Last spring, I toured Spain’s world-famous estates and palaces with my family, but it was a small semi-concealed garden I stumbled upon that made the biggest impression – and inspired me to discover other urban oases across Europe.
The Huerto de Calixto y Melibea, perched high on Salamanca’s Roman walls, is a rare oasis in the labyrinth of this ancient European city. A mere half-acre in size, this enchanting garden was designed in 1981 in a consciously “romantic” style, inspired by the Spanish tragicomic novel La Celestina. Its coupling of formal elements – structural evergreens and clipped hedging – with loose and sensual planting felt representative of both historic and contemporary Spanish gardens.
We came upon the huerto by accident while ambling away from the city’s thronged Easter parades, following the lighter footfall through a low stone arch at the end of a narrow cobbled street. At once we were in the cool shade of ornamental trees that softened the signature desert yellow sandstone of the “Golden City”: low medlars and dark-leaved oaks, tapering Italianate cypresses, cherries white with abundant blossom and scattered Judas trees flushed pink.
The narrow grit pathways were edged with velvet-petalled irises and wild alliums, and reaching the boundary wall, we could look back at tree-framed vistas of Salamanca’s two magnificent cathedrals. Its visitors, in happy gatherings below the canopy, seemed utterly relaxed, and as a parent, I felt secure in allowing our then three-year-old freedom to roam.
In the context of travel, garden visiting is as much about the timing and experience – its setting within a city, town or rural landscape, and your receptiveness to potential serenity – as the plantings. For the holidaymaker, a good garden is one that puts you at ease, breaks up your itinerary and offers respite and recharge on the move.
Increasingly, these are difficult qualities to extract from the signature gardens of European tourism routes. Three million visitors take in Granada’s Alhambra each year; Keukenhof in the Netherlands has been known to see 26,000 visitors a day. My advice for those roaming abroad, then, is to indulge curiosity in pursuit of a b.
