Segovia in 2 days, on foot

This 2-day self-guided walking plan for Segovia covers 15 narrated sights in an easy day-by-day order. Each day is split into a morning and an afternoon loop, and every stop has a two to three minute audio story in the Gingerguide app.

You set the pace: this is a suggested order, not a schedule. Walk it in 2 days, or stretch it out. Reorder freely; Segovia rewards a detour.

Day 1

Morning

1. Acueducto de Segovia: One of the greatest surviving Roman aqueducts on earth: a two-tier wall of granite arches, nearly 2,000 years old, holding itself up across the whole valley without a single drop of mortar.
2. Iglesia de San Millán: One of Segovia's oldest and purest Romanesque churches, prized for a rare four-apse east end and shaded arcades, its shape a small copy of a great cathedral near the Pyrenees.
3. Mesón de Cándido: The famous old inn at the foot of the aqueduct, home of Segovia's signature dish, cochinillo asado, roast suckling pig so tender it is carved at the table with the edge of a plate.
4. Casa de los Picos: A 15th-century mansion whose entire front is clad in more than 600 granite diamond-points, a house that appears to be wearing armour, now an art school on the climb to the Plaza Mayor.

Afternoon

1. Iglesia de San Martín: A 900-year-old Romanesque church wrapped in a shaded arcaded porch, hiding a Baroque dead-Christ by Gregorio Fernández, and facing the bronze statue of Segovia's rebel hero, Juan Bravo.
2. Iglesia de San Esteban: The 'queen of the Byzantine towers', reckoned the tallest Romanesque church tower in Spain, six stages of stone arcades climbing above one of Segovia's quietest, least-visited squares.
3. Plaza Mayor de Segovia: Segovia's arcaded living room beneath the cathedral's honey-gold flank, a market square for 500 years, once a bullring, where Isabella was proclaimed Queen of Castile in 1474.
4. Catedral de Segovia: 'The Lady of the Cathedrals': one of the last great Gothic cathedrals in Spain, begun in 1525, a full century after the Gothic age had ended, to replace one wrecked in a revolt.

Day 2

Morning

1. Judería y Antigua Sinagoga Mayor: The old Jewish quarter below the cathedral, and its great medieval synagogue, seized on a false pretext, turned into the convent of Corpus Christi, and emptied by the expulsion of 1492.
2. Puerta de San Andrés: A twin-towered medieval gate on the south wall, also called the Gate of the Jewish Quarter, the threshold through which Segovia's Jews reached their rock-cut cemetery beyond the walls.
3. Alcázar de Segovia: A fairy-tale castle riding its rock like the prow of a stone ship, from which Isabella rode out to be crowned Queen of Castile, its famous spires added by a king missing his Austrian wife's homeland.
4. Iglesia de la Vera Cruz: A strange twelve-sided church in the valley below the Alcázar, built to imitate the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and long, wrongly, credited to the Knights Templar.

Afternoon

1. Real Casa de Moneda: Philip II's water-powered Royal Mint on the Eresma, one of the oldest industrial buildings in Europe, where the river itself, turning great rolling mills, struck the coins of an empire.
2. Monasterio de El Parral: A jewel of Isabelline Gothic in the river valley, founded by a future king who hid the project under his favourite's name, still a living, enclosed monastery nearly 600 years on.
3. Mirador de la Pradera de San Marcos: The riverside meadow below the Alcázar where the castle floats on its rock like the prow of a stone ship, Segovia's most famous view, with storks nesting in the trees.

Full Segovia guide and all stops →