The Big Walk

The Big Paella – Day 30

We’re passing frequently through villages again, which is good news as it means I don’t have to carry four kilos of water, with every Spanish village having a public fountain. Many houses here are stone to the top of the ground floor windows, with timber framing and plaster above. At home such houses would be restored and treasured, but here they are falling into ruin, many having become derelict whilst their owners have moved into a modern house they’ve built in the garden – a real shame, but I suppose it’s much cheaper than renovation. For once outsiders moving in with a little cash to invest would seem a good idea. There is virtually no traffic; car ownership here is so low that in one village the dusty football pitch has its goals on opposite sides of the main road.

Finally we reach a town of old houses clustered on a hilltop; Graňon. We wonder around looking for the hostel before noticing that the side door of the church has a brass knocker in the shape of a pilgrim staff, gourd and scallop shell – the hostel is within. The interior is wonderfully ancient and seems to have been purpose built at the same time as the church itself whilst the bell tower is used for hanging out your clothes to dry. Run by friendly religious volunteers; the service provided here includes meals and the ‘donations only’ approach is taken to an extreme – the money box on the sideboard is left open with a sign telling you to ‘leave what you can afford; or take what you need’. In the evening, the village priest comes to dine with the pilgrims and a giant paella is cooked on a three foot wide pan sitting on a burner, and is accompanied with wine, salads and fruits. Afterwards, we’re given the option of either heading into the church next door to pray, or doing the washing up instead; I opt for the latter.

The Cyclops – Day 29

As we leave the city centre at six o’clock the next morning, great crowds of people are still wandering the streets, or queuing to get into nightclubs. The waking hours we are keeping are truly alien here.

We’ve been dreading the walk out of Burgos following warnings from other pilgrims; it’s reputedly the worst and most dangerous section of the entire camino, all along a thundering trunk road. We cast around for an alternative and manage to find another way through the suburbs, making a rapid escape. Beyond the motorway ring-road we cross limestone uplands with scattered white boulders before descending to Atapuerca, famous for prehistoric finds in its caves, said to be the earliest and most extensive evidence of human settlements found in Europe, but off limits to visitors. It’s on the periphery of an enormous holm oak forest in the foothills of the Montes D’Oca. In medieval times this was one of the most bandit- and wolf-infested stretches of the camino; no such worries today as we reach the hamlet of St Juan de Ortega.

In the very centre of the forest, St Juan is dominated by the large Romanesque church built by its namesake. Juan had dedicated his life to helping pilgrims following his return from his own pilgrimage to Jerusalem. A noted architect, he built a hermitage and church in this most dangerous spot and also constructed bridges over the rivers. St Juan is still only a tiny hamlet, its remoteness intact, and the wonderful forest still surrounds it; a welcome change from the noise of nearby busy roads which has plagued us on recent days.

There is a hostel here, but other pilgrims have warned us that it’s really dirty. Inside the entrance hall the staff have put up a big sign informing guests that ‘Pilgrims are always very grateful for everything they receive, and never grumble’ – whilst underneath, someone has written ‘even so, this place really IS shit.’ We decide to walk on.

Thirteen hours after leaving Burgos, we reach Villafranca and another hostel. It’s in an old school, full of broken beds and mattresses on the floor in draughty rooms still wallpapered with children’s paintings, but by this time we’d settle for anything. After we’ve showered in what looks like a broom cupboard with a door that doesn’t close, we discover why the other pilgrims talked in whispers about the warden, calling her ‘the cyclops’. She storms into the dormitory and frogmarches us new arrivals to a desk she has set up in the middle of the beds, scowling at the other pilgrims and their bags as she wanders through. She’s the first unfriendly Spaniard we’ve met, and we’re very lucky that she doesn’t notice from our credentials that we’re walking the wrong way since it seems that with any excuse she’d have everyone sleeping outside on the street.

Burgos, City of El Cid – Day 28

It’s a whole week since we last had a day off, and our aching bodies aren’t allowing us to forget. We head over to the Cathedral, packed in amongst a maze of streets, a Gothic giant which dwarfs that in Leon. It’s covered in delicate filigree stonework, with projecting baubles everywhere, looking like someone has finished off the great structure by going mad with an icing gun. The vast interior is so full of subdivisions that there’s no real feeling of open space, and it is surrounded by no fewer than fifteen side-chapels, some large enough to be churches in themselves. Each is different; one is painted in overpoweringly bright colours, another in a striking two toned black and white, whilst others have great domed ceilings and are filled with paintings. All have fascinating relics: most shockingly, one has a fourteenth century life-size crucifixion, the Christ figure having real human hair and nails, and the skin of a water buffalo – to us it’s gruesome sight, but one approached by believers with the greatest of reverence.

We buy a ticket to go into restricted parts of the building, including the greatest chapel of all, that of the Condestable, where every object is considered to be an artistic masterpiece. A caretaker follows us around to let us through various locked iron-gates to other parts of the cathedral, each in turn. It feels strange to be on our own in these chapels, with the other tourists peering through the iron railings at us from the other side – an insight into life as a zoo animal. Afterwards, we climb up to the castle ruins to get the only elevated view we’ve had in the Spanish cities.

We head to a deli for picnic-lunch supplies, ordering ten slices of top quality lomo (preserved pork loin); it’s a good job they slice it thin as we didn’t notice it cost sixty euros per kilo. We’d have been stuck with tins of beans for the next few days. Relieved, we head over to the city outdoor swimming pool, surrounded by grass lawns full of bikini-clad sun-worshippers, and while away the hours catching up with news from home, having managed to find a British newspaper in town.

In the evening we settle down at one of the outside tables of a bar on the main pedestrian thoroughfare. The bars are as packed as those in Astorga, but here everyone is watching the passers by as the whole town seems to have come out for a paseo or evening walk. There’s always something to see from the immaculate outfits to children zooming around on scooters or begging to be bought helium balloons shaped like dinosaurs. Later we make up for last nights’ experience with a bar meal of raciones, giving us a chance to try morcilla, Burgos’ own version of Haggis, which is made with rice instead of oatmeal. It’s absolutely delicious.

A load of tripe – Day 27

Our final two sections of meseta, separated by a wide chalk valley, are bathed in a rosy, soft dawn light that makes you feel even more apart from the world below. It’s a tiring but very pleasant walk, and we approach to the city of Burgos through a long, shady riverside park, a welcome change after the walk into Leon. We knock gingerly at a battered old door on the street indicated in our guidebook, before being called up four flights of stairs to find a spotlessly clean, modern pension, our refuge for the next couple of nights. Our siesta lasts several hours, before we head out to find a restaurant. Castilian soup turns out to be a bowl of tripe, looking like a honeycomb made of white fat and something I’ve dreaded eating, but it actually tastes fine if I can avoid looking at it on the spoon.

Breaking Bread together – Day 26

A miracle has occurred – there are clouds in the sky! The next village of Itero de la Vega has tudor style black and white houses, which makes it seem ancient, since to British eyes these are about the oldest homes we have. Happily, the plains are behind us at last, and we begin to climb a steep chalk escarpment, pausing to look back at the wonderful retrospective of the checkerboard of wheat fields below. What a relief that there’s something to look at that isn’t a church. We’ve reached the meseta, a region of high, sweeping plateaux. There’s a broad, winding valley ahead, and as the sky blackens further, we hasten our pace, especially when forked lightening begins to crackle over to our right. Minutes later, we are being bombarded with hailstones the size of small pebbles and have to madly scramble through our bags to dig out coats that have been buried deeper and deeper with each scorching day. By the time we reach a bar in Castrojeriz, we’re soaked from the waist down and our boots are squelching with every step. Five or six waves of the most fantastic rain pass over for the next couple of hours before the storm seems finally spent and we dare to venture back outside. Castrojeriz is an ancient town built on the side of a detached chunk of the meseta, topped by a castle, and the residents are attempting to celebrate the start of a fiesta. A band braves the rain whilst the locals in their finery skulk under the arcades of the central streets.

The baking sunshine returns to begin the slow drying of our boots as we pass the ruins of the Hostal San Anton. Monks here could reputedly cure St Antonin’s fire (a type of gangrene prevalent in the eleventh century) by touching pilgrims with a tau-shaped cross. The once-fine carvings on the weathered remains are a sad contrast to the state of the camino’s churches. Niches are still visible in the walls beside the way, where bread was once put out for pilgrims passing by. Our destination for the day is Hontonas, steeply enclosed in a narrow valley. The vast, stone built houses, with timbered upper floors, put the road in permanent shadow, and the only sign of modernity being a tempting swimming pool. To our dismay, it’s closed – ‘too early in the year,’ apparently, so god only knows how hot it must be in another month or so.

The pilgrim hostel is a particularly fine old house with an enormous stone arch over the doorway. It provides evening meals, and we eat at a huge wooden table with the other pilgrims, French, Dutch, German, Swiss, a Flemish Belgian, and ourselves. The wine smoothes over the communication difficulties as the conversation is carried out in a mixture of French, Spanish and English, the Dutch lady being fluent in all three. Even the Flemish guy joins in with hand signs, though he understands not a word from anyone. It was a good experience to break bread together in such a group, for once crossing the barriers that normally keep all the pilgrims apart. At the end of the night, we find the establishment’s disadvantage – the home-made bunk beds are ridiculously high, fully seven feet off the ground. There are no railings to hold you in, and I try to sleep whilst gripping the sides of the mattress. The Swiss lady across the room seems to have no problems with the height, so our fears don’t augur well for the Pyrenees.