It wasn't exactly a home for witches, although it seems certain that there were times when they danced around it in the pleasant warmth of the bonfires. Nor were they as terrifying as the others Francisco de Goya painted commissioned by the Marquises of Osuna for their Capricho estate, which are now proudly displayed in the halls of the Lázaro Galdiano Museum in Madrid. In fact, and to put the matter to the extreme, they weren't even witches, but simply simple villagers who remained faithful to the customs and fertility rites of their farming ancestors.

Hand in hand with that true thunder dressed as a Nazarene, as the poet Antonio Machado would say, referring to that Spanish gentleman named Don Guido, who wielded his sword with one hand and beat his chest for forgiveness with the other, today, hand in hand with Don Hilarión, I invite you to join me through that traditional Madrid, where another of the most important places awaits us: Tapas y Cañas.

A few meters beyond the underground source of the Ucero River, at the entrance to one of the most impressive geographical landmarks of the Numantian community of Soria, the Lobos River Canyon, any traveler who voluntarily surrenders to the pleasure of adventure will recognize, without hesitation, that Nature, unparalleled sculptor of subjective principles and impressionist brushes, surpasses itself, sculpting a landscape that is, to say the least, delightfully thrilling.

One of the harshest, yet at the same time most fascinating and adventurous landscapes of that immortal Numantian Soria are those, comparatively, Highlands, which have fallen into disrepair over time, but which, in medieval times, formed population centers of unshakeable solidity, as well as the settlement of a nobility whose most powerful weapon was something worth its weight in gold since ancient times: livestock.

It's always a pleasant pleasure to return to certain places, the traveler thinks, since, having recovered from the impression of finding himself once again, face to face with the ancient archetypes of a sculpture, complementary and associated with these models of ancestral architecture that he so passionately loves, Romanesque sculpture has, as its superb characteristic, brilliance, standing out precisely in this privileged area that delimits the border between Aragon and Navarre and that answers to the name of the Cinco Villas (Five Towns), which always invites him to let that metaphorical runaway horse roam as it pleases, which, from his point of view, is always something as subjective as speculation.

It may seem like an incredible statement, but sometimes those discredited medieval legends, those fantastic stories that seemed to affect, especially, dreamy monks and extraordinary environments, have been confirmed in what we assume, possibly erroneously, to be brand-new modern discoveries.