The Catholic side of Spain

September 19th

Spain is a hard-core catholic country.  To me it seems like the mindset is that "We're catholic; our family has always been catholic; and our children will also be catholic." This makes for some pretty awesome tourist sites-cathedrals, churches, and monasteries.


So this weekend we saw all these things when we took a three-day trip to the northern section of Spain, Castilla y León.

First off, one of the first things you need to know about Catholic Spain is the Camino de Santiago- the Road to St. James. The tradition says that around 814 AD the tomb of St. James was discovered in Galicia (Top left corner on the map.) A church was built on that spot, and as the news spread people from France, Rome, Spain, England, and other parts of Europe began making pilgrimages to "Santiago de la Compostela."

Santiago de la Compostala is still one of the most popular pilgrimages in world.

Pilgrims can be recognized by the seashell they wear somewhere on their clothes, and in the older days they usually looked like this.

Now they look like this:

Anyway, so specifically we went to two places along the Camino de Santiago-León y Burgos.

León

In León we saw the coolest cathedral. La Catedral de Santa María de Regla. It was built in the thirteenth century and in the gothic style that came from France. To me, it looks a lot like the Salt Lake Temple

                               

And it also has about 1800 sq. meters of stained glass-one of the largest in Europe. The cool thing is that it's mostly all original. Over the years, much of the stained glass in other cathedrals has been destroyed, but not here.

I really liked all the symbolism in the cathedral:

      

You can't see it very well, but the 12 flower petal-like things depict each of the 12 Apostles.

The cathedral was positioned so that the brightest light shines through these windows-it happens to depict the Godhead.

It started raining right when we finished the tour, so we waited in this patio-like area for it to clear up. 

This is my friend Rachel.

The next day, on the way to Burgos, we stopped at two cute churches along the Camino de Santiago. 

Burgos...

Next stop-Burgos. Burgos happens to be one of my favorite places we've been to so far in Spain. I basically loved the cathedral...which looks like this:

This was actually just a tiny little "relief" on one side of an altar, but I really liked all the details. This was probably one of my favorite pieces of art in the Cathedral.

This is the biggest orignal stain-glass window in Spain. León has the most, but Burgos has the biggest. 

  But we found the best part of Burgos when we least expected it.

1) Around 5 o'clock-just in time to wake us up from our siesta...

Sorry it's side-ways

2) This randomly in the street...

3) And this...which was epically awesome...

It turns out that the week we went to Burgos happened to be the week of "Las Ferias." So we were witnessing plays in the streets and random festival-like parades because of that. But, we loved it because to us it was so random.

Also Burgos is the birthplace of the legendary "Mio Cid." The story goes that he helped big time with the Christian Reconquest (taking back Spain from the Moors AKA Arabes. This took about 800 years by the way.) Cid is a genuine Spanish hero.

 "Mio Cid."

Yay for vacations in the middle of the semester :D