Parador Argomaniz; Parador Soria; Parador Lerma Spain

The parador of Argomaniz is a former Renaissance palace in an isolated location, overlooking the plain of Alava. It served as the Napoleonic headquarters during a portion of the Peninsular War. The public rooms are large and sumptously decorated, a considerable number of the standard bedrooms are, while very nice in themselves, unfortunately overlook a garbage dump but, except in the high season, you can generally book a "superior" room on one of the online discount sites for not much over half price. Nearby lies the city of Vitoria-Gasteiz, nowadays the seat of the Basque government, under whose walls Wellington defeated the French. Any number of Riojan vineyards in the region offer free wine tastings.

The parador of Soria, a newbuild, lies to the south, across the border in Castille. It sits high above the town on a hilltop with splendid views of town and coutryside. There's a pleasant park surrounding it and, a rarity in paradors, an indoor pool. The rooms are spacious and well furnished. In the city there are three Romanesque churches. Santo Domingo is in the French style, with a magnificent twelfth century portal; San Juan de Rabanera is remarkable for the Byzantine influences it displays; the cloister, which is all that remains of San Juan de Duero down by the river, has intersecting arches which derrive straight from Moorish art. Soria, in the time of Alfonso VIII and his consort Eleanor Plantagenet, served as a capital of the realm, which may well account for these cosmopolitan elements.

Lerma, to the west, is a smallish town where, in the early seventeenth century, Philip III's favorite, the extravagantly corrupt Duke of Lerma, built a palace to receive his master along with a plaza surrounded by stone houses for the large number of retainers he maintained. The whole makes for a very imposing complex. The palace itself, with its severe stone facade, is now the parador. Everything on the interior strives for a majestic effect, the bedrooms are large and sumptuously furnished. For whatever reason, the food in the dining room struck me as not up to parador standards, but there are excellent restaurants within easy walking distance. Nearby is the city of Burgos, the capital of Castille in the middle ages, with its splendid Gothic cathedral, the third largest in Spain, and the foremost example of the Spanish Flamboyant style. Madrid is little more than an hour's drive from Lerma, a straight shot down the A1 motorway.