round-trip railway ticket or go on a bus if you haven't (there will be a special bus leaving from the Calle Victoria opposite the Pasaje Alvarez), and, coming from the hot sun of the bare, desert country, suddenly, under the shade of the trees, see brown-armed girls with baskets of fresh strawberries piled on the smooth, bare, cool ground, strawberries you cannot reach around with thumb and forefinger, damp and cool, packed on green leaves in wicker baskets. The girls and the old women sell them and bunches of wonderful asparagus, each stalk as thick as your thumb, to the crowd that comes off the special train from Madrid and Toledo and the people who drive into the town in motor cars and ride in on busses. You can eat at booths where they grill steaks and roast chickens over a charcoal fire and drink all the Valdapenas wine you can hold for ñ\e pesetas. You can lie in the shade or walk and see the sights until time for the bullfights. You can find the sights in Baedeker. The bull ring is at the end of a hot, wide, dusty street that runs into the heat from the cool forest shade of the town and the professional cripples and horror and pity inspirers that follow the fairs of Spain line this road, wagging stumps, exposing sores, waving monstrosities and holding out their caps, in their mouths when they have nothing left to hold them with, so that you walk a dusty gauntlet between two rows of horrors to the ring. The town is Velasquez to the edge and then straight Goya to the bull ring. The ring itself dates from before Goya. It is a lovely building in the style of the old ring at Ronda and you can sit in a barrera seat and drink wine and eat strawberries in the shade with your back to the sand and watch the boxes fill and see the girls from Toledo and all the surrounding country of Castille come in and drape their shawls over the front of the boxes, sitting, with much fan waving, to smile and talk with the pleasant, conscious confusion of amateur beauties under inspection.