The Train of the Poets leaves from Atocha station, Madrid, on the dot, the gates closing two minutes before departure, and each of us had left something at home and had to run back to collect it. Five minutes to go and the last arrives and puts his bags through the scanner. We've hardly taken our seats and are catching up on news when the AVE high-speed train pulls into Cuenca and we're greeted by a flurry of snow. We'd been warned, "bring abrigos and libros" (coats and books).

Colombian poet, Lilián Pallares, and I were invited to Cuenca to recite our poetry, give a video-poetry workshop and be treated to a personal tour of the art galleries of this beautiful Spanish city built on the edge of the sierra at the confluence of two rivers; the meeting of two gorges. The city grew and houses were built right to the edges of the sheer cliffs, their balconies overhanging precipitous drops.

We gave the workshop in Lamosa Lab in a beautiful old building. When we got there the owners were just unloading wood for the little stove which heated the upstairs room where we worked with two groups preparing to film poems. For the filming the next day one group decided to make it in a local bar. The atmosphere was great, elderly men playing cards at a table, the equally elderly barman coming over to tell us corny jokes. Placing an apple on the table he asks, “What’s the difference between a train and this apple?
“Trains don't wait.”

Poet and art critic Samir Delgado who organises The Train of the Poets has an unstoppable energy. Having moved to Cuenca from the Canary Islands where he organises the poetry festival Tres Orillas (Three Shores) he fell in love with the city and has been the dynamo behind this project to bring poets to Cuenca treating them at the same time to a cultural bath in the city’s rich heritage.

A city of stairs and narrow dark cobblestone alleyways opening onto incredible views, it keeps you fit and there are surprises at every turn.  One of the gems is the art gallery created by the Philippine-born painter Fernando Zóbel in the 1960s. He created the Museum of Spanish Abstract Art in one of the emblematic "Hanging Houses", renovating this beautiful space and carefully selecting works for each room by artists such as Saura, Millares, Chirino, Sempere, Chillida, Tàpies, among others who at the time were little known within Spain.

The people of Cuenca were very welcoming and we gave poetry recitals in the Royal Academy of Arts and Letters hosted by the poet José Ángel García, in the public library Fermín Caballero hosted by Samir Delgado and a recital with music in “El Círculo” called “Zumbidos” (Zumbidos means buzzing and is the title of one of Lilián’s poems about mosquitoes in Colombia) accompanied by the Colombian musicians William Carreazo and Denisse Ariza.

Walks along the river below the hanging houses, witnessing cloistered nuns dressed head to toe in white praying softly behing a wrought ironwork fence, a lunch cooked in a wood-burning oven made from the hub of a truck wheel at a farmhouse in the Sierra of Cuenca, and signing our books while keeping wrapped up against the cold winter air rounded off a great experience. We are already planning to return.

There is a documentary about Zobél called “Hanging from a dream” which can be seen in full in Spanish on the following link: www.rtve.es and here is a trailer in English: