After nine nights, we have managed to leave Alclalí. This was not quite as easy as you might at first think. Finding someone available to take payment was the trickiest thing. I asked on Friday if I could pay mañana but all farming hands were busy on Friday and on Saturday nobody turned up. Finally this morning [Sunday], in an act of desperation, I went and knocked on a window waggling my wallet and managed to throw €190 at Señor Octavio senior. Success, we could leave with a clean conscience.
The question was where to leave to? We are booked in to Camping de Haro from Monday within striking distance of Bilbao and our return ferry to the crappy British climate. That’s a big step of almost 650kms, so we wanted a midway stopping point.
On our many journeys between Bilbao and Jalon, in the halcyon days of owning Casa Libélule, at about half way, we passed signs to a place of some notoriety, called Belchite. In beginning to think about writing this entry, I was going to say that Belchite was Franco’s answer to the SS atrocities in France at Oradour-sur-Glane.
Oradour-sur-Glane is a must on the French tourist route. Four days after D-Day [10th June 1944], a Waffen-SS Panzer Division stormed into Oradour-sur-Glane and murdered 643 inhabitants, including 247 children, Six of the village inhabitants survived.
Most famously, the local doctor’s car stands rusting on its axles in the street where it was parked when the Nazis entered the village. Numerous other cars stand rusting elsewhere in the village.. Most poignant, is the church, where a twisted, rusting pushchair remains, the women and girls having been imprisoned in there while the church, surrounded by machine gunners to cut down any escapees, was set on fire. I defy anybody with any emotion at all not to develop floods of tears. Francine was so overwhelmed that she was unable to use her camera, when we visited. It is really quite unbelievable.
In Spain, Belchite was wiped out by being bombed into oblivion by Franco’s forces, apparently a part of the battle for Zaragosa. Checking my history (which is very sketchy) I realized that the Spanish civil war was going on in 1937, seven years before the SS stormed into Oradour-sur-Glane. I seem to remember that some of the Luftwaffe pilots used the Spanish civil war as something of a training exercise for WWII. Thus, Belchite was more of a fore-runner to Oradour-sur-Glane.
Having driven past Belchite several times over the years, we thought we’d finally call in and see it.
Our route to Belchite took us through about 150kms off any motorway. As soon as we dived off onto the (excellent) side road, we were in the familiar ol’ Spanish quarry. After passing a few mining towns which looked as though they’d seen better days – mind you, a lot of internal Spain looks that way – we entered the Campo de Belchite, where the “quarry” seemed to transform into more of a lunar landscape.
Staying at Belchite would continue our Spanish camping education. Belchite has an aire for motor homes which is conveniently close to the ruins. The catch for us is that, being a true Spanish aire, it was off-grid, meaning no facilities. We’d be cut loose from our familiar umbilical chords. Frodo is quite well suited to such a brief stay, we’ve just never done it before. Frodo has two leisure batteries, a 100-litre fresh water tank, which was full and an 80-litre grey water tank, which was empty. The fridge runs on gas (or should) and the water heater also runs on gas (ditto) so we could use the on-board shower without discharging (see below). The theory was fine, it just seemed a bit of a leap of faith ‘cos we hadn’t done it before.
The Spanish have rules about camping, or rather not camping, on free aires – this is best summarized as “you can park but you cannot be seen to be camping”. Francine has a neat graphic explaining. For someone such as myself who is anal about getting the van level, the worst part of this is that I’m not allowed to use any levelling devices on the aire. Oddly, you can chock the wheels but not drive up a ramp; mind you, if the ground sloped such that you needed to chock the wheels, I’m not sure how you’d get any sleep. Anyway, you take what the ground throws at you.
Fortunately we found a pitch – I think there were 10 – that was not too far off level in both directions. Once we got Frodo settled and through the heart-in-mouth waits getting the gas systems fired up – it takes a while ‘cos the gas lines empty when not in use – we spent a very quiet and comfortable night.
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