Tudela

Tudela sent the Middle Ages its greatest traveller and kept the best vegetable garden in Spain. Benjamin of Tudela set out from this Ebro town around 1165 and crossed the known world to Baghdad and beyond, his Sefer ha-Masa'ot — the Book of Travels — remaining the indispensable Jewish itinerary of the medieval Mediterranean, a century before Marco Polo; the town honours him in bronze, together with the poet Yehuda Halevi's local roots, for Tudela was one of Sepharad's luminous communities, its juderia's memory kept in the old quarter's lanes. The cathedral's Puerta del Juicio answers with Christian stone: hundreds of carved figures enacting the Last Judgment across its archivolts, one of Romanesque Spain's great portals.

The Ribera's market gardens made the town's other fame: Tudela's vegetables — the cogollos (lettuce hearts that carry the town's name nationally), artichokes, asparagus, borage — are celebrated each spring in the Verduras festival, gastronomy as civic pride, with the Ebro's mejana island as the town's green lung. Beyond the fields waits the Bardenas Reales: the lunar badlands of clay castles and gullies, a UNESCO biosphere reserve of magnificent desolation. The concert record's register — bands, choirs, church music, touring visits — completes the picture. A world walked, a garden tended, a desert next door: Tudela's horizons were never provincial.