All posts tagged: Heritage Travel

Bilbao: The Cliff Notes Edition

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  Wow! I had read the stories of how a gritty, shipbuilding city in Spain had reinvented itself as an arts and cultural center built around the signature Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim Museum. I had seen the pictures. But I wasn’t ready for the reality. We spent Sunday in Bilbao, Spain — after a drive through the lovely heart of the Basque country — and Candice and I found the first city where we are set on finding a way to return as soon as possible. Bilbao in the 1980s saw the closing of an iconic shipyard and had the foresight to think creatively and boldly about a new future which blended new and old. It is the last part — the blending of new and old — that is often missed in the write-ups about Bilbao’s renaissance.  You get the impact of Gehry’s Guggenheim, along with the works of Calatrava, Norman Foster and other modern masters. But what is often missing is the context for these works: a walkable and vibrant historic city dating back …

Santiago de Compostela: Our visit to the final destination of the Camino de Santiago

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Saturday of our European Coastal Civilizations tour took us to Santiago de Compostela, the famous destination of the medieval pilgrimage trail Camino de Santiago (Way of St. James) and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The morning began as we docked in La Corona, Spain, after sailing past the Tower of Hercules, the oldest Roman lighthouse in use today.  It makes for a dramatic entrance into the port city and set the stage for what was in store. After an hour-long bus drive, we arrived at Santiago de Compostela, with its cathedral of St. James.  The picture at the top of the post marks the official end of the Camino de Santiago, and we had a chance to talk with pilgrims who were arriving in a steady stream – many on very nice road bikes! The city’s importance came from a visit by the Apostle James to this outpost in Spain to convert people to Christianity.  Centuries later, in 813, a hermit saw a vision of a shining field, and from the Latin “Campus Stellae” …

Porto, Portugal – A great start to our tour of European coastal civilizations

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Candice and I just completed the first day of our European Coastal Civilizations tour, spending a delightful day in Porto, Portugal.  After setting sail from Lisbon, our ship headed north overnight and docked on Friday morning at the Port of Leixoes which services the city of Porto. Quoting from the ship’s news, The city of Porto, built along the hillsides overlooking the mouth of the Douro river, is an outstanding urban landscape with a 2,000-year history. Its continuous growth is linked to the sea (the Romans gave it the name Portus, or port). It is the second largest city in Portugal, after Lisbon, and one of the major urban areas of Southern Europe. Porto’s history goes back to pre-Roman, Celtic times, and it was during the Middle Ages that it developed into one of Portugal’s most important trading cities.  It was in the 18th century that Porto became an important link between the Douro Valley wine producers and wine importing countries like England. The old city – a UNESCO World Heritage Site – is where …

A Refuge

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Since I was young, I have been drawn to the 19th century utopian communities that seemed to spring up like wildfire across America.  Rugby, Tennessee, was a place that sparked the preservation interest which would lead to my career. The Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, has been a community I’ve visited numerous times and have always found fascinating. So when the National Trust for Historic Preservation listed the Village of Zoar, Ohio, on its 2012 listing of America’s Most Endangered Historic Places and named it one of our National Treasures, I couldn’t wait to make a site visit. Yesterday I joined colleagues and partners in this small Ohio village founded in 1817 by a group of German religious dissenters.  The Zoar Separatists were persecuted in their native country for refusing to join the state-sanctioned Lutheran Church, and they immigrated to America with the help of English Quakers. Using funds borrowed from the Quakers, they purchased 5,500 acres on the Tuscarawas River (the mayor says you have to visit the town at least 3 times …

The World’s Longest Art Gallery

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  Utah’s Nine Mile Canyon is one of the unique cultural  landscapes in the world. Earlier this week I was fortunate to tour portions of the canyon with some of the smart, passionate people who have helped save it through the years. As Jerry and Donna Spangler note in their guide Horned Snakes and Axle Grease, Nine Mile Canyon is…well, not nine miles in length. By its very name, Nine Mile Canyon is an enigma.  From its upper reaches on the west, the canyon twists and turns more than 50 miles to its confluence with the Green River on the east. And how the canyon got its incongruous name remains clouded with the passage of time. Despite the misleading name, Nine Mile Canyon is an amazing landscape filled with rock art – or as some prefer rock writing – from Native Americans about whom we know very little.  The miles of rock art has led many to call Nine Mile Canyon “The World’s Longest Art Gallery.” As the Spanglers note, “There is something undeniably magical …

Introducing Rugby (TN) to the next generation

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Rugby, Tennessee, is a unique community on the Cumberland Plateau, with an incredible story of perseverance. It is also a place that means a great deal to me, as it was where my preservation career began. Today I took the opportunity to introduce Claire, Andrew, and Candice to Rugby and to show them the places that inspired me. Here’s the official story from my last post: “Rugby was established in the 1880s by the successful Victorian-era author Thomas Hughes as a Utopian community for the second sons of English gentry.  Due to the system of primogeniture, these men would inherit little or no property and had very limited career opportunities.  Hughes established this colony in the beautiful but hard-scrabble Cumberland Plateau area of Tennessee.  After some initial success, the colony fell on hard times, ultimately failed and was largely forgotten.  In the mid-1960s, residents of the area began to restore the remaining historic buildings and over the course of five decades have saved this wonderful place and turned it into a thriving community and a …

Eating Local

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With a great deal of travel on my schedule for June – November, I’m trying to focus on what’s wonderful about leaving home. So this will not be a post about the state of the airline industry in the U.S. Instead, I am thinking about food. Local food to be exact. Regular readers will know that I like to avoid chains and hotel restaurants when I travel, seeking instead the local landmark. I’m only two days into this week’s trip to the west coast and I’ve already hit my “go local” stride. Lunch on Tuesday came from a wonderful cheese and sandwich shop named Cheese Plus which features tasty sandwiches with locally themed names such as the Willie Brown Duck (named for former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown), Crissy Field, and Castro’s Cubano.  I had the Happy Thanksgiving, which – along with the brisk city breeze and temperatures in the 60s – made me wish for the fall. After a drive to Sonoma County to view a site where we’re working, and especially after a …

A Day at Joshua Tree

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National Parks are all unique.  They have different histories, different stories of how they were saved, different challenges in today’s world. I was fortunate today to be introduced to one of the most unusual:  the Joshua Tree National Park in California.  With a half-day to myself, I stuck my toe into the vast park where the Mojave and Colorado deserts converge and was fascinated with what I saw. What follows are photos from the northwestern edge of the park – from the village of Joshua Tree down to Key’s View, where one gets a remarkable panorama of the San Andreas Fault.  Here’s a bit from the park’s brochure about what one sees in this part of Joshua Tree: Amid the boulder stacks are pinyon pines, junipers, scrub oaks, Mojave yuccas, and Mojave prickly pear cacti….What tells you most you are truly in the Mojave Desert is the wild-armed Joshua tree.  It isn’t really a tree but a species of yucca….Joshua trees can grow over 40 feet tall – at the leisurely rate of an inch …

San Xavier Del Bac – A World Treasure

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My trip this week to Tucson was filled with meetings, tours of work-related projects, and presentations.  But one part of the tour allowed me to slip into full-tourist mode:  the visit to San Xavier Del Bac. A National Historic Landmark, San Xavier Mission was founded as a Catholic mission by Father Eusebio Kino in 1692.  Construction of the current church began in 1783 and was completed in 1797, when Southern Arizona was part of New Spain. This is – simply stated – a spectacular building of international importance, with masonry vaults and beautiful  interior artwork, the latter restored after $2 million was raised by the local community.  Little is known about the artists – most likely from Queretero in current-day Mexico – but their work mixes New Spain and Native American motifs.  The architect, Ignacio Gaona, designed what many consider to be the finest example of Spanish mission architecture in the United States. We had a great tour from Bob, one of the leaders of the Patronanto San Xavier, who recommended A Gift of Angels …

Landmark alert: World’s best custard

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Travel has its benefits. I was in Milwaukee yesterday for the announcement of the 2011 list of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places.  We had a terrific event with our local partners, pointing out the threat to a real national treasure:  the National Soldiers Home Historic District.  One of three homes built for Civil War veterans after Abraham Lincoln authorized them as one of the last acts of his presidency, the Milwaukee Soldiers Home is the only one to maintain the context of the historic buildings and landscape.  One of the veterans who spoke at our event said that this place was critical to his recovery from PTSD, noting that the two words most associated with the site by veterans were “peace” and “serenity.”  To lose such a place of healing would  be a travesty. On this trip my colleague Genell introduced me to another national treasure (though not endangered):  Leon’s World Famous Frozen Custard.  My, my!  What a wonderful frozen custard.  It was great to watch the employees pour a large bucket of milk …