After walking in the heat and stopping to play a get-to-know-you game under the shade of some trees (to wait out the heat a bit), we were lead to a gravel road where we climbed down the embankment (through many trees and brambles) to be shown the oldest bridge in the city. It’s so old, in fact, that nobody really knows how old it is. And it’s so well-built that it’s still in use. 
We were then led back along the dirt road up to an abandoned olive oil plant. The roof was gone but most of the walls were still there. It is here that local teenage artists come to graffiti the walls with their works of art. There is also a lot of graffiti within the city of Caceres, but it’s not gang-related like it is at home; it’s just kids making their mark on the city. In the abandoned plant, they do it more thoroughly.
After looking around the plant, we were led behind it and up the road we’re shown orchards that were planted by the Moors during their occupation of Caceres. The orchards have been abandoned by the city, but the land is still standing as it was and the trees in the orchard still bear fruit. Manuelo and his organization are trying to petition the city to see this orchard (and other surrounding land) and resources to be used and not ignored, abandoned, or developed unnecessarily.
Further up the road, Manuelo led us off to the side and down through brambles and bracken to show us the main river of Caceres. It was more of a small stream than a river, but he brought us down there to emphasize that the city has many natural resources that should be cultivated and cared for that are largely ignored, including the Caceres River. The river itself in that particular spot was overgrown and almost impossible to see.
After climbing back up through the thorns and bramble, we headed back up the road where we made a water stop at the house of some of Maneulo’s friends. Their existence in that particular place is very interesting because they are staging a protest of sorts just by living on the land they occupy.
At the moment, they are renting the land and trying to prove a point to the city of Caceres. That being, it’s possible to cultivate natural resources surrounding the city without exploiting them. They are staging this because the city wants to build a highway through the land and also build and oil refinery (you can see the sign on their house that says “No Refineries” in Spanish). They firmly believe that the world’s dependence on oil is antiquated and that trying to build communities based on out-dated processes is counter-intuitive and potentially disastrous for the community in the long run. To prove their point, they live entirely off the land they inhabit and eat only what the land produces. They have many lovely fruit and flowering trees, a garden, and a small chicken coop. My favorite was the huge grape vine growing up the front side of the house, providing the roof for their front porch with hanging grapes as decorations. If these people can’t convince the local government that their ideas are good ones, the land they live on will be bulldozed in two years to make way for the refinery and new highway.
After our visit, Manuelo took us a little ways down the road from the house to a stone wall surrounding a pasture. We climbed over the wall (which was tricky for those of us with creakier limbs than others) to be led to the middle of the pasture and shown and ancient roman watering well, used for irrigating the pasture and watering the animals. It was a cool contraption because it dated back more than a thousand years and illustrated the engineering ingenuity of the early Romans. The part we saw was the reservoir, and the rest of it was located at the top of a nearby hill. I didn’t see it, but was told that the rest of the contraption was powered by donkeys. As they walked around in circles, the water was pumped down to the reservoir, which in turn was pumped into the field. Very cool.
After all that, we climbed back over the wall and started heading home. On the way there, we saw a marker in the road dating from around the 3rd Century proclaiming who the emperor was at the time, and Manuelo also showed us the community garden that was put together on the outside of the city limits to get the local community involved with cultivating their land. All together, it was a fascinating trip!
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