A step back in time to La Alberca

La Alberca's Paza Mayor

Perhaps the most enchanting step back in time I took on my 2009/2010 Europe trip was the village of La Alberca in Spain. I was staying nearby while volunteering at Pueblo Inglés (from which I have many memories but have not written much, except a brief post, Consulting My Pillow in La Alberca).

In Spain, every village has its own distinct design. My friend
Lisa Ch, sporting the La Alberca village ring we both bought there
(this pic from later that year, when we reconnected in NYC)

Anyways, it was with interest that I stumbled across this enchanting post by a traveller who has been there more than once, and though that I'd share it.

"When my parents came to visit in Madrid last year, they brought with them some of my old photos, a box of a few hundred slides I’d set aside years ago. It was a random sampling of the uncounted thousands of Kodachromes and Fujichromes I have sitting in the not-so-archival environment of my parent’s damp basement in Toronto.

There are a lot of things I prefer about digital photography over film, but film has digital beat when it comes to looking at old photographs. You get to hold the actual original thing, for starters, and you can see it without having to plug anything in. Slides can’t be perfectly copied in a keystroke, they’re one of a kind. And for that same reason, you see them only once in a while. They get put into deep storage and get forgotten about until they surface sometime later, like artefacts from the past.

Photo copyright Spain by Mike Randolf

There was one slide in particular that caught me eye. I took it out of the plastic sleeve and held it up to the window. My uncle Miguel had died the year before, but in the image, taken some twenty-five years ago, he looked not much older than I am now. We were in a village called La Alberca with my aunt and an old woman we met while wandering around..." [read more on Spain by Mike Randolf].

It's a great story.

Mike also has some great photos, they are really worth a look.