Torremejia – Mérida September 27th

Last night most of the people I’d been running into on and off along the way were staying at the same place and ate there last night.

They come from all over the place but only two of us, both Pauls, come from outside Europe – Canada and Australia.

As I mentioned in my last post , the building is very old , but I hadn’t mentioned that you can see remains of Roman statues that were used to build a wall of the building. On the left you can see robes and on tbe right a torso and a hand wearing a ring.

Today is a short walk of around 15km and I should arrive in plenty of time to see some of the sites.

Mérida was the capital of Lusitania, one of the three Roman provinces into which Iberia was divided. It’s remarkable ruins led to a world heritage listing in 1993.

I walked today with Luís . His friend  Toni has decided that long distance walking isn’t for him and he caught the bus to Mérida .

Two shadows !

This is a photo of the 3 of us back in Zafra – I look terrible!



The path follows more or less the route of the Roman road,as does the modern freeway.

Unfortunately, we both missed the signs for the path turnoff and we walked the whole way on the asphalt – ouch! It’s hard on the feet .One nice thing is that we entered the town across the Roman bridge. Build around 100AD, with 62 spans and a length of 755m, it’s the longest surviving Roman bridge.

This photo shows just one section of the bridge as the river has a number of channels .

Today I saw a few of the sites – I’ll cover the rest tomorrow on my rest day.

The aqueduct fell out of use a long time ago as the inhabitants of Mérida used the stones to build houses.

After this wanton act of destruction, the local people were reduced to drinking only beer, wine and Coca-Cola.



There are Roman ruins everywhere – here an office building has been built over the top of remains of houses and streets.

The massive moorish fortress has a cistern deep underground with river water filtered by sand.



An old shop sign –