Leon, Part 3: Lions and Tombs and Cloisters Oh My

St. Isidoro is a much smaller church in Leon but significantly it has 23 kings entombed. Their tombs sit in an amazing arched chapel decorated with Romanesque murals in astonishing shape. The down side is that you can only enter with a rather severe tour guide (spanish-speaking only) which meant that our boys had to sit quietly (oops--once on an actual ancient tomb--sorry again) for an hour. I whispered a LOT of Where's Waldo questions ("who can find the heart with arrows piercing it? who can find the sword? etc etc) to keep them respectful while everyone else who did speak spanish got a great lesson in the tombs and art. Yet another reminder that I should have taken that intensive spanish-language class before the sabbatical.

The other photos here were of the parador's very peaceful cloister with its diving swallows and cool promenade. Peaceful, I think, because no one was really meant to be in it on the weekend but once I broke the rules and snuck inside a crowd of other hotel guests followed.

The paradors had lion mailboxes so we "fed" the lion our hands (and the very few postcards we sent!) each time we passed by.

Leon, Part 2: Felicidades!

Just behind that enormous red flower pot--Ed's only a few inches taller than it--we spotted the first of three wedding parties we witnessed in Leon. We think wedding #1 was more of a municipal service but everyone was brilliantly dressed for a Saturday late afternoon/early evening. By the time we made it to the cathedral we had seen all kinds of people in tuxes and long gowns. We couldn't get into the cathedral but we didn't really grasp why until they opened the doors and there was wedding party #2, getting their photos taken at the altar. This cathedral, which I mentioned in a post a while back as being the boldest in Europe for its floor-to-ceiling walls of stained glass... so much so that the walls have to be held up entirely by banks of flying buttresses. But by the time I could take photos of either the windows or the buttresses, we got caught up in wedding #3 and it really felt like we should leave again to give them some privacy. I'm pretty sure our family is in a number of their formal and informal photographs--oops--as we tried to escape out the doors of the cathedral.

As bride #3 exited her Bentley to go into the front of the cathedral, bride & groom #2 exited the side door where guests pelted them with confetti and set off firecrackers (roman candles?). Ed was just explaining to the kids how these particular fireworks were good at blowing off people's fingers, hands, or arms, when this priest came up and took a hold of Ben good-naturedly telling him in Spanish not to fool around with fireworks. I figured if you touch my kid without permission I'm taking a photo of you without permission. But he was benign after all and quite the joker (we think). A very exciting day for 3 families and what appeared to be the rest of the town invited to the soirees.

I took the photo of the empty streetside cafe because at other hours of the day, Leon was so empty and silent that it seemed like everyone was gone. Siesta is taken very seriously in Leon. Don't even try to get a bocadillo or a cafe con leche. Or go inside a church or museum. You are meant to be resting so get off the streets!

That's Our Hotel?

What a difference a day makes. This gorgeous building (which at 100 metres was actually too big to fit the frame from anywhere I stood) is the Leon parador hotel. Originally a monastery, it sheltered pilgrims on their way to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. And because that pilgrimage (part religious effort, part hike) is still quite popular and because this year is a special year when a particular door is opened at Santiago de Compostela, there were a lot of pilgrim hikers with the traditional scallop shell hanging off their backpacks. In some recent years, there have been nearly 100,000 of them, on foot, bike or horse/donkey. There are many paths across Europe but all follow the yellow arrows and shell signs meant to guide them to the endpoint: the remains of St. James in Santiago de Compostela.

We saw pilgrims in a lot of places in northern Spain, but Leon is a particularly important stop for them. Here's the statue of a pilgrim outside the parador; note his shoes are off and can you blame him after 500 miles? Thank you, Nate, for using the fidelity hand symbol (learned in one museum early on); let's take it as youthful enthusiasm as opposed to some sort of sacrilegious gang symbol. The hotel inside is beautiful though we'd arrived on a weekend when the parador/monastery's museum were completely closed so we know less about it than usual.

We couldn't figure out why these musicians were in the courtyard of the parador, tuning their instruments and straightening their costumes but not actually playing. Turns out we found them later that evening, playing for at least one of the three weddings we ran into. A fancy place, Leon. Like seemingly everywhere in Spain, it was founded by the Romans. But then it was a Kingdom for a long, long time and while it's not large, it still has a kind of importance and pride to it that could have been off-putting but wasn't. We liked Leon though didn't do that much for those two days. I'd admit the significant improvement in our lodgings may have played a part in rating it as highly as we did...