“People of Valencia! I bring you bread!” roared Charlton Heston as he galloped through the Torres del Quart, the colossal gates of the medieval walls of this city.

It has to be one of the chisel-jawed actor’s most memorable movie moments.

As the talismanic Spanish warrior in the epic blockbuster El Cid, in which he co-starred with Sophia Loren and a cast of chainmail-clad thousands, Heston is shown at his larger-than-life best as he saves Valencia from the fearsome Moors.

Now Spain is encouraging us to discover more about El Cid. In one of its most ambitious projects, it has created La Ruta Del Cid – The Route of El Cid – a trail that winds over 1,200km.

It begins in Burgos, El Cid’s birthplace, and ends in the Levante around Valencia, the city he held siege for three years and finally conquered from the Almoravids in 1094.

Over the course of Spanish history, this 11th-century knight has been its most popular national hero. Every child in Spain learns his story and Generalísimo Franco worshipped him. He is to Spain what Robin Hood is to Britain, and has inspired scores of literary works. He even inspired Cervantes, who has Don Quijote trying to compare his wobbly horse Rocinante to the hero’s powerful white Andalucían steed Babieca.

Truth be told, El Cid (from the Arabic sayyid meaning ‘lord’), whose real name was Rodrigo Díaz, is a controversial figure. Historians now know he wasn’t quite the hero depicted by Charlton Heston. In fact, he fought on the side of both Moors and Christians, beginning as a nobleman in the court of the Castillian king Alfonso VI, later selling his services as a mercenary–general for the Muslim emir of Zaragoza and eventually gathering his own army and seizing Valencia for himself, where he ruled until his death.
Legend has it that after El Cid died, he was strapped on to his horse and ridden into a battle, where the Moors were so afraid of his prowess they ran back to their boats. Truth or not, it makes a great ending to the film.

The Ruta, being launched to commemorate the eighth centenary of the publication of the poem El Cantar de Mío Cid, has been divided into eight sections that mirror El Cid’s historic rampage across Spain. These can be travelled by foot, bike, horseback or car and wind through eight provinces: Burgos, Soria, Guadalajara, Zaragoza, Teruel, Castellón, Alicante and Valencia.

statue of el cid in valencia

Even today, the province retains much of its medieval past. Many of the towns and villages were seized by El Cid as he fought his way across the taifas (small Moorish kingdoms) towards his glittering prize of Valencia.

One of the most picturesque villages is Alpuente. But it has good reason to want to forget El Cid – he burned crops and forced villagers to surrender taxes so he could pay his troops. Records in the ayuntamiento (town hall) show he took 10,000 dinars – enough to pay his army for a year. Here, medieval houses cling to the hillside and there’s a pretty ninth-century church built on top of the original mosque – chances are El Cid prayed here for luck in battle.

Nearby is Xátiva, then a wealthy town from where the Moors introduced paper to the rest of Europe. Above it stands its storybook castle– a fortress El Cid would have stormed as he journeyed southwards.
Over 900 years after El Cid seized Valencia, there’s plenty of him left. And that’s quite aside from his splendid statue on his rearing horse in the Plaza de España. It replaced one of Franco in the 1980s.
Modern Valencia, now famous for architectural creations such as Santiago Calatrava’s spaceship-like City of Arts and Sciences, is preparing itself for another invasion this year with the Americas Cup, the world’s biggest sailing event. But the Ruta proves that Valencia is more than the gloss of its new veneer.
Anyone who comes here and fails to explore the patina of the past is missing out, says historian Fernando Sanz Ruiz, who leads walking tours round the city. “Valencia has one of the best preserved medieval city centres in Europe,” he says.

A nice place to raise a glass to El Cid

I drop into the Iglesia de San Esteban, where El Cid is said to have married his two daughters, then climb the spiral staircase of the bell-tower of the cathedral in the Plaza de la Reina. Long views over Valencia’s gleaming ceramic domes, the maze of narrow streets and the huerta (fruit groves) beyond stretch out. Still visible are the imposing towered stone gates, Torres de Serrano and Torres de Quart: they’re all that remain of the medieval city walls El Cid and his troops scaled.

“See these old red bricks?” says Sanz Ruiz as we head into Calle Salinas, one of the oldest streets in Valencia. “They are over 900 years old. You find similar ones in Morocco baked from the same kind of moulds.”

We turn a corner. “Here’s an azucat (Arabic for dead end),” he says, leading me bang into a brick wall and explaining how blind alleys were a defensive architectural ploy of the Moors: soldiers on horses would have come charging into them and found themselves trapped.

El Cid was obviously not fooled. Even so, I can’t help but imagine Charlton Heston is about to come galloping round the corner …

www.spain.info
www.caminodelcid.org

El Camino del Cid published by Pais Aguilar gives maps and historical information, plus where to stay en route (in Spanish)

Walking tours with Fernando Sanz Ruiz, author of A Guide to Walks Around Historical Valencia (English) can be booked via www.fernandosanzruiz.es; tel 0034 649 732 744