An uninteresting country is passed between Medina and Avila. This old city is indeed very finely situated; and if it be approached from Madrid, seems to be a real capital of the mountains, with ranges of hills on all sides. It lies, in fact, on the northern side of the Sierra, and just at the margin of the great corn-growing plains which extend thence without interruption to Leon and Palencia. Of the many fortified towns I have seen in Spain it is, I think, the most complete. The walls are still almost perfect all round the city; they are perfectly plain, but of great height, and are garnished with bold circular towers not far apart; and for the gateways two of these towers are placed near together, carried up higher than the rest, and connected by a bold arch thrown from one to the other. There are in all no less than eighty-six towers in the circuit of the walls, and ten gateways; and so great is their height[168] that nothing whatever is seen of the town behind them, and they follow all the undulations of the hill on which they stand with a stern, repulsive, savage look which seems almost to belong to a city of the dead rather than to a fairly lively little city of the present day. The space within the walls was very confined, and no doubt it was found impossible for any new religious foundations to be established within their boundaries. Several of the great churches, and among these some of the most important--as San Vicente, San Pedro, and San Tomás--were therefore built outside the walls; and the Cathedral itself, cramped by its close neighbourhood to them, was built out boldly with its apse projecting beyond the face of the walls, and making an additional circular tower larger and bolder than any of the others. [Illustration: Puerta de San Vicente.] The walls of Avila were commenced in A.D. 1090, eight hundred men having been employed on them daily in that year;[169] among them were many directors who came from Leon and Biscay, and all of them wrought under Casandro, a master of geometry and a Roman, and Florin de Pituenga, a French master; so at least we learn from the contemporary history attributed to D. Pelayo, Bishop of Oviedo. The walls were finished in 1099. In 1091 the Cathedral of San Salvador was commenced by an architect named Alvar Garcia, a native of Estella, in Navarre;[170] the work was completed in sixteen years, as many as nineteen hundred men, according to the authority already quoted, having been employed on the works. D. P. Risco[171] throws considerable doubt on the veracity of D. Pelayo; and his figures certainly seem to be on too grand a scale to be at all probable.