[ Dec.2018 ] The day we visited the historic town of La Orotava in the north of Tenerife in Spain was a Sunday.
Many of the restaurants there were not open on Sundays and we had a bit of difficulty finding a place to have lunch.
As I said before, most of the streets in La Orotava are slopes, so it takes time and stamina walking around this town.
When
I was becoming very tired, we finally found the restaurant we were looking for, called Tascafe Grimaldi.
This restaurant is situated in a part of the historic mansion called Casa Lercaro.
This mansion was built in 1654 and the restaurant’s name, Grimaldi, is from the name of the wife of the couple who built this house.
The mansion occupies 3,240 square metres on site, apparently.
We did not visit the house itself, but it seems possible to do that.
From the courtyard, where a part of the restaurant was located, we could see the nice view.
The customers of the restaurant all seemed to be tourists, but the atmosphere was nice and the food was good, too.
We shared the assorted salami (the menu said sausages) with some olive oil for the starter.
It came with the toasted bread, which was nice but very hard, so it hurt my teeth.
For the main, I chose the pork dish with mustard sauce.
The meat was very tender and lovely.
My husband chose the sirloin steak, but in fact it was a fillet steak.
He asked for it to be cooked medium, but it was a juicy rare steak.
He joked “If I asked for rare, a cow would have appeared”.
My Brownie for the dessert was good, too.
My husband tackled a huge Mango Cake.
The wine we had had been produced in the valley just below this hill, which was a little young, but very good.
The bill was €74.
Considering
the food as well as the location, it was very reasonable.
Just around the time we were finishing our meal, a cat came up to us and sat on the chair next to my husband’s.
I wonder if this cat lives here…
After lunch, we went back to Iglesia de la Concepción, which we could not see well in the morning because they were holding Mass.
This church was originally built in 1516, 
but because of the earthquakes in 1704 and 1705, it was destroyed.
They started rebuilding it in 1768 and then afterwards, they added many parts to it.
According to our guidebook, it is the finest example of baroque architecture in the whole of the Canary Islands.
I was not much impressed by the purple dome, but the altarpiece with the intricate carvings, which was made in the 17th century, was beautiful.
After this, we walked around looking for the bus stop.
Although this is a small town, maybe because of the slopes, it was easy to get lost.
We went back to Puerto de la Cruz, where we were staying, on a very packed bus.
