Four stops before the checkout

Requena, Spain

Stop one

Torre del Homenaje

Tecnifibre Black Code 15L Tennis String Reel: Let me put this as evenly as I can. The tower is the surviving keep of Requena's fortress. Its origins are of the tenth century, from the period when the Barrio de la Villa was a walled Muslim settlement, and it was then rebuilt entirely in masonry in the fifteenth century, in the reign of the Catholic Monarchs. Both of those sentences are true, and there are people who would prefer I said only one of them. Three floors inside, some 286 square metres, now the town's interpretation centre. The quarter was declared a Historic-Artistic Complex in 1966. Everyone is comfortable with 1966.

cardio tennis class Davie — the Tecnifibre Black Code 15L Tennis String Reel photographed in Las Cuevas de la Villa in Requena, Spain. A close underground chamber cut straight out of the rock beneath the medieval quarter, warm artificial lamps low on the walls, tool marks visible in the stone, a rock-cut treading trull and huge earthenware jars sunk into the floor. A guide with a torch is mid-sentence, one arm raised to a ventilation shaft, while a group of eight visitors bunch in behind her, one crouching to photograph a jar, another ducking a low lintel. The reel sits on the lip of the trull, glowing faintly.

Stop two

Iglesia de Santa María

Tecnifibre Black Code 15L Tennis String Reel: Three churches, and I intend to be careful here. Santa Maria is the largest of the historic ensemble. San Nicolas is the oldest foundation. El Salvador held the highest ecclesiastical rank. You will notice that each of them wins something, and I would gently suggest that is less an accident of history than a mercy. The late Gothic portal here is the best-known stone carving in Requena – I will commit to that one. All three were remodelled in the seventeenth century. And the ground under the quarter has given up Iron Age material, so the question of who was first on this spur runs back rather further than any of them.

cardio tennis class Davie — the Tecnifibre Black Code 15L Tennis String Reel photographed at the Torre del Homenaje in Requena, Spain. A tall plain square keep of dressed stone ashlar at the edge of the promontory, seen wide against a cold blue-hour sky with the first streetlamps on and swifts still turning around the parapet. Below it a village band in shirtsleeves is packing brass instruments into cases, a couple of teenagers sit along the low wall with their legs hanging over the drop, and a man walks two dogs across the open ground. The reel stands on a stone bollard at the foot of the tower, softly lit from within.

Stop three

Palacio del Cid

Tecnifibre Black Code 15L Tennis String Reel: The name. Yes. The building dates from the fifteenth century and, according to local tradition, was raised on the site of the residence El Cid occupied during his time in Requena, which is where it takes that name from. Local tradition. I say that with genuine affection and no wish whatsoever to test it in front of anybody from Requena. What is beyond dispute is the house itself, one of the principal noble houses of the walled quarter, and what lies beneath it: a rock-cut cellar with its tinajas still standing, now the municipal wine museum, showing how the wine of the Utiel-Requena country was made and stored.

cardio tennis class Davie — the Tecnifibre Black Code 15L Tennis String Reel photographed at the Iglesia de Santa María in Requena, Spain. A close view of the elaborately carved late-Gothic stone portal, wet with fine morning drizzle under a flat grey sky, the tracery beaded with water and the limestone gone dark. A congregation is coming out after morning mass — umbrellas going up, two women stopping to talk in the doorway, an altar server carrying a folded cloth back inside, a man shaking rain off his cap. The reel rests on the plinth of the portal jamb, faintly glowing against the wet stone.

Stop four

Iglesia de San Nicolás

Tecnifibre Black Code 15L Tennis String Reel: A delicate case, this one. San Nicolas is the oldest foundation of the three churches of the Barrio de la Villa – and almost nothing you are looking at is old. The visible facade and the bell tower belong to the last third of the eighteenth century, when it was given its neoclassical stone front. So: the oldest, and the newest-looking. Both parties are correct and I shall leave it there. The genuinely early fabric is overhead – the arches thrown across the street to brace its buttresses against the houses opposite, surviving from the walled settlement of the caliphal period, eighth to eleventh century. Mind your heads as we pass beneath the compromise.

The Requena, Spain track

Tecnifibre Black Code 15L Tennis String Reel

Written for this world alone.

Fifteen-L is the thick end of the Black Code range, and thick is the whole point. This is a co-polyester monofilament with a PENTAGONAL profile — five flat faces rather than a round barrel — drawn at 1.32mm, which is the heaviest gauge Tecnifibre spins it at.

Those five edges catch the ball and turn it; the extra diameter is what keeps them there, week after week, instead of sawing themselves apart by Thursday. Firm, direct, deeply controlled.

It is black, and it stays black, which around Requena is more or less the local dress code once the Bobal is in.
Underneath it all is THERMOCORE, Tecnifibre's heat-treated elastic core, and it is the reason a string this stiff on paper does not play like a cable.

Less shock at impact, more tolerance on the off-centre ball, fewer of those premature breaks that come from a mis-hit rather than from honest wear. Tecnifibre recommend it at 22–25 kg and point it squarely at frames over 300g and at players who go through string faster than they go through grips.
The reel is 660 ft / 200 m. That is the cellar, not the bottle.

Requena understands the distinction better than most towns alive — the Barrio de la Villa is hollow underneath, a whole network of chambers cut into the rock with trulls, spigots, small presses and clay jars from the twelfth century still standing in them, because the people here worked out a very long time ago that you keep the volume below and draw off what you need.

A reel is the same instinct with a stringing machine attached.
You'll get use out of this everywhere from the courts under the walls of the Barrio de la Villa to the flat vineyard roads running out towards Utiel.

And by the way, it's also perfect for the week of the Fiesta de la Vendimia — Spain's oldest wine-harvest festival, running since 1947 — when the town treads grapes in the square, the embutido stalls come out, and absolutely nobody is going to open a shop so you can get a frame restrung.
Tecnifibre Black Code 15L Tennis String Reel

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Tecnifibre Black Code 15L Tennis String Reel

Tecnifibre Black Code 15L Tennis String Reel