26th of August we still had to see one cultural highlight of León: the palace and monastery of the Basilica San Isidoro and connected to the cloister. It has a beautifully painted Romanic crypt in brilliant colours with the royal Pantheon. The building was built directly against the Roman city wall. It also shows a Renaissance library with its original leather cladded huge books, which one person couldn’t carry alone. To sum up the experience of León: it’s worth the trip.
On our way out of town the Camino is passing by the Convento of San Marco which would have also been worth a visit, but we had to continue our way over the bridge crossing the river of Bernesga to gain distance. Biking along the industrial areas of the suburbs with all their rusty silos didn’t leave the impression of just having seen the cultural heritage from centuries. The modern church of the Basílica de la Virgen del Camino was the last architectural highlight before we left into rolling hills with a vegetation looking like being in an African savannah. The guide book had warned us that today we would get to the least interesting part of the Camino as far as scenery was concerned, so it was a real relief to see these beautiful trees in a softly rolling landscape.
Although we had pure nature around us we couldn’t ignore the smell of forest fires been carried with the wind from far away. You could see the smoke moving through the blue sky against the sun. In Chozas de Abajo we suddenly met Ariane from Starnberg again who I had met the first time where the meteorite hit the Camino. She was walking with two French guys Steven and the 14-year-old Enzo. We spontaneously decided to have lunch together in the one and only bar in the middle of nowhere called “La parade de Chozas de Abajo”. It was the place to be and we had a lot of fun enjoying that we met again on the Camino.
The heat was building up more and more as we left the village and we finally must have arrived in the boring landscape as the tour book had warned us. Even the glowing asphalt streets created mirages at the horizon to double the boring image of the endless path to go. We were still happy that our bikes gave us the chance to get some headwind, but the poor foot pilgrims didn’t have a single tree to hide from the sun and find some shade or cooler air. There were only a few that were keeping up with these temperatures at this time of day anyway.
As we kept on moving westwards we slowly could tell in the hazy grey of the horizon that we were getting closer to some mountains. At hospital de Órbigo we were crossing the river Órbigo over a bridge with 20 arches built in the 13th century. In the year 1434 a knight Suero de Quiñones had fought for his love with 300 knights, which is repeated every year in June. It must have inspired Cervantes to write his character of Don Quixote.
There was a hostel in Hospital de Órbigo run by the German pilgrimage society which was really nice, and we had a short talk with Nicole who was in charge. As they had the exact same type of pilgrim credentials as the one we had already I bought another two for our continuation as our double package got already quite full of stamps. Nicoletta the Italian lady at the reception handed them out to me, and we excused ourselves that we had to continue as we had already booked ahead in Astorga, but they knew the place and we should send Nicoles’ greetings to Lea.
From now on the landscape changed dramatically after having crossed for days the endless high plateau of the Meseta. Suddenly we had to climb a range of hills which offered us a splendid view back over the flatlands where we came from. Once we reached the top you could see the towers of the cathedral of Astorga in the haze. We arrived at Lea‘s hostel “My Way” just at the foot of the city wall which again was built by Romans. This time by Augustus who gave the name of the city Astorga. Lea had Swiss origins, but had lived her whole life in Spain. We had the opportunity to do our washing and hang everything in the garden until she had cooked for all her guests.
In the meantime the news had reached me from my father back in Germany that the region where we were was declared a disaster area by the Spanish government. I told him that this has more organisational and financial reasons to facilitate aid to the communes. We asked around if there were any parts of the Camino closed due to the fires like some days ago, but everyone confirmed us that it was possible to continue the Way of Saint James.
After dinner we climbed up to the fortified city of Astorga and from there we could see the smoke clouds from the mountain range west of us obscuring the sunset. Helicopters and airplanes were still flying above our heads to reach the fires from the air. It was a bit of an apocalyptical view, but unfortunately the proof that this is all related to the climate change.
But nevertheless life was going on in Astorga and they prepared their traditional festival.
The locals were practicing their traditional music and local dances with castanets and bagpipes. We seemed to be the only foreigners watching them. What a beautiful evening with a moon rising in a bizarre smoke cloud.
