Day 21

A few days ago, we started seeing doorways dug into rock walls, or multiple doors on little hills outside of small towns. At a distance, you squint and say to yourself, “Hobbits?”

These rural storage units are called bodegas here, and the tradition dates back 2,000 years to the Roman occupation. Romans then, like Romans today, really like their wine and bodegas are great wine making and storage facilities. The tradition caught on and although most families are more into modern storage methods today, lots of the bodegas are still used. (The unused ones are hazards, as nobody pays attention to them and then they cave in from the top, causing a hole people/pets can fall into.)

The bodega hill in the little town of Moratinos, which we passed the other day, estimate their bodegas as 500 years old. There’s a sign next to them saying that legend has it that the digging of bodegas was done by kids, as a way of keeping them occupied during winter. A few feet into digging the cave, the kids started to make the chimney-like ventilation shaft that they used to haul up most of the dirt in buckets. The dirt then was packed on top of the already hill-like hill, making it even bigger. A lot of the little towns call their bodega grouping “the Castillo” - the castle.

The sign in Moratinos also goes on to plea that the Pilgrims not use the bodegas as garbage cans or toilets... sigh.