of 110 m. The ship sank in 700 BC, it was discovered in 2007 and it was finally excavated between 2018 and 2021.
The final room I saw hosts a few skulls from the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum. I might have to return to Malta just to finish exploring all the prehistoric sites – aside from that, there is sea, the food is delicious and when you open the tap, the water is warm. I felt right at home, really. Anyway, some of these skulls are described as “elongated” and for a while there was even a conspiracy theory about them being alien… They are not. The elongation was not artificially created, like in some Mesoamerican cultures. They belonged to a few individuals who had… long heads. Which is a bit anticlimactic, but only a few remains have been recovered from the calculated thousands, so there is very little that can be inferred from whomever was interred in the burial chamber.
There was actually a last-last area, a ball room from the Baroque palace, but that was under construction and I could barely have a bit of a look. Afterwards, I walked towards the St. John’s Co-Cathedral | Kon-Katidral ta’ San Ġwan. The Catholic co-cathedral shares responsibilities with the one in Mdina, and was built between 1573 and 1578 in a Mannerist style. The interior was redecorated in the 17th century in a very Baroque style and lots – and I mean lots – of gold and golden decoration. Downstairs, there is a crypt where some Grand Masters of the Knights Hospitaller are buried. On the main floor, the nave is surrounded by nine chapels, eight of which are dedicated to the different chapters of the Order and their patron Saint, and the last one is dedicated to and one to the Virgin Mary. .
Though you can get tickets online, there is no chance to buy same-day tickets but on site. I queued for a while, maybe 20 minutes or so, before I was scanned for… guns and explosives… then I was allowed in. There were small restoration works being carried out. Not a Baroque person in general, but I have to admit it was impressive. I declined climbing to the dome because the fun views are from across the harbour, not from inside the city itself.
The co-cathedral holds two pieces of art by Caravaggio – The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist and Saint Jerome Writing, both in the chiaroscuro style – with high contrasts of light and dark. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571 – 1610) was one of the maximum representatives of chiaroscuro, with usually violent and gruesome topics, usually disguised as hagiography.
After I exited the cathedral, I headed down a small alley opposite for something that is not a monument but… made me happy anyway. Malta has Costa Coffee – something which, unlike the plugs, I had thought of checking beforehand. I actually had a shop near my hotel. Had I known that, I might have skipped booking breakfast. What I did worked really well though, so no big deal. I managed to balance breakfast and dinner, which made my moving around more convenient, not needing to find a place for lunch. Of course, a medium vanilla latte from Costa does not count…
My next stop was the Grand Master’s Palace | Il-Palazz tal-Granmastru. It was the first building erected by the Knights Hospitaller around 1574, and it is considered the seed of both Valletta and the country of Malta itself. The building was first the residence of the eponymous Grand Master of the Knights of Malta until the 18th century, then the residence of British Governors, the Seat of the Parliament, and it currently houses the Office of the President of Malta. That explains why the security is tight enough you’re not even allowed a bottle of water in.
The building was designed by Gerolamo Cassar. The exterior is Mannerist, severe and simple, but the interior is richly decorated with paintings and frescoes. Some of the rooms have coffered ceilings and tapestries on the walls. There is a huge armoury, organised chronologically, and a throne room, which felt a bit out of place for a republic. The building has two courtyards – the so-called Prince Alfred’s Courtyard has a clock tower which is claimed to date from the 1530s. Oh, and apparently, it’s haunted? I did not feel anything out of the ordinary, not even a temperature drop. That would have been handy.
After the Palace, I walked down Valletta’s narrow streets and until I reached St Paul’s Pro-Cathedral | Il-Pro-Katridral ta’ San Pawl, the Anglican “temporary” cathedral, established in 1839 – and still in use. It is a Neoclassical building with a very characteristic steeple and an organ imported from England.
I then took a walk towards what is called Lower Valletta, at sea level. I walked around Elmo Bay and reached Fort Saint Elmo | Forti Sant’Iermu. The origin of the star-shaped fort was defence against the Ottoman Empire (which would eventually yield to Türkiye), and it is a large structure in limestone. It was key in the 1565 Great Siege of Malta and the Maltese victory. However, the interior is a War Museum, and I did not quite feel like that. Instead, I walked around and went down to the beach to enjoy the waves and the views of Fort Ricasoli | Forti Rikażli across the bay.
Later, I found the Lower Barrakka Gardens | Il-Barrakka t’Isfel, a green terraced with trees, monuments and fountains, along with a nice view. I was heading upwards again, towards Upper Valletta.
I thought I ought to get some food as I passed by the Valletta Food Market | Is-Suq Tal-Belt, but I did not find anything I fancied. I bought a soda in a small market in the basement, where I was charged 10 cents for the “reusable cap” (fair) and 10 extra cents for buying a chilled drink (LOL). The soda gave me calories and hydration enough to continue on, so I found the Upper Barrakka Gardens | Il-Barrakka ta’ Fuq. Aside from a nice mixture of architecture and nature, the gardens are linked to the Saluting Battery | Batterija tas-Salut, which stands under the terraced area of the gardens as part of the St. Peter & Paul Bastion. It was constructed in the 16th century for ceremonial gun salutes. Today it hosts cannon replicas that are fired at 12:00 and 16:00. I was there for the Evening Salute, with the firm plan to watch from above.
Then a nice gentleman in a nifty uniform said something akin to “for just 3 € be the closest to a firing cannon you can be in Europe” and there went all my restraint. I mean it was only 3 € and being the closest to a firing cannon you can be in Europe. Yes, I’m easily distracted. Yes, I paid the 3 €.
Entry included a brief explanation, including what a “smooth-bore breech loading 32-pounder gun” is: basically, a cannon designed in the 1880s with a smooth barrel, which can be loaded from the breech end of the barrel and… can fire shells weighing 55 pounds (24.95 kg). They were made modifying guns that could only shoot 32-pound shells though. The soldier-actor explained about cannons, how to load them, what the process was and the security protocols. Oh, and that the weapons were anything but accurate in real life. That was cooler than I thought it would be, so I was happy I had decided to get the ticket.
When the demonstration was over, I left the gardens. I walked past the Tower Port and The Lascaris War Rooms, another war museum, on my way to the Herbert Ganado Gardens and the Kalkara Steps. Doing this, I temporarily left Valletta and stepped into Floriana, then walked back into Valletta until I found The Valletta Waterfront, a group harbour warehouses from the 1700s which have been converted into restaurants, bars and souvenir shops. Since it was that silly time when the restaurants have closed after lunch time and are not yet open for dinner, it was almost empty, so it was nice to see all the buildings.
I had two options then – one was walking back towards the city centre to see two churches that I had missed, or head back to Saint Julian’s | San Ġiljan. Since I was quite closer to the bus station than to any of the churches (Shrine of Our Lady of Mount Carmel | Bażilika Santwarju tal-Madonna tal-Karmnu and The Collegiate Matrix Parish church of Saint Paul | Il-Knisja Kolleġġjata Arċipretali u Matriċi ta’ San Pawl), I decided to return.
Once in Saint Julian’s | San Ġiljan, I had the largest pizza I’ve ever had the pleasure or disgrace to be served. I mean, good thing that I ordered a plain Margherita (in all honesty, it was the house special with extra cheese) because I would not have been able to eat anything with toppings, even after having basically skipped lunch. I somehow made space for ice-cream afterwards…
My flight departed at 9:55 from Madrid-Barajas, which is actually a very bad time for a flight, as you have to drive to the airport through the daily rush-hour traffic jam. However, for a change, I was given a lift there instead of driving myself – my car failed a few days before and I was not feeling too trusting. The inbound plane was delayed, and we ended up landing at Malta International Airport around an hour late.
It turns out that Malta has done a smart thing – the airport is also a coach hub, and there was a bus which went directly where I wanted to go first 20 minutes afterwards – that was lucky because the bus only comes every hour. It did not take long to reach the Blue Grotto | Taħt il-Ħnejja in the village of Qrendi | Il-Qrendi.
I got off in an aptly-named bus stopped called Grotto, next to which stands Xutu Tower | Torri Xutu. The history of Malta cannot really be understood without mentioning the Order of Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem, the Knights Hospitaller, today also known as the Sovereign Order of Malta. This Catholic military order was founded during the Crusades in the 12th century and the knights were established in Malta between 1530 and 1798, acquiring the name. They fortified the island and created the city and defences of Valletta, so-named after Grand Master La Valette. The knights built hospitals – along with medicine schools – and turned Valletta into a centre of art and culture with a university, a school of navigation, and a school of mathematics. Through the centuries, the order transitioned from a warring and defensive army to an organisation centred in humanitarian, medial and social assistance.
Xutu Tower | Torri Xutu was one of the towers built during the operation to fortify the coastline of Malta, probably around 1650. It is a two-story tower with a square ground plan and vaulted ceilings inside, setting the example of the towers that would be built afterwards. As many buildings in the island, the tower was erected using limestone, and restored in 2014 using the same type of material. It also yields to impressive sights – even without climbing it – of the ocean and the islet of Filfla, uninhabited and turned a bird sanctuary.
I bought a ten-euro ticket to sail to the Blue Grotto | Taħt il-Ħnejja from the Blue Grotto Boat Service. This is just a way to amalgamate all the captains and boats who do trips to the caves, I think, and not a bad one. It is a quick trip that does not even take half an hour and charters you to snoop the different caves, created by the erosion of sea water and waves against the cliffs. Each has its name: Blue Window Cave, Circle Cave, Calscave, Honeymoon Cave, Cat’s Cave, Reflection Cave and the main archway which gives the name to the whole area, the Blue Grotto. The water is very clear and since the sun was out, there were extremely beautiful reflections. I stuck my hand in the ocean a few times when I was not taking pictures.
Afterwards, I decided to stop for food. I was not really hungry, but I wanted to tackle the walk to the viewpoint, which was 15 minutes. I thought it would be more efficient to have a late lunch first. There were a couple of restaurants and I chose Step in Malta. It had a terrace, was less than half full, and most importantly: offered calamari fritti. When I researched Maltese food, I read about this dish – fried squid with garlic and parsley mayonnaise , and I really wanted to try them.. I think I broke the poor waiter’s brain when I told him I did not need the menu and ordered directly. They were delicious.
I then did the short walk to the Blue Grotto Viewpoint – and though I won’t be mentioning it much, just assume I just used a lot of sun lotion all the time. It did not take as long as I expected, even if the shortcut was closed down. It yield to pretty views, but not as impressive as expected.
I was about to go back towards the original spot to wait for the 201 bus again, when a Valletta-bound bus stopped by. I hopped onto that one to use the Wi-Fi and replan the rest of my evening. An idea had been to head towards Valletta indeed, but instead I decided to try my luck to reach my first Megalithic temple in Tarxien | Ħal Tarxien. The Blue Grotto is actually quite near another archaeological complex, but that one was covered by the tour I had booked on Saturday.
The trip to Tarxien turned out to be a great idea. When I arrived, I was surprised by the sheer amount of Christian images that were in the streets. That weekend the Catholics celebrated the Feast of the Annunciation. Malta is officially a Catholic country with over 80% of the population adhering to the religion, so while it was slightly surprising to see so much decoration, it is not shocking. I wanted to get to the Ħal Tarxien Prehistoric Complex | Il-kumpless Preistoriku ta’ Ħal Tarxien because it had a closing time.
The Megalithic Temples of Malta are considered amongst the oldest free-standing structures in the world. They were erected between 4100 and 2500 BCE (making them older than Stonehenge, whose rocks were placed between 2600 and 2400 BCE), though the remaining structures probably date from the 3600 – 2200 BCE. In 1980, the UNESCO created the Heritage protection for one of the temples, and in 1992, the Site expanded to six temples / structures in total.
The Ħal Tarxien Prehistoric Complex | Il-kumpless Preistoriku ta’ Ħal Tarxien has been dated between 3000 – 2500 BCE, and it is considered the greatest example of the Temple Period (4100 – 2500 BCE). It was first excavated by Maltese archaeologist Themistocles Zammit around 1913 following complaints of a local farmer that he kept hitting stone while ploughing. The main excavation and restoration took place between 1915 and 1920, and some of the most delicate structures were moved to the Malta Museum of Archaeology to protect them from weathering. The site is covered by a protective tent that makes it look a bit alien, and being alone made it even more magical.
The temple is built in limestone, showcasing three constructions which are independent but attached to one another. The rooms are round, and there is evidence that they had a roofing. There are several chambers, and in some of them there are spiral decorations and domestic animals carved into the rock. There is even a small hearth where fire could be lit. I spent about an hour there, nearing closing time, which meant I was almost alone. I was extremely happy to be there.
I could not visit the related Hypogeum of Ħal-Saflieni because tickets are released – and sold – months in advance, and this whole trip was planned in a couple of weeks. But I could explore around.
Due to the festivities, some of the bus stops were out of order, so I followed the bust route until I found one that was in use. At some point there I crossed my first “invisible frontier” between the village of Tarxien and Paola. Still in Tarxien, I stopped to look at the Catholic sculptures, and in Paola, I came across the Minor Basilica of Christ the King | Il-Bażilika ta’ Kristu Re. The church was erected at the beginning of the 20th century and, compared to the buildings around it, it feels huge – over 80 metres long, 40 metres wide and 60 metres high. It was full, which I found strange for a weekday at 18:00, but then I thought it might be part of the Feast of the Annunciation programme.
I took a bus again and after a few changes I reached my hotel in the town of Saint Julian’s | San Ġiljan. Though I was driven through a few towns, it felt like a huge stride of buildings one after the other, with no real break. It was weird, that the whole area is just one big urban sprawl. I found changing buses easier than I expected, even not knowing the layout of the area. I got to my stop, Ballutta and checked into my hotel.
Aaand at that point I realised that there was a consequence of “British colonisation” that had not even crossed my mind – Malta has Type G plugs. So on my supermarket run I had to add an adaptor (despite having a few at home) to my bottled water and sandwich shopping list. I dropped the groceries at the room and then I went off to explore the coastline. That way, I inadvertently crossed to Sliema. I walked along Ballutta Bay and Exiles Bay, two of the three lobes that make up the larger St Julian’s Bay. I was a bit surprised when all the beaches were made of rock and limestone, which made them great to walk on. I had a lovely walk – except at one point, when I slipped and realised that my totally-sensible-for-airport shoes were not the best choice for limestone beaches. Eventually, I went back to the hotel to eat my supermarket-bought dinner.
Since I had woken up early the previous day, I had also woken up early today, and I was caffeinated and ready about one hour before pick-up time. Considering that they were picking me up at 8:30 for a 13:45 flight, I decided to go for a walk in Istanbul | İstanbul before I got stuck at the airport. The Aqueduct of Valens was close to my hotel, and to get there I had to walk in front of the building of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality T.C. İstanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi Başkanlığı. In the town hall yard there is a fountain with a glass case and several figures inside, reaching for the water. It is the July 15 Sarachane Monument Saraçhane 15 Temmuz Anıtı, which recreates a picture taken on the 15th of July 2016 during a coup attempt. It is supposed to represent a group of civilians Muslim men performing ritual ablution before facing off the rebel military forces at the call of President Erdogan. I was not sure if taking pictures of it was a security risk, but there were no guards around…
I continued on towards Bozdoğan Kemeri (Aqueduct of the Grey Falcon), the part of the Aqueduct of Valens Valens Su Kemeri that can be driven and walked underneath. I stepped through the arches, and then turned towards Sarachane Park Saraçhane Parkı, which was empty except for a few cats and hooded crows (Corvus cornix) which expected me too feed them…
I went back to the hotel, gathered my things and came down to reception – both my driver and I were there at the same time, around 8:20. I guess we managed to avoid all traffic jams, because we reached the airport about 9:30. Upon entering the terminal, there was a first security control which X-rayed all the luggage, then I could access the check-in counters. I had done my check in online, but I printed my boarding pass in the kiosks anyway, and dropped off my luggage. The employee at check-in, holding my passport and boarding pass in her hand, asked me if I had a boarding pass. Obviously, she was not having the best of days, either.
I then went to passport control to clear immigration, which took about half an hour, and then the standard airport security check, which was fast because I found a “no need to take your electronics out” queue. Everything was extremely expensive in the airport. I did buy a bottle of water, but the prices put me off an ice cream, so I munched on some crisps that I had not eaten for dinner the previous night and I had packed exactly for this.
Truth is that Istanbul airport has a museum, but entrance was 13 € (note, not Turkish lira – 13 €). And at that point I decided that I was done feeling like a cash cow and introducing euro into the economy. I spent my remaining lira in the duty free shop, and found a copy of The Little Prince in Turkish for my and my parent’s collection.
We boarded around 13:00, and the process was not as efficient as the way in, but it was easy. We got lunch on the plane – happy to report I have finally internalised that pasta on planes tends to have peppers in the sauce and that upsets my stomach, too. I watched a movie and a half, and spent the rest of the time with one I had watched before as I would not have time to finish it.
Landing was smooth, but it took 61 minutes exactly from touchdown to getting out of the arrivals lounge, what with waiting for the luggage and so. And that was the end of the trip.
Maybe the bad project I mentioned at the beginning of the report was cursed, and thus the circuit was doomed, but it has been honestly one of the most disappointing trips I’ve taken – rushed, with bad information, and horrible customer service. I complained to my travel agent, who was horrified. It has really, really put me off anything organised for a while, and left me with a bad taste in my mouth. Of course, there have been good times, and awesome places, so it was not a complete disaster. Just not what I wanted, or what I thought I was buying when I chose it.
Would I come back to make up for it? I don’t know. As I was writing, I did wish I could go back to Cappadocia and Pamukkale to satisfy the geology nerd in me. Istanbul was not a city that made me feel particularly welcome, so I could skip that. Maybe in 20 years or so, if Türkiye is still a somewhat laic place, I might consider it. But the world is big, and there are many other places to explore… And the Turkish guide kept complaining that “all the good stuff was taken to Germany” so… that might be an option.
We had to leave by 5:30 to go see the Trojan Horse. The reason why I had chosen this particular circuit was because it included “Troy”. The only thing I got to see of Troy was the Truva Heykeli Trojan Statue, – the horse which was used by Warner’s Bros to film the movie Troy in 2004. Not a damn ruin, not a damn rock, let alone be near the archaeological site. Damn it, did I choose the circuit badly or what? I do wonder what people thought of us taking structures of the stupid thing at 6:40 in the morning. As we drove north, we saw the Galipoli Peninsula, place of a huge battle between the Ottoman Empire and New Zealand and Australia regiments belonging as part of the British troups.
We continued towards the city of Bursa, the first capital of the Ottoman Empire, and another of the World Heritage Sites – Bursa and Cumalıkızık: the Birth of the Ottoman Empire. It started off as a settlement around 5,200 BCE, which evolved into a Greek city. Under the Byzantine reign, it was a city known for its garrisons and its silk manufacturing centre. It is considered the origin of the Ottoman Empire, and throughout the period, it flourished through its local silk production. Following the foundation of modern Türkiye, it became an industrial city.
Our first stop was the Grand Mosque of Bursa Bursa Ulu Cami. Its first stone was set in 1399 an important building in the early Ottoman architecture as it found its own style. It is a rectangular building with a fountain from the 19th century at the centre – originally this area was open but it is now closed with glass, forming a skylight. It has two minarets. The interior is mostly white, but at the same time, quite decorated with calligraphy, medallions and vegetal themes.
Then we drove to the Green Mosque Yeşil Camii complex. It was commissioned in 1412 by Sultan Mehmed I Çelebi, who is buried in the adjacent Green Tomb Yeşil Türbe – along with his children and their caretakers. Both the mosque and the mausoleum have beautiful decoration in blue-green tiles with gold inserts, which create the motifs and calligraphic inscriptions.
Next to the mosque stands a building which calls itself a Silk House, but is just a huge souvenir shop, nothing even close to the actual Silk Bazaar. Afterwards, we went for lunch, lentil soup and a traditional Bursa kebap İskender kebap, making this another sort-of actual Turkish meal. It uses meat cooked on a vertical rotisserie (döner kebap) on pita bread, with tomato sauce, yoghurt and sheep’s milk butter – which was poured at the table. Dessert was a honey pastry.
Then we continued off back to Istanbul | İstanbul. We got there around 16:00 and I was considering maybe heading out to a church-turned-mosque to see some of the most important museums but… at that point it felt more like a self-imposed obligation that something I really wanted to do because I would enjoy it? It was more of a feeling of “you should do it because you are not going to come back to this country”. But the truth was that I really did not want to do it. I was disappointed in the whole trip experience, and in a way, I did not… I don’t know… care anymore? No balloon over Cappadocia, not enough time for Pamukkale travertines, no Troy. Whatever.
The nice group from the trip invited me to hang out with them for a walk. Together, we walked to the Grand Bazaar Kapalı Çarşı. Then we continued towards Sultanahmet Square Sultanahmet Meydanı, from where we crossed Gülhane Park Gülhane Parkı until we reached the coastline İBB Sarayburnu Parkı, the point in which the Golden Horn and Bosphorous Strait come together. On our way back, we stopped around Sultanahmet Square Sultanahmet Meydanı to take some pictures.
Finally, I headed back to my hotel – Hotel Bi·setun, the same as the first two nights – to order dinner, have a shower and get ready for the return trip.
We left around 8:00 towards Pergamon Ancient City Pergamon Antik Kenti, another of Türkiye’s World Heritage sites – Pergamon and its Multi-Layered Cultural Landscape, still in the city of Izmir | İzmir (in Türkiye, “city” and “province” are interchangeable, apparently). The origin of the city dates back to the 8th century BCE – though there were legends about a mythological foundation by the son of Heracles. Pergamon flourished and became the capital of its own kingdom, until it eventually fell in Roman’s hands. The most important archaeological area is the acropolis – though the Great Altar, which is currently located in the Pergamon Museum of Berlin, in Germany. I had had a tired / silly moment the night before and packed the camera battery charger with the battery still in it, and I almost had a heart attack when the camera would not work. Fortunately, it made a lot of sense after I opened the battery receptacle.
We did not get to go to the Upper or Lower Acropolis, but we could see the theatre, one of the steepest theatres in the world – built in the 3rd century BCE with capacity for about 10,000 people. We stayed down at the foot of the acropolis, in the Sanctuary of Asclepius Asclepieion [Ἀσκληπιεῖον] – a healing temple dedicated to the demigod Asclepius, the demigod who learnt the art of medicine from the centaur Chiron and became the first doctor in “history”.
The Asclepieion worked with a holistic approach to patient care, giving thought to tranquillity, water, and activities such an art and theatre performances. The theatre is one of the best-preserved structures in the Asclepieion of Pergamon, though there are many others – such as 70 metre long cryptoporticus a tunnel that connected the baths, sacred pools – with a healthy population of frogs and tortoises – and fountains. I also found a lizard chilling out – or baking out, considering the temperature (remember, I had packed for… autumn, not for almost 30 ºC at noon every day…). Some famous ruins include
I wandered around for as long as I could, but again here was no time to explore everything – though this time I came pretty close. We left at around 12:30. This was the only visit we had on the day, as we were directly driven to the hotel in Çanakkale. On the way, we saw the Red Basilica Kızıl Avlu just before leaving Izmir, and glimpsed the island of Lesbos from the bus.
Iris Hotel was in the middle of a residential area – to the point that the bus barely passed through some of the streets. There was nothing interesting around to see in kilometres, so to… compensate, I guess, the hotel had a small mini zoo of deer and fowl.
Behind the hotel there was a private beach with a stunning sunset, but nothing around to explore or do. Çanakkale is located to the west of Türkiye, at the end of the Dardanelles Çanakkale Boğazı, the natural straight that joins the Aegean Sea with the Sea of Marmara, just south of Istanbul. The sea was warm, but I only got in up to my knees. At night, I watched a monster movie in Turkish. That… was an experience.
It is not paranoia if they are really after you. And I am paranoid enough not to set a foot onto a bus before I make sure my suitcase is on board with me. So, guess who had to wrangle their suitcase down the stairs, since the hotel staff did not do it? Yep, I did. At least down is easier than up. Anyway, we were our merry way by 9:00, and continued until noon, when we were ushered into a “typical fur-working centre” which was… I don’t know how describe it, to be honest. But neither typical nor traditional are words I would use.
First, we were taken into a room with a catwalk and given notepaper to write down the numbers of items we liked. For about an hour, four or five models showed off anything but typical leather items, a lot of them reversible. Then, we stepped into the shop. I touched some of the items – they were extremely thin and weightless, which was weird. The prices were extremely high, too, even taking into account “the 70% discount because we were special”. I am happy to report I was at no point approached by any salesperson – again, maybe I do not look targetable to Turkish people?
Lunch was okay, it had some nice dips and a soup, then another sad-meat main dish – albeit with your very own pita bread! Dessert was the only one I liked – a churros family treat called tulumba.
Afterwards, we continued onto our way to Ephesus, which belongs to the current settlement of Izmir | İzmir, and is an archaeological site considered World Heritage. Coincidently, it was more than warm. It was scorching. We were there for two hours and a half, from 14:30 to 17:00. Again, leaving way before closing time to reach the hotel around 17:30, and yet this was the archaeological site where we spent the longest!
Ephesus was a city in ancient Greece – which back then included several areas of what is now Türkiye. Ephesus was founded around the 10th century BCE, and it became home to one of the Wonders of the Ancient World, the Temple of Artemis, which was built around 550 BCE. It was controlled by the Romans between 129 BCE and 395 CE, and during this period, it became an important site in Christianity starting the year 50 CE or so – with the apostle Paul of Tarsus living there, and reportedly being home of “the seven churches of the Apocalypse”. The city suffered attacks from the Goths, and was damaged by earthquakes before being finally abandoned in the 15th century.
Though the temple of Artemis was off-site and it has been destroyed, many monuments from different periods still stand or have been restored. There are two theatres, a small odeon, and a larger one – with the large one being probably the greatest in the ancient world, seating 25,00 people. There were two agoras, one for commercial meetings and the other one for business. During the Roman times, the Gate of August was built to honour the Emperor.
Since the temple is long gone, the most important building remaining is the Library of Celsus, rebuilt from the pieces left. Tiberius Julius Celsus Polemaeanus was one of the Ancient Greek governors of Roman Asia, who paid for the library himself around the year 125 CE, and is actually buried underneath. The library once held up to 12,000 scrolls in 180 square metres.
The guide kept hurrying us up, saying that he had a surprise for us – which turned out to be an immersive show about the history of the city, and after that we had to leave. The film was okay, but I would have much preferred to have more time to wander and see the real thing. The only item that was real – I hope, though it was probably a copy – was the final statue of Artemis.
We left afterwards. We did not get to stop by the place where the temple used to stand. We did not see one of the most famous sites outside the city either – the so-called house of the Virgin Mary because, according to the guide, “it was a recycled myth”, it was probably the house of Artemis’ priestesses. Which in my view made it even more interesting, but oh well…
Ephesus Hitit Hotel had an outdoor swimming pool that I dipped into, but it was too cold to stay for a long time. I also tried to go out of the hotel to find something to see, but the street did not seem safe. To the point that our bus driver actually saw me going out and came to ask me if I was all right…
Upset as I was, it took a long time to fall asleep, and I nearly had a heart attack when the hotel’s automatic wake-up call made the landline ring at 4:20 – half an hour before my alarm clock was set. We left around 5:40, and it was cold at that time, though it would get really hot during the day. Around sunrise, we reached our first destination – a caravanserai (kervansaray in Turkish, کاروانسرای, kārvānsarāy], in original Persian). Between the 2nd century BCE and the 15th century CE, Europe and China were communicated through the Silk Road, a network of trade routes frequented by caravans. Caravanserai were roadside inns built alongside those trade routes. They were fortified inns which protected the traders from bandits and weather, providing food and water. In Turkish, they are also called han.
Öresin Han (also called Tepesi Delik Han, “the han with a hole on the roof”) is a restored caravanserai / han. It was built in 1188, according to a plate that was recovered during restoration. The works lasted between 2007 and 2010, saving the building from literal ruins (and the aforementioned hole on the roof). Nowadays, it is a shop and inn for tourists. It has thick walls and a vaulted interior to withstand the weather and possible attacks.
We continued on the road for hours until an early lunch at noon, then drove to the World Heritage Site Hierapolis-Pamukkale, a combination of historical site and geothermal activity. First and foremost, there is the travertine formation. Travertine is a sedimentary rock made out of calcium carbonate which precipitates from fresh water – basically, the material stalactites are made of. Sometimes, in thermal areas, they deposit in cascade form with lakes and waterfalls.
The Pamukkale travertine formation Pamukkale travertenlerinde is a terrace formation around 2,700 metres long, 600 metres wide and 160 metres high. The local thermal water oozes onto the surface at a temperature between 35 and 100 ºC and saturated with calcium carbonate. At the surface, carbon dioxide degasses and the calcium carbonate precipitates into a gel that will crystallise into travertine. Unfortunately, the waterfalls have been mostly drained now to feed pools at the hotels.
Even from the Classical era, the travertines have attracted visitors to the point that a thermal spa was founded around the 2nd century BCE, which eventually became the town of Hierapolis. In the year 133 BCE, Hierapolis was incorporated into the Roman Empire.
We had some time to wander around the place, but way too short to actually see even a quarter of what was on display, which was frustrating – but this would again happen at every archaeological site. Along one of the nice ladies from my group, I saw the Roman baths, then basilica, now museum, which contains the smaller items unearthed – sculptures, friezes, sarcophagi. We then climbed up to the Temple of Apollo Apolion and the Temple of Pluto Ploutonion – which are closed off as the cave underneath them emits asphyxiant carbon dioxide due to the geothermal processes.
There is also a swimming pool on site, and after hiking up to the theatre it might have even been inviting, if not for the fact that you could actually step onto an area of the travertines to experience them first-hand. I of course took the chance, and was surprised at how… non smelly it was, used to sulphur thermal waters in Japan.
I did not understand why we had to leave so early, because then we just ended up at another hotel with nothing around – thinking back, I have reached the conclusion that the guide was overworked, and he kept a schedule of going to sleep early and getting up early too, that is why we were at all the hotels at 18:00 at the latest; not an excuse, but an explanation. We were at Colossae Thermal & Spa Hotel around that time. The hotel did not have a lift, and most of our rooms were on the first floor. The hotel staff brought the luggage up, and we were reassured it would be taken down again the following morning. I… had a feeling it would not.
In accordance to the thermal and spring water reputation of the region, the hotel had a thermal centre. It comprised a swimming pool, a warm pool and a jacuzzi inside. Outside, there was an actual thermal water / mud pool – which was great for relaxing, but at 33 ºC, I could not stay for long (and I tried not to feel guilty as I knew the water is deviated from the travertines). By this time in the trip, too, I had inserted myself into a group of nice people, and made acquaintances with a nice couple, which was good because it’s always useful to have someone telling you that you’re about to get into the shower with your glasses on…
I had made a thing out of two coffees for breakfast, and today was no exception. The whole group was now in the hotel so we were ready to go see the sights. The bus had barely hit the road when our guide gave us a huge grin and decalred “I’m the first Turkish face you meet during this trip. Trust me. We’re going on the balloon is too expensive, so we’re not gonna do it here. We’re going to do it somewhere else”.
I was crushed at these words. Had he said this the previous day, I would have arranged to go onto the balloon on my own – today. Now, with a 5:00 departure time the following day, it was impossible. I don’t have words to write how I felt – devastated, cheated, furious. The option to ride a balloon in Cappadocia was in the documentation, and I had budgeted for it. And this guy had plain and simply… robbed me from it, because he did not want to wake up early after picking the other half of the group from the airport. Looking back, I should have tried to do it myself, hiring the flight on the hotel for today – and knowing that does not make it any better, because I could not do this one activity, which was important for me, not because of the weather or any actual problem. Just because the guide did not want to do his job. I did try to get him to reconsider, but he was like “no can do”.
Thus, I reached the conclusion that the travel agency, Oxin Travel and the guide himself sucked. Through the day (and the rest of the trip), I would build evidence on this – such as hearing explanations that did not make sense, or just contradicted what was written on the panels. I’m surprised it did not cross my mind to leave the trip at that time, because I was seething and heartbroken. In the past, I have tried to leave unsavoury experiences out of JBinnacle, but this would not be an honest trip report without all the emotions that coursed through me during that day – and to be honest, this was just the beginning of the problems. I wrote an email to the distributor that very same day, told the guide, and have complained formally to my travel agent. I have no hope for any solution, but at least I made it known that I was not happy with the services provided. And this trip was not cheap, at all.
I had to try to get over the disappointment in order to at least see what I could of the region. It was hard, I felt a cloud over my head ruining the mood. I almost did not care about anything else, but I knew I had to make do with what I had, or let my whole trip be ruined. Thus, I tried to get myself into the right mindframe to enjoy the World Heritage Site Göreme National Park and the Rock Sites of Cappadocia as much as I could.
Around 9:00, we reached Christian Keşlik Monastery Keşlik Manastırı outside the town of Ürgüp, which is a cave monastery. Human history in Cappadocia is tied to its geology. Tuff is easy to carve, and a lot of civilisations have made their dwellings into the earth instead of on it. First, it was the cavemen, and much, much later the Christians. The first buildings from the monastery date back from the 3rd century CE. Between the 1st and the end of the 4th centuries CE, Christianity spread through the Roman Empire, coming into conflict with the established religion, which deified the Emperor. As Christianity forbade idolatry, their refusal to adore the Emperor as a god made them a target of persecution, accused of treason. In some Roma cities, the Christians took to the catacombs. In Cappadocia, they dug cave monasteries.
Within the tuff structures, ancient Christians created all the items that one would find in a regular monastery – a church, two actually, St. Michael and St. Stephen, a refectory, a winery, dwellings, a baptistery created from a sacred spring… The monks could perform their rituals and protect themselves from any possible attack. It was a functioning Orthodox church well into the 20th century.
The most important cave-building in the rock is the Church of Saint Michael. Its ceilings are decorated with black backgrounds and colourful figures, although many were damaged by iconoclast movements. There were also tomb-like structures where the monks meditated. Underneath the church, there is a baptistery, and next to it the refectory, with a long table and seats carved out of rock. Outside, you can wander around the dwellings, halfway between caves and houses, which served as rooms for the monks.
Afterwards, we headed out to the Underground City of Mazi Mazı Yeraltı Şehri, known in the past as Mataza. There are between 150 and 200 known “underground cities” in Cappadocia. They were initially carved between the 8th and 7th century BCE by the tribes which dwelt in the area. Turf is easy to carve and there is no water in the soil, which made it easy for the tribes to dig “caves” under their houses. These caves became “rooms” which ended up connected to one another through tunnels. As time passed, the cities became more and more complex, with decoy tunnels and booby-traps that the locals could use to hide, safeguard their resources, and protect themselves from raids.
The cities were layered, and the levels were used for different activities – upper floors were for stables, underneath which stood the wineries and ovens… They had wells and ventilation systems that could not be tampered with by the enemies, and even a communication system to talk to people who were in other rooms. Mazi itself had eight stories, four different concealed entrances, and rounded rocks that could be used to close off the corridors. About 6,000 people could survive in its tunnels for up to a month. We did not have much time to explore as we had to move as a group, but it looked really cool.
We went back onto the bus to head to Guvercinlik Vadisi, Pigeon valley – so called because the geological formations were excavated into dovecotes, since pigeons were used for food and their droppings as fertiliser. As we had 20 minutes there, I could hike down into the valley for a bit and even step into one of the dovecotes. Since it has become a tourist spot, locals have decorated trees with Turkish amulets – evil eye charms – to create photo spots they can request a tip if you get your picture taken there.
Back on the bus, the guide “graciously” and “secretly” stopped at Üçhisar, a town which has turned a lot of its fairy chimneys into hotels and cafeterias. It is dominated by Üçhisar Kalesi, Üçhisar “castle”, the only natural castle in the world, built in a tuff hill.
Then we were taken for lunch, a rather nondescript buffet which ran out cacik (Turkish tzatziki) way too fast, and afterwards to a “jewellery atelier”. The rocks they showed us were pretty, but the jewellery was rather tacky – and their star product? A pendant made of the local semi-precious stone sultanite inside a balloon, so we were not amused. I was not the only one angry about the whole debacle.
During the bus ride the guide had pitched several optional activities, and I decided to take a so-called jeep safari, run by locals, which takes you in a kind of luxury jeep up and close with the geology of the area. I got that one because it was external and better than nothing, but I did not sign up for the “traditional Turkish night of alcohol and dancing” – I don’t drink alcohol and I was not in the mood for dancing.
The jeep safari drivers picked us up from the jewellery shop around 16:00, whilst the rest of the group went back to the hotel. I felt so cheated – six hours in Cappadocia to go back to the hotel at 16:00 is disgraceful. But then again, I was not in my best disposition. Good that I still had the chance to drive right into the heart of the valleys, at least.
It was a pity that the drivers spoke zero English or Spanish, because it made it impossible to determine where exactly he was taking us. However, we got close to the rock-houses, saw the valleys, the castle, and finally, finally, finally got close to a fairy chimney! We even caught a glimpse of one of the volcanoes responsible for the landscape. It was hard having to go back to the hotel at sunset, but I had a lot of fun – I shared the car with a couple, and the poor lady was terrified by the driver’s antics. I was honestly more worried about the times on the road than the bouncing through the trails.
However, back in Suhan Cappadocia Hotel & Spa before 18:00 made the sadness hit – and no internet in the rooms did not help for any kind of distraction. I tried to walk around the village to try to see something, but I did not find a way, and it was getting dark. I packed for the next day as we were leaving the area. After dinner, I wrote to the travel agents’ in Spain to complain, with zero hope for a solution as it was a Sunday, but I wanted it out of my system. I spent a really bad night, and it was stupidly short because I could not fall asleep…
The alarm clock went off at 5:40 and I was ready for pick up in 15 minutes. The guide had changed my pick-up time from 6:25 to 6:00, but apparently was the only one who had been informed about the rescheduling. The travellers in the rest of the hotels in the area had no idea, which made it absolutely pointless because we had to wait for them anyway.. For this leg of the trip we were 16 people, and the description of the day said we would “visit the Atatürk mausoleum in Ankara and see the Salt Lake” on our way to Cappadocia. A quick calculation yields to about 733 km of trip from Istambul to Avanos.
We left Istanbul and went on the road. We took a couple of breaks on the way, and around 12:30 we reached Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s mausoleum Anıtkabir in Ankara. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk is often called “the founding father of modern Türkiye”, and served as the first president of the Republic, between 1923 and 1938. The Ottoman Empire had participated in World War I, and after its defeat, the Allied powers wanted to divide the country among themselves. Atatürk spearheaded the Turkish War of Independence, and upon victory, he abolished the Sultanate and proclaimed the Turkish Republic. He made a lot of changes – primary education became free and compulsory, the Latin alphabet replaced the Ottoman writing, women obtained equal rights, the country became secular and started industrialisation, the language was strengthened, and surnames were adopted.
Upon Atatürk’s death, it was decided to build a mausoleum in Ankara – Anıtkabir. There was a design competition which was won by Emin Onat and Orhan Arda, though modifications were added later on. It is a massive complex with a courtyard, stairs, the tomb hall, and exhibition rooms. The theoretical entrance to the area is an avenue lined with lions and trees, though due to security, you enter from the opposite side. The Hall of Honour holds a symbolic sarcophagus, and the actual tom is located 12 metres underneath. On the corners, there are small ethnographic exhibits. The whole complex is made out of reinforced concrete and is decorated with marble, travertine, reliefs, frescoes, carvings… Everything looks golden. Around 13:15, we saw the changing of the guard in the ceremonial courtyard.
Then we headed off for lunch, a bowl of lentil soup and a plate of flattened “meatballs” and rice, and continued on our way. Around 17:00 we “saw” the Salt Lake indeed – we guessed its existence from a service station a few kilometres away. We reached the Suhan Cappadocia Hotel & Spa in Avanos, in the region of Cappadocia. We would be using that as base for two days. One of the things to do in Cappadocia is seeing sunrise from above. However, since the group was not complete, the guide did not offer the possibility for sunrise the next day, he just gave us the Wi-Fi password (which only worked in the lobby), and the dinner / breakfast / day trip for the morning, and left.
Riding a balloon in Cappadocia is the thing to do. It allows you to see the structures called “fairy chimneys” from above as the sun rises, and since the landscape is so unique, I was really excited. Geologically, Cappadocia is a very interesting place – some thirty million years ago, volcanoes Erciyes, Hasan and Melendiz erupted repeatedly. Over thousands of years, ash rained on the ground, creating an elevated plateau of around 17,671 square kilometres. The ash hardened into tuff (a porous rock that I have seen in Neapolitan architecture) before it was covered by a layer of basalt. Both types of rock weathered, but tuff erodes faster than the upper basalt – creating sort of mushroom-like rock formations. As you can imagine, being the geology geek I am, visiting all these was one of the things I was looking forward the most. I had even put aside a budget “just for the balloon”, as it can get quite expensive, and I wanted to remain reasonable.
I dropped off the luggage and decided to go get something to eat before I hopped into the shower – else I would not get any food at all. Dinner was a buffet, and it was overrun. The food was weird… there was a huge dessert buffet, and a lot of breads, but nothing that really grabbed my attention but a few dollops of cacik (Turkish tzatziki). Back in the room, I tried to find a TV channel with something I could understand – and was not related to Israel bombing or being bombed. I did not even find the BBC…
It was warm in Istanbul | İstanbul when the sounds of the town woke me up. Since I was up early, I decided to find the Bozdoğan Kemeri (Aqueduct of the Grey Falcon), part of the Aqueduct of Valens Valens Su Kemeri. It was built using brick and stone in the 4th century in order to bring water to Constantinople. Construction started under the reign of Constantine II and finished during the reign of Valens, and the structure was in use under the Ottoman period. The Bozdoğan Kemeri bridge is 971 metres long, and its maximum height is around 30 metres. Today, it stands over a busy road, with cars running underneath.
I went back to the hotel for pick-up, which today happened on time. I had signed up to the other day trip offered to me at the airportEstambul Bósforo (55 €). My hopes were not too high, but at least I met with the nice ladies from the day before. This time around, the group was bigger, so everything was a bit more chaotic. Our first stop was Süleymaniye Mosque Süleymaniye Camii, an Ottoman imperial mosque commissioned by Suleiman the Magnificent to his imperial architect Mimar Sinan around 1550. The mosque has four minarets with a total of ten balconies. The interior is decorated with medallions, writings, geometrical decorations, and beautiful stained-glass windows. Outside, there is a cemetery with the mausoleum of Sultan Suleiman and his wife Roxelana.
After the mosque complex, the bus headed out towards the Asian side of Istanbul for a panoramic viewpoint up Çamlica Hill Çamlıca Tepesi, which implied getting stuck in traffic for a long time again and driving past a lot of interesting buildings – visiting any of those would have been a better use of our time.
We went back to the bus for the boat ride, which despite being advertised as a Bosphorus trip, was only up and down the Golden Horn Altın Boynuz for about an hour. At first, I tried to pay attention to the guide as he explained things, but I got bored pretty quickly. This was not a good sign, considering this one guide was the one who was to take me onto the tour around the country…
For lunch, we had been asked to choose either bream or chicken. I had ordered the chicken because I had a feeling I could not trust a random restaurant in Istanbul… I was right. The bream turned out to be sea bass. Again, food was nothing remarkable. Then, we walked towards the New Mosque Yeni Cami, which was the next visit, but we did not get to go into that one for reasons that escape me. Instead, we were taken into the Spice Bazaar or Egyptian Bazaar Mısır Çarşısı, for a demonstration inside a particular shop. I do wonder how many and how much commissions go into decisions like that.
This was the end of the day trip, around 17:00, since the guide had once again stated that “your hotels are close, no need for the bus”. I said goodbye to the nice ladies, and headed out towards the Grand Bazaar Kapalı Çarşı, described as a “network of indoor souks and market streets”. It is actually one of the oldest and largest covered markets in the world, and it has thousands of shops – literally. It dates back from 1455, just after the Fall of Constantinople into the hands of the Ottomans. It was an interesting structure, but I only found trinkets and souvenirs, and it was packed with people.
Thus, after crossing out the Grand Bazaar from the list, I headed towards the university İstanbul Üniversitesi, my reference for the metro stop Veznecıler. From there, I could take a train towards Taksim Square Taksim Meydanı, the gateway to Independence Avenue İstiklal Caddesi, on the other side of the Golden Horn but still in the European side. The area is a tourist hub with shops, fast food places, and ice cream vendors who play around before they serve you the ice cream cones. One of the highlights of the avenue is the “nostalgic tramway” İstanbul nostaljik tramvayı, a revival or heritage tramline with tiny cars, built from memories and photographies. It is not a novelty thing for tourists, but an actual working system that goes up and down the avenue, line T2. I was happy to be able to see it, the car was packed – mostly by tourists though…
At the end of İstiklal Caddesi, stands Galata Tower Galata Kulesi, a former watchtower, now a museum with an observation deck. The origin of the tower dates back from 1204 though the original tower was destroyed and rebuilt in the Romanesque style in 1350. At that point, it was the highest building in the city. At the moment, it is almost 63 metres high, with nine floors, and a renewed roof.
Afterwards, I caught the underground at the nearest stop – though I was a little bit tempted by the nostalgic tram – and I headed back to the hotel. I settled the bill for the water bottles I had bought and went up to my room, where I decided to order the same dinner as the evening before – kebap and yoghurt. I then had a shower and packed, because pick-up was at 6:00 the next morning. Good thing that I had found a vending machine in the underground system that sold canned coffee, even if it was “almond flavoured”.
JBinnacle – A Travel Logbook 