Early in November,[7] their brother set out on his last earthly journey. The distance from Valladolid to Yuste was between forty and fifty leagues, or somewhere between 130 and 150 English miles. The route taken has not been specified by the emperor's biographers. The best and the easiest road lay through Salamanca and Plasencia. But as he does not appear to have passed through the latter city, he probably likewise avoided the former, and the pageants and orations with which the doctors of the great university would have delighted to celebrate his visit. In that case, he must have taken the road by Medina del Campo and Peñaranda. At Medina he doubtless was lodged in the fine old palace of the crown, called the Torre de Mota, where, fifty years before, his grandmother, Isabella the Catholic, ended her noble life and glorious reign; and at Peñaranda he was probably entertained in the mansion of the Bracamontes. These two towns rise like islands in their naked undulating plains, covered partly with corn, partly with marshy heath. Southward, the country is clothed with straggling woods of evergreen oak, becoming denser at the base and on the lower slopes of the wild Sierra of Bejar, the centre of that mountain chain which forms the backbone of the Peninsula, extending from Moncayo in Aragon, to the Rock of Lisbon on the Atlantic. At the alpine town of Bejar, cresting a bold height, and overhanging a tumbling stream, the great family of the Zuñigas, created dukes of the place by Isabella, and known to fame in arts and arms and the dedication of Don Quixote, possess a noble castle, ruined by the French, which there can be little doubt served as a halting-place for the imperial pilgrim. He advanced by very short stages, travelling in a litter, and often suffering great pain. But his spirits rose as he neared the desired haven. In the craggy gorge of Puertonuevo, as he was being carried over some unusually difficult ground in a chair, his attendants were deploring the extreme ruggedness of the pass. "I shall never have to go through another," said he, "and truly it is worth enduring some pain to reach so sweet and healthy a resting place as Yuste." Having crossed the mountains without mischance, he arrived on the eleventh of November, St. Martin's day, at Xarandilla, a little village at the foot of the steep Peñanegra, and then, as now, chiefly peopled with swineherds, whose pigs, feeding in the surrounding forests, maintain the fame of porciferous Estremadura. Here he took up his abode in the castle of the count of Oropesa, head of a powerful branch of the great house of Toledo, and feudal lord of Xarandilla.