In the Shadows of the City of Hanging Houses (pool #783)
- Apr 5
- 2 min read
5 April 2026
Bella and I have locked into our top five features for our travel perfection:
Fitness first – pools for me and great gyms for her
Food next – we aim to eat our way around locations, going in for local over global, flavour over fullness (though sometimes we indulge with filling local flavour!)
Walking, walking, walking – we walk A LOT with history/city walking tours and food walking tours booked whenever possible. This both serves goal #1 and is the best way to slow down, take in the sights and absorb some of the culture. Madrilenos, for example,
never seem to cross a cross-walk until the little green man lights up, no matter how empty the roads.
show a far lower propensity to vaping versus what I see as being such a prevasive habit in London
Sample the local arts and cultural scene, tending towards live events vs museums.
… and to find a cold, dark, quiet cave in which to sleep. Technically, we have only ever found a cave hotel when staying in Cappadocia, Turkey in 2014, but our perfect sleep environment mimics that.
Madrid delivered all of that from Thursday late afternoon through Saturday evening’s excellent flamenco performance, but we also wanted to sample some of the Spanish countryside, so we grabbed a rental car early on Easter Sunday morning and headed out to the incredibly charming town of Ceunca, a UNESCO World Heritage city that is famous for its 14th century "hanging houses" (casas colgadas) ... just stunning both architecturally and for the landscape:
Thankfully, Bella indulged me my obsession with grabbing pools and brought a novel along to read on the very comfy couches in the ante-room of the Complejo Polideportivo Luis Ocaña while I swam here, pool #783 which sits in the modern part of the city in the valley below the old town on the hill.
While this is not a fancy pool. they had the water at a perfect 26°C and it was open between 10am and 2pm on Easter Sunday. It was lightly enough attended that I shared a lane with one other guy, getting in enough of a workout before walking the ~30 minutes up the hill to "pre-pay" our indulgence in some excellent Spanish cuisine over a lazy lunch in the old town.
The highways were uncrowded both ways, so this was a perfect Sunday outing to cap off our weekend ... leaving us satisfied we had seen a lot of Madrid, but still desirous of coming back for more in the future.
