This is my first post for some time. I don’t wish to make excuses, but I have been
rather busy. Completing the tender
design for my last project, with an issue date the week before Easter, has
occupied most of both my time and my thoughts for almost all of 2013 to
date. Having finally delivered it, it
felt like I was waking up and returning to normal just as the world outside
began to emerge from its winter slumber.
It was time to get out of the city.
If you’re reading this, you probably saw the Facebook
commentary. As if it were necessary, let me tell you more. Since I originally wrote this two months ago,
you’ve probably forgotten anyway.
After the deadline, Easter loomed, and my Spanish colleagues
prepared to return to their respective pueblos
to spend time with their families. I realised that this four-day weekend would
be one of my best opportunities to explore the country outside the capital. The last year has gone by at a frightening
pace, with more time spent in airports than at leisure in Spain, and I now
found myself suddenly at the halfway point of my assignment. With every
available holiday dedicated to the wedding I am left with dwindling
opportunities to make the most of my experience here.
With this in mind, I didn’t let my lack of available
travelling companions deter me, and got to work on finding a destination. What with the aforementioned busyness,
however, I didn’t start to plan until the week beforehand. Despite having been to Spain over Easter and
seen some of the Semana Santa celebrations before, I severely underestimated
the importance of that week and the associated dearth of accommodation or
transport. The dream of a sun-kissed
break to the beach down south was short-lived, so I settled on a quieter area
right on Madrid’s doorstep: Castilla y Leon.
On the Thursday morning I stuffed a few things in a
rucksack, bought a bus ticket and booked a night in an Avila hotel, and then
set off with no clear plan of what the weekend held. The big camera, guide book and my sketchbook
made up most of my luggage.
Avila, or Steak Town, as I shall henceforth be calling it,
is a beautiful walled medieval city.
There’s the odd ramshackle bit – the bus station is a touch
post-apocalyptic and there are few places where I’ve seen so many ruined shells
of buildings within the city – and I wonder if these are signs of suffering
from la crisis or the wider migration
away from this area. I understand that
many villages are slowly dying as their people abandon them, and certainly as I
travelled further from Madrid I saw more and more empty buildings left for the
elements to reclaim.
Going into the cathedral was a mixed experience, as although
they’ve screened off the cloister with ugly perspex sheeting and replaced real
candles with rather less evocative battery powered fakes, the timing of my
visit meant that the nave was filled with the processional floats of Semana
Santa. These colourful renderings of
Biblical personages are interesting displays of craftmanship, but leave me
feeling either totally godless or at best extremely Protestant, as do the
processions themselves. I respect the
solemnity but remain disappointingly unmoved.
What I did really appreciate was the speckled red apse built
into the city’s fortifications…<look at pictures and describe further>.
In a small museum off to one side, amongst the ecclesiastical finery and
religious paraphernalia I came across several huge illustrated cantora.
These are essentially monk’s hymn books, with medieval written music,
which given my recent reading (In the Name of the Rose – lots of detailed
descriptions of monastic life and illustration) and singing in a choir (reading
sheet music for the first time in years) were of particular interest. I spent much longer than I might otherwise have
done poring over minutely detailed flowers in the borders of the pages and
trying to decipher the musical notation before skimming past the other displayed
finery to continue round the city.
The other big-hitter of Avila (aside from face-sized,
flavourful steaks washed down with very nice red wine) is the city walls, half
of the perimeter of which can be accessed.
Where better to sit sketching for an hour in blustery springtime
conditions than the most exposed position for miles around? I duly climbed to the highest point I could
find, one of the wall’s turrets slightly above the bustle of the bank holiday
tourist crowds, and settled myself down.
It’s a good way to slow my pace when alone, although when finished I
felt dazed and tired: as I finally paused all the fatigue of the preceding
weeks washed over me. I headed back to
the hotel for a little rest.
Darkness fell, and the streets filled up. Avila is well known for its Semana Santa
processions, and the floats from the cathedral were brought out through the
city streets by their hooded attendants, watched by large crowds in a scene
repeated, with some variations in style, in cities and towns across Spain
throughout the week.
The obvious next step the following morning was the next
city to the West: Salamanca.
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