Salamanca and Cuidad Rodrigo

Well, this was the most terrific day – it felt a bit like when we went to the Little Big Horn – this is a mythical place, but here we are! The Arapiles are very easy to find and you can climb them both – the lesser is where Wellington commanded and spotted the French mistake. ”Mon cher Alava, Marmont est perdu.”  He rode himself with the order for Pakenham’s division to attack. It’s a long way, I should say 3 or 4 miles. I don’t know how they got a field battery up onto lesser Arapil so quickly, they must have manhandled them, I don’t see how you could do it with horses.

We spent a long time pottering around with maps, as you can probably tell. So many men killed, just here, and now it’s peaceful fields of barley. There were 14,000 French casualties and 5,000 British and Portuguese.

The greater (French) Arapil from the lesser (British).


Two French generals were killed, Thomieres and Bonnet, and Marmont himself was severely wounded. But the British lost Le Marchant, who led the astoundingly successful charge of the heavy dragoons. The dragoons did well - during the French retreat the King's German Legion dragoons broke a French square, not once but twice!

We were surprised to find a rather riotous night life in Salamanca (well, by European standards – it’s nothing to Newcastle.)  But there were stag and hen parties and some noisy Portuguese football fans, less noisy after their defeat by Germany. Also, by nine o’clock at night we are ravenous and bad tempered and it’s still too early for people to eat. But we really enjoyed looking round Salamanca, and the nuns have not developed sophisticated marketing strategies, so we escaped without cakes or biscuits. Wellington’s more cultured officers commented that the university was more attractive than Oxford as there were no smoking chimneys. But there didn’t seem to be any heating, so it must have been horrible trying to study in winter here. The French demolished 20 colleges and two convents, for stone to build forts, but there’s no shortage of sights.

Cuidad Rodrigo

Another mythical place! After a drive past cork plantations, with long legged grey pigs and black bulls artistically disposed beneath the trees, we reached the second of the “keys of Spain”, Cuidad Rodrigo. It’s a really nice town, I would advise any one to visit, even without the Wellington associations. There are quite a number of palaces, mostly sixteenth century, with massive doorways and coats of arms, in one of which Wellington stayed after the sack of the city was over. It wasn’t as out of control as the sack of Badajoz, probably because the city was taken with less loss. The storming of Badajoz seems to have traumatised even experienced troops. The breaches are marked, and there is a plaque in memory of General Craufurd who was shot through the spine in the lesser breach, leading his Light Brigade. Both breaches are close to the cathedral, which shows a lot of damage.  There’s a memorial to the Spanish general who held it for 25 days against the French; the British battered the walls in the same place to create the larger breach – the repairs weren’t as strong as the older part of the wall. But there is a deep ditch, a glacis, newer artillery fortifications, another deep ditch, and then the old high, thick walls. It’s amazing that it was taken so quickly although I think the French weren’t expecting an attack in the dead of winter and from several directions. Also they don’t seem to have been as infernally inventive as at Badajoz.

Some of the damage to the cathedral.