Reunion with Granddaughter Claire

Nantes, May 29-30

What a wonderful two days! We came to Bouaye, a suburb of Nantes, to visit our granddaughter Claire, who was just finishing up her academic year as an exchange student at the local lycée before returning to Washington State for her senior year of high school. It would be hard to exaggerate how impressed we were with her maturity and her command of French. She took us to her school, where we toured its modern facilities, including the Bob Marley recreation student recreation area, which featured pool tables and murals of Bob. We also met a number of her friends and found that “deux fois” cheek kissing is currently the standard greeting among the young with “quatre fois” generally used by them for respected elders. According to Claire’s estimate, some 60-70 percent of lycée students smoke; the air was certainly full of tobacco when we passed the smoking area during a break.


At Bouaye Lycée


Claire and friend at entrance to Bob Marley Espace (Bouaye Lycée)

Claire then took us on a tour of downtown Nantes before we drove out to St. Nazaire at the mouth of the Loire River on the Atlantic. Here we had one of the moules/frites lunches one associates with coastal France and toured the port area. LNG vessels were unloading and a cruise ship was being refitted, but we were most impressed by the massive concrete bunker built by the Germans during World War II to shield their U-boat pens from Allied air raids. It took almost two years to build and was so huge that the post-war French government could not afford to tear it down. It remains a kind of park, therefore, commanding an excellent view of the city.


With Claire in Nantes


St. Nazaire port


German U-boat bunker (St. Nazaire)

That evening Claire’s host family invited us to their home for dinner. This gave us a chance to thank them for all their kindnesses to Claire and to hear her carry on in rapid-fire French with the parents and her schoolmate. We came away impressed with the value of educational exchange, both for the exchangee and the host family. This is a trite observation, we realize, especially given our former professions, but the personal experience of a family member drives the point home.


Claire and her host family

On the Camino de Santiago to the Basque Country

Roncesvalles, Spain, and Aincille, France, May 27-28

Continuing eastward along the Camino de Santiago, we climbed into the Pyrenees after Pamplona and reached Roncesvalles (Ronceveaux in the French “Chanson de Roland”), our last community in Spain. Roland bought the farm here in Charlemagne’s defeat in 788, and the village later became the first stopping point for pilgrims crossing over the Pyrenees pass (1057 m.) from St. Jean-Pied-de-Port, the French jumping-off place. Beds in the pilgrim hostel were advertised at 5 euros, and two local restaurants offered three-course dinners for pilgrims with IDs at 8 euros.


Santiago the Pilgrim in church at Roncesvalles

We crossed the pass ourselves and made our way down to St. Jean, a delightful town packed with tourists and pilgrims, where we bought local wine at a street fair from a San Francisco native whose parents had taken her back to her Basque roots for fear she would marry an American. Like the entire region—and the Spanish side of the border as well—the town has a distinctly Basque flavor with signs in two languages and Basque dancing at the fair. However, we heard little Basque on the street, perhaps because of the demands of tourism.


St. Jean-Pied-de-Port


Tasting Basque wine

From St. Jean we continued on a bit further to Aincille (pop. 103), where we had booked one of the 14 rooms attached to a restaurant. It would be hard to imagine a greater contrast to our Burgos truck stop, for “bucolic” doesn’t begin to describe the atmosphere. We got some badly needed exercise by walking on the lightly traveled local roads, and Todd made an excursion on one of the European “Grande Route” footpaths into the lower Pyrenees. The extreme quiet was only broken at mealtimes, for our restaurant attracts patrons from St. Jean and other towns in the area—and understandably so, for the food was excellent. As parents lounged after a meal, boys played a version of jai-alai on Aincille’s municipal court, which seemed to be a feature of almost every village.


Aincille


Basque sheep seen from our hotel room

Eastward on the Camino de Santiago to Burgos

The Camino de Santiago and Burgos, May 28-29

We drove eastward from Santiago on roads paralleling the Camino de Santiago, the pilgrims’ route across northern Spain. Most of our travel was on freeways, but twice we opted for two-lane roads immediately adjacent to the camino, which in those sections at least was a well maintained unpaved footpath. We spotted pilgrims every two kilometers or so, a few on bikes but most hiking. This Austrian couple, who looked to be in their 70’s, told us that they had trained for the journey by hiking in their Steiermark mountains and were able to walk at least 30 km a day. At that rate it would take them 26 days to go from St. Jean-Pied-de-Port, the jumping-off place just over the French border, to Santiago. No blisters so far, they happily reported, and only a few hours of very light rain so they were two days ahead of schedule. However, unlike medieval pilgrims, they would return home by plane rather than foot.


Austrian pilgrims


Bergianos del Real Camino

We had booked a room seven km outside of Burgos at—not to mince words—a truck stop. True, it was a Michelin-recommended truck stop with good food, but the roar of diesel motors did little for our sleep. Down the street from our lodgings was a village that seemed to be either under construction or no more than five years old. Our desk clerk confirmed that this was a new bedroom community where Burgos commuters could find a small townhouse with garage for a reasonable price. The town’s only venerable building was the church, which the sacristan was cleaning up, he explained to Georgia, in preparation for his daughter’s wedding the following weekend.


Iglesia de Villagonzalo

We started our day in Burgos by visiting the Monasterio Real de las Huelgas, which used to have so much political and economic power that medieval Spaniards said that if the Pope was obliged to marry, he would have to take the Abbess of Las Huelgas as his bride. Some 100 nuns, all from royal or noble families, each with two servants in tow, occupied the convent up to the 16th Century, when the abbess was Doña Ana of Austria, the illegitimate daughter of Charles V’s illegitimate son. The convent, which now has some 30 nuns, is strikingly large, rich and beautifully preserved.


Monasterio Real de las Huelgas


A chapel at Las Huelgas


Las Huelgas cloister

While the outlying convent was a delight to visit, we were similarly impressed by the center of Burgos, which is graced by the green esplanade that runs along the Arlonzón River. However, the city’s greatest building is the cathedral, a beautiful blending of Gothic, Mudéjar and Renaissance styles. Our favorite parts were the cupola, immediately under the transept, and the Constable’s Chapel, which has perhaps the best reredos we have seen. Marked by metal cockleshells in the pavement, the Camino de Santiago runs right next to the cathedral, and the city was filled with pilgrims enjoying an R&R break.


Burgos


Paseo del Espolón


Cupola above the crossing at Burgos cathedral


Golden Staircase


Santiago the Moor slayer (Burgos Cathedral)

A report from Burgos requires some mention of El Cid, the city’s favorite son, who is buried in the cathedral. However, the tourist brochure accounts skip over the fact that he was a mercenary who fought for Moorish princes as well as Christian before redeeming himself by dying in the Christian conquest of Valencia. You’ll recall Charlton Heston in the role before he gave up swords for rifles.


El Cid

Nuns and Pilgrims

Tordesillas and Santiago de Compostela, May 23 and 24

Leaving Salamanca, we detoured slightly to visit Tordesillas, where the eponymous treaty was signed in 1694 dividing the world for colonization between Spain and Portugal. Juana la Loca, the mother of Charles V, was sequestered here, supposedly to spare her son embarrassment, and it is still the site of a royal convent, founded by Peter the Cruel in the 14th Century to stash his mistress, a noblewoman from Seville. To keep the mistress happy in austere Castille, he built the convent with many Moorish features reminiscent of Sevillian architecture. It is maintained in beautiful condition today, thanks to successive generations of nuns from the order of Santa Clara. Eleven cloistered nuns still live in the convent and help support themselves by selling sweets to the public—but only via a turntable that permits product and payment to be exchanged without face-to-face contact between the nun and the buyer.


Tordesillas treaty plaque


Real Convento de Santa Clara


Nuns' cloister at Santa Clara

We arrived in Santiago de Compostela at the beginning of the Fiesta de la Ascension and were treated to street dancers in fantastic masks and a peculiar display of rockets that exploded overhead with bangs and puffs of smoke—daytime fireworks, you might say. The city is always in a fiesta mode, the guidebooks report, for the steady stream of pilgrims, pumped up by the conclusion of their long journey, are in a mood to celebrate. One street leading to the cathedral is lined with tapas bars, where we ate pimientos de padrón, extraordinarily tasty tiny green peppers flash-fried in olive oil.


Santiago street scene


Street dancers and band (Santiago)


Street dancers (Santiago)

The Cathedral of Santiago was built to house what are supposedly the remains of St. James the Apostle, who had a posthumous career leading the Spanish Christian forces in battles against the Moors. Although impressive additions were made in later centuries, the heart of the cathedral is the 12th Century Portico de la Gloria (see below), which portrays James sitting below Christ and welcoming pilgrims at the end of their journey.


Portico de la Gloria (Santiago cathedral)


Cathedral towers (Santiago)


Hostel (now Parador) de los Reyes Catolicos (Santiago)

We opted for lodging outside the city with easy parking for Valeriu and found a little inn in a 250-year old building eight miles to the west. It was charming and reasonably priced with good food, including baked ray, a first for us. However, the place was vaguely reminiscent of Fawlty Towers with loud orders from the chatelaine, uncertain if well intentioned waiters (remember Manuel?), and repair projects underway during the 9:00 p.m. dinner hour.

We drove a few kilometers further to the west to see one of the Atlantic inlets for which Galicia is famous. As the picture below suggests, this is a beautiful area, but we were surprised by how few pleasure boats we saw—only one sailboat on the water and just a few in marinas. On the hill behind the inlet you may be able to make out some power-generating windmills, which we have seen in all parts of Spain that have a good breeze. (In contrast, we also offer a picture of traditional windmills, these near Valencia, that seem to be fast disappearing from the landscape.) On our drive we were intrigued by the hórreos, small, almost chapel-like structures, typically topped by a cross and raised on stilts, in which Galician farmers store their grain.


Galician coast


Old style windmills


Hórreo

Imperial Retirement and Academic Tradition

Yuste and Salamanca, May 21 and 22

If you had ruled half the known world, what location would you choose for your retirement home? Well, sure, but Emperor Charles V hadn’t heard of Sun Valley in 1555. Instead he picked La Vera Valley west of Madrid in Extremadura. Not a bad choice, as we discovered when we stopped there en route from Seville to Salamanca.

A devout man, Charles built a wing, with only four modest rooms that he occupied, on the side of the small monastery at Yuste, which enjoys a temperate climate. As we saw, his bedroom opens onto the chapel so that he could participate in the mass from his bed when gout pained him after an excess of red wine and anchovy consumption. Two of the other rooms command a superb view of countryside, and with some fifty servants in attendance his life was far from Spartan. Unfortunately, Charles lasted less than two years in these digs and was buried, as he had ordered, beneath the chapel chancel until his son Philip II moved his remains to the far more imperial surroundings of El Escorial.


Monastery at Yuste

Salamanca is to Spain as Oxford and Cambridge are to England and the Sorbonne is to France. Church and university were closely linked as the cathedrals—old (Romanesque) and new (Gothic)--are within a stone’s throw from the heart of the university and students traditionally visited certain chapels to pray for divine assistance before exams. But they had their differences, too, as memorialized by the statue of one professor, Fray Luis de Leon. Seized in the middle of a lecture by agents of the Inquisition, he spent four years in prison and, upon his release, returned to the university to resume his lecture where he had been interrupted. Academics were tough in those days. His lecture hall, rough hewn benches and all, is preserved as it was. Also preserved is the hall where Rector Miguel de Unamuno, old and in failing health, defended the university against the slurs of a crazed Franco general during the Civil War.


Cathedral

The architecture of Salamanca is fascinating. The unusual Salamanca arches (see below) set the city apart, but it is best known for its plateresque facades. As we learned after arriving there, “plateresque” derives from the word for silversmith, for the stone carvers in Salamanca were able to achieve results comparable to those of workers in soft metals since their stone was unusually malleable when freshly cut. Hence, the university façade, which memorializes in great detail (top to bottom), Ferdinand and Isabella, Carlos V and his empress, and the pope and his cardinals.


University courtyard with Salamanca arches


Plateresque facade at University

Salamanca’s Plaza Mayor tops its rival in Madrid in our opinion. We strolled down there for tapas our first evening and ended up in a bar called “El Reloj de la Plaza,” which we enjoyed so much that we decided on a return engagement. The crowd was a happy mixture of students, jubilados and in-betweens, all good natured. Our favorite tapa was the specialty of the house, a combination of potato, egg and sausage. We definitely want to return to Salamanca!


Plaza Mayor


Plaza Mayor