Author Archives: Steve Walker

About Steve Walker

Once a tech in-house PR type, now professional photo/videographer and recreational drone pilot. Violinist. Flautist. Occasional conductor. Oenophile.

Travel, and the first day’s skiing

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Saturday 13 January 2024 – Happy new year!

January is not normally a time of year that people traditionally look forward to. However, this wasn’t the case for me, as I had a holiday to look forward to.  These blog pages are usually dedicated to writings about Our Travels, which we (ironically and unseriously) differentiate from Going On Holiday.  My January excursion, though, was definitely a holiday, and a skiing holiday, to boot. I was fortunate to be able to take up on a late-arising chance to revisit a skiing resort which has many memories for me, most of them fond – Sauze D’Oulx in Italy.

Sauze has a bit of a chequered past. When I first went there, it had a reputation of being somewhere between louche and hooligan. That, though, was 44 years ago, in 1980. Since then, it has moved a little way up market. It’s still a lively enough place, and one I was very interested to revisit.  I have been to Sauze no fewer than seven times since that first skiing holiday; but the last visit was in 2003; furthermore, my last skiing holiday was in 2006, so, as you might imagine, I was rather wondering what a lacuna of 18 years was going to mean for my physical prowess generally and my skiing ability in particular.  I was in my 50s for the last skiing holiday and now I’m in my 70s; a vintage, one might think, which is rarely in evidence on the slopes.

Time would tell – read on and you’ll find out.

Many things are the same as they were 44 years ago – the laws of physics, the gradients of the slopes and the depth of human nervousness at the conjunction of these.  Many things have changed, too.  I will write a separate post articulating the contrast between how things were then and how they are now.  It’s pure self-indulgence on my part, of course, but I find the comparison fascinating.

One thing that emphatically has not changed is the likelihood of an inconvenient flight time for a package holday. My flight from Gatwick to Turin was at 0800 on 14 January.  Back in 1980, being young – 27 – and not particularly well-off, this simply meant getting up at a ridiculous hour to drive to the airport, leave the car in the long term car park and stumble blearily through the check-in process before finding a bar to have a bracer before the flight. These days I’m lucky enough to be able to afford a taxi to the airport and a hotel stay the night before. I still had to get up at 0500, but at least I had no worries about potential problems getting to the airport.

The initial information I had was that my flight departed from Gatwick’s South Terminal – the cheaper of the two – so I booked in at the Hilton attached peripherally to that terminal. The Powers That Be then decided to arrange for the flight to depart from the North Terminal, possibly to give it an air of respectability, I don’t know. Fortunately, it’s very easy to get from one terminal to the other, so this was a minor annoyance, particuarly compared with having to get up at 0500.

Gatwick has changed beyond recognition since 1980, and the whole process of checking in, going through security and getting breakfast was amazingly swift and easy.  You still have to go along a soulless corridor on a moving walkway to get to it, though – that much is the same.

I was up at 5am, checked in and through security by 6, outside a Full English by 7 (well, I was going to The Foreign, and they don’t do a proper breakfast there, do they?), and on the plane ready for departure at 8.

The radar at Turin airport, though, was not party to the same efficiency. Problems with it meant that we were nearly an hour late departing; but that, I guess, is par for the course these days.  The flight was uneventful so I leavened its ordinariness with a couple of G&Ts (harking back to the holiday ethos of 1980, there) and we landed at Turin airport about as behind schedule as we had been taking off. No matter, it was still only lunchtime.

The process of getting from aeroplane to coach is another thing that has changed.  In 1980, after passport checks, we were ushered into a smallish hall with a single carousel, which was a rotating disk to transfer bags from the arriving planes, which were few in number.

These days….

it’s clear that Turin airport has expanded hugely.  One thing that hasn’t changed is my anxiety that my bags have gone astray. Carousel 3 was Our Carousel, and eventually its sign said that bags from our flight were being delivered.  On they came for the crowd to pick them up.

After several minutes, many of the crowd had picked their bags

and so the assembled throng began to thin, and my worries to increase. I am still emotionally scarred by the time on a business trip that I was the last person standing by a carousel which only had two bags on it, neither of them mine; hence my anxiety.

That anxiety rose a notch when they then changed the sign for the carousel

implying that a complete delivery had failed to include my suitcase. However, I had only a few minutes of high anxiety before my bag came through and I was able to head out to the coach which would take me to Sauze.  In a good example of a well-engineered process, I received a text message from Crystal Ski, the tour operator, telling me which coach to go to – a nice touch. Inevitably, though, we had to wait nearly an hour for a handful of people to arrive on a different flight before the coach could depart.  A mild annoyance, but nothing new in the world of package holidays.

The drive to Sauze D’Oulx from Turin is a mere 90 minutes; it’s a very convenient resort in that respect.  It’s slightly less convenient in that the coach drop-off point is by the tourist information office, which is below the town. And I do mean below.  The distance to my hotel, inspiringly named the Hotel Sauze,

was some 500 metres and involved a 50-metre ascent. Those of you dear readers who followed our trek across northern Spain  will know that I consider a 1-in-10 uphill slope to be non-trivial, and I was lugging a 15kg suitcase, to boot. I was pleased to note that the training in Spain meant that this was not too challenging, meaning I got to our hotel before anyone else from our coach, so check-in was swift. It was also efficient, and so I quickly got to my room so that I could unpack and consider my options for the rest of the afternoon.

One of those options was to buy some shirts, as I realised swiftly that I had left the ones I’d intended to pack hung up in my wardrobe, rather than usefully included in my suitcase.  A trip to town was thus an obvious undertaking. I also, of course, needed to pick up the skis, boots and helmet whose hire I had pre-booked, otherwise the skiing component of the week was going to rely heavily on my imagination.

So I went for a walk. Obviously.

I pottered into town, noting, as I went, those establishments that had been there in 1980, of which there are a surprisingly large number. Most sadly missed is a bar called Andy Capp’s, which was head and shoulders the liveliest place in Sauze when I was first there, but is now an apartment block. I’d wondered if it had been shut down because of the arrival of Winter Olympics to Sauze, but this can’t be the case, as Andy’s was no longer extant when I was last here in 2003, and the Olympics were in 2006.

I got my boots and skis at Maison Clataud, which had survived since 1980 and which now boasted a very swish check-in and provisioning system.  The boots I got were substantially similar to the concrete wellies that I remember (shuddering) from 1980, but the skis were fully a foot shorter, a testament to the improvement in ski materals and technology over the decades. The helmet was a new thing, too. I’m not sure when they became ubiquitous, but they certainly are now.  I had reserved one only from an excess of caution, as I expected to fall over a lot, but I had thought mainly to wear a woolly hat during time on the piste.  Time will tell.

Sauze has always been an attractive town, but I had never bothered to take photos of it during my previous visits. So I used the pottering around to capture some images in the late afternoon light.

including one rather endearing sequence of outdoor DJing, winter style.

Lampione, by the way, is one of the 1980 survivors. It has moved up market from a pub with a table football table (where I met some very entertaining BA pilots in 2003 with whom I went on to join for further skiing exploits) to a swish-looking wine bar.

The main square of Sauze is rather nice at this time on a Sunday late afternoon, too.


By the time I got back to the hotel, it was Time For The Bar, I Think.

The hotel has a decent bar, and shortly after this photo was taken and since it was near dinner time, it filled nicely. I had a chat with Gill and Steve from Bromsgrove and a bunch of Scots people from the Borders, which smoothly led into dinner time.  The hotel had arranged a buffet, and very good it was, too.

After dinner, though, I decided to take it easy, rather than go out looking for alcohol-fuelled mischief (another, and major, change from 1980 – or even 2003, frankly), and retired for an early night, hoping that this would improve my chances of having fun on the slopes the next day.

Sunday 14 January 2024 – I awoke at 0730, having had a night’s somewhat sporadic attempts at sleep, punctuated by a couple of episodes of nearly falling out of bed – the room has two narrow single beds separated by a couple of feet and I’m not used to something that narrow. The room’s bathroom, though, has a great shower and so I presented myself to breakfast in a decent state and a reasonably timely manner, though not as enthusiastically as I would have during my pomp as a skier*, when I would be there for Earliest Breakfast and First Lift. This time, I’m more modest in my ambitions.

After a very fine breakfast, made even finer by my bringing to it a couple of bags of Twining’s Finest Earl Grey, I did the usual First Morning Faff – assembling the relevant clothing and trying to make sure that I had all the right things with me – gloves, tissues, lift pass, internet hotspot** that kind of thing, and headed down to get boots and skis.

The hotel has a very convenient location, right at the bottom of the slopes.  One has a choice – walk for some 10 minutes (or take the bus) to the “main” lift up the mountain to Sportinia, or go up on the nearer lift, called Clotes, which is a short but telling uphill walk from the hotel. Or, rather, it used to be.  They’ve put an escalator in!

This made things a lot less tiring to get to the Clotes lift (on the left above). It would have been entirely untiring had the thing kept working, but I had to walk up about the last third after it stopped; as I reached the top, a chap came along and restarted it, which was fine for everyone behind me.

I made the first slightly wrong decision of the day at this point, in that I decided to walk, rather than ski, the short distance across to Clotes, as in my memory it was a chair lift on which one had to carry, rather than wear, one’s skis.

This has changed. It’s now a grown-up chair lift and so one wears skis to ride it, and skis off the top.

The practical upshot of this was that of course the first experience I’d had for 18 years of the limiting characteristics of wearing skis on my boots was trying to get through the entry gate to the lift. This featured a very slight and short downhill stretch, which was enough to upset my already-fragile sense of balance.

So I fell over. Bollocks!

Apart from that major embarrassment, I got on the lift OK and even managed to ski off it without falling over. But, boy, did I feel unsteady!

From the top of the Clotes chair, it’s a short, 800-metre, descent (153 metres vertical) back to the town.

It’s an easy piste, and used as a standard by the local ski instructors to teach beginner classes.  I remember that in 1980 the descent took our class two hours. It took me, uncertain and wobbling as I was, four and a half minutes. I didn’t feel particularly in control, I doubtless looked a mess stylistically, but I made it unscathed (and no other skiers were injured in the process, by the way).  I was quite relieved that I wasn’t a liability on the slopes despite the intervening years.  So I did it again, and could feel my confidence returning, if not any kind of stylishness.

The rest of the day was spent reacquainting myself with the main lifts of the Sauze system, and getting a greater degree of confidence back. That first run was at an average speed of just 13 km/h with a maximum speed of 18 kph. My pulse averaged over 150 beats per minute for that short time, a pulse rate that I would expect if I were going running.

As I did more runs, the confidence I had in my control increased, and long-dormant muscle memory started to emerge, so my speed increased. By the time I decided to call it a day, my average speed had increased to 20kph and I hit the heady heights of 48kph at one point – that’s 30 miles an hour. My pulse wasn’t particularly high at that point, but I think I nearly discovered that adrenaline is brown.

Anyway, as the day progressed, stats aside, I was enjoying myself – rediscovering some of the great views

and the lunchtime venues.

A huge part of enjoying myself was the discovery that I was, indeed, fit enough.  Logically, I know I’m a great deal fitter – and lighter – than I used to be. Where I used to ski a couple of hundred metres and then stop to rest and work out where to go next, now I was able to ski for several kilometres wthout pause and without getting tired. Also, by the end of the day, I felt I was beginning to recapture some amount of stylishness (this is important, not just in how you look, but also how efficiently you cover distance and how quickly and effectively you can respond to emergencies like stupid bloody snowboarders hacking past with scant regard for mountain etiquette).

I stopped early – about 1430 – because it was, after all, my first day, and the vast majority of skiing accidents happen in late afternoon and to people who go for “just one last run”. I hightailed it back to the hotel and put skis and boots away (another advantage of stopping promptly is that you get the better choice of racks for skis and boots).

And so the evening awaits.  Dinner is at 1900, so I shall partake of a pre-prandial bracer and see who’s in the bar for a chat.  After dinner – who knows? Check back and see whether I was sociable or sensible…

A rivederci!

 

 

* Were you a pompous skier, then? Ed
** Bloody Brexit – I’m still absolutely livid!

After the Camino, Part II – A Day Trip to the End of the World

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Monday 2 October 2023 – As satisfied as we might have been with our 800 kilometres of walking the Camino Francés, one could say that we hadn’t actually completed the staff work. Yes, the Camino primarily leads to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, because the remains of Saint James the Apostle are believed to be buried there, but some pilgrims choose to continue their journey to Finisterre and Muxía, on the west coast of Spain, for a few reasons, historical, symbolic or traditional among them. We had, in our way, chosen to do this, but it would be by bus, not on foot (walking to Finisterre would have added three days minimum and some 80km to our pilgrimage).

Thus it was that we found ourselves standing outside an underground car park at 0845 waiting for a coach to turn up and whisk us off to Finisterre and Muxia so that we could at least see what lay at these two significant and symbolic end points of the Camino.

The itinerary turned out to be a lot more varied than I’d expected, and  involved no fewer than seven stops. It was a pretty standard tourist setup – coach with guide, stopping at places so everyone could scramble off the bus and wander around for a few minutes taking photos before getting back on and being whisked off to the next place.

The weather was quite cool as we started, and as a result we could see the mists in the valleys as we went along.

The first place we stopped at is a staging point on the Camino as it wends its way coastwards. When we arrived, because Pontemaceira was (being centred around a bridge over a river) in a valley,

It Would Have Been Better If It Were Clearer.

Despite the poor visibility, one could see it was a charming place; I can imagine it to be eye-achingly photogenic in the right conditions.  The bridge from which the village takes its name is a 13th-century bridge built upon the foundations of an earlier Roman bridge, and the place (which, Wikipedia tells me, has 73 inhabitants) is a monumental village. That means it’s a village which is in itself a monument rather than one which is huge. It has a couple of dwellings, a chapel, two old water mill buildings and a more modern manor house. One can look into the mill buildings

and see the river Tambre rushing past underneath to give some idea of what would have powered the mills when they were operational.  I really wish that (a) the weather had been clearer and, if so, (b) we could have had longer to take photos. The whole thing was a bit rushed, but that’s not unusual for these kind of tourist outings.

So it was back on the bus and off to the next destination, which was a fishing village with, it would appear, a speciality of farming mussels.  There were some large platforms out to sea, reportedly some 25 metres square.

As you can see, the sun had burned off the mists, and was shining strongly, making Muros look very pretty.

Again, we didn’t have much time to wander around, but then again the place didn’t have much to offer. I’m not quite sure why we stopped, to be honest; it was perfectly pretty, but didn’t really add anything to what I perceived to be the mission of the day trip, which was more to do with the Camino.

Neither did the next stop, which was, again, pleasant enough, but slightly puzzling.  At Ézaro there’s a waterfall which is unusual in that it debouches directly into the sea. Also unusual is the amount of tourist infrastructure in place for something which is nice enough but doesn’t have the gravitas to merit what one finds there. There’s a tourist centre, with a cluster of outlets – souvenirs, clothing, ice cream, coffee, all under a large shelter with plenty of seating. To get to the falls, there’s a very well-engineered walkway, which leads past a thundering great hydro-electric facility; this made me wonder whether the price of being allowed to set up the plant was an obligation to provide the somewhat over-engineered tourist facilities. The falls themselves,

at least when we saw them, were, well, just these waterfalls, you know? It may be that the hydro plant was extracting lots of water  and the tide was low; perhaps on another day they would even impress an Icelander. Anyway, we scarcely had time to have beer and crisps and visit the falls before we had to hurry back to the bus and on to the next destination, which was Finisterre.

I was keen to see Finisterre, principally because of its status as an end point of Camino pilgrimages. It was named by the Romans, as they thought that it was, literally, the end of the world – Finis Terra. Also, the name was familiar to me as one of the names in the UK Shipping Forecast, along with Rockall, Dogger Bank, German Bight and the rest of them. I started to look for a chart of where the Finisterre area was and made a discovery that quite startled me: it no longer exists! It used to be the area, as one might expect, to the north-west of Spain, adjoining Biscay. However, its name conflicted with a different Spanish meteorological area definition, and Spain won the international wrangling over the name, So the Finisterre name was dropped and the area has been christened FitzRoy, named after the grandpa of all shipping forecast areas, Met Office founder and HMS Beagle captain, Admiral Robert FitzRoy.

This, by the way, was back in 2002. And no-one told me.

Finisterre was not the desolate, windswept outpost I expected. There’s a rocky outpost, yes, which is a lighthouse at the top of a cliff

but it’s not desolate; it even has its own hotel.

OK, there may be only six rooms in the hotel, but as soon as I learned that it was possible to stay there, a plan started hatching in my mind, matching the one which had been forming in Jane’s for several days now: we could do one of the other Camino routes, with the Portuguese one being the favourite, and finish with stay at the hotel. More on that plan later…

The Finisterre lighthouse is a popular tourist destination, and so there were a lot of people there as well as the contents of our coach. There is a “zero kilometre” Camino marker there

which is inevitably a selfie magnet, though I don’t believe that any of the people queuing up to have their face in a photo of the marker had actually walked there. There are a few other things at the site: a small memorial cross;

and a rather nice symbolic boot.

The lighthouse was built in 1853, in part to address the reputation of the coastline as the “coast of death”, because of the appalling loss of life due to shipwrecks in the area. Its light is reportedly visible at a distance of 30 nautical miles. Except in fog, of course. For that eventuality it was equipped with a siren that sounds like mooing, so it has the nickname “the cow of Finisterre”. I have a picture of the cow’s horns.

The lighthouse is, of course, right at the tip of the land, because its usefulness would be limited were it elsewhere. I thought that there was nothing else there, or at best a few shacks.  I was therefore surprised at the size of Finisterre town, at which the coach stopped after we’d visited the lighthouse.

It even has its own castle,

although it’s rather small and is now in use as a fishing museum.

We wandered round the back streets of the town

which has one of those “Spanish open” – i.e. closed – churches, and also a rather engaging chapel, Capela de Nuestra Señora del Buen Suceso,

and also a lavadoiro,

albeit one which doesn’t look as if it gets a whole lot of use.

There are numerous eateries along the seafront by the harbour, and we managed to choose the one which gave us the single most horrible cup of coffee in our entire Spanish travels before going back to the bus and on to the next destination.

Muxia was also not what I expected. Having seen the film “The Way”, I expected a dark, desolate, rocky, windswept outpost, lashed by Atlantic seas, with a dark stone church as the sole construction there.

It wasn’t quite like that.

For a start, there’s a very impressive monument, which was erected in recognition of the events of 13 November 2002, when the oil tanker ‘Prestige’ ran aground at Muxia, spilling some 75 million litres of oil into the Atlantic and along the coast from Portugal to France, with Muxia being the worst hit. A massive cleanup followed, which means that the site is now pristine.

The monument takes the form of a broken rock – symbolic of the break in the ship, the wound to the sea and also of how the disaster divided the community through the economic hardship engendered by the damage to the area. The monument is called “A Ferida” (“The Wound”) and was sculpted by local artist Alberto Bañuelos.

In front of the monument is the other “zero-kilometre” marker for the Camino. “How,” I hear you cry, “can there be two places which are at zero kilometres?” There are two Camino routes which start at Santiago de Compostela; one leads to Finisterre (called Fisterra in Galego, the  language of Galicia), and the other leads to Muxia.

Each of them is around 90km in length, but to receive a Compostela for these Camino journeys, one has to complete 100km.  This means visiting both by foot, in either order, adding some 30km to the total.

Can you imagine how the plan hatching in my head is developing?

Anyway, Muxia. This is what it looked like on the day we were there.

The church is the Santuario da Virxe da Barca, the Sanctuary of the Virgin of the Boats. It was originally a pre-Christian Celtic shrine and sacred spot. This part of Spain was resistant to conversion to Christianity, and was only converted in the 12th century. The Christians built a hermitage on this location at first, and later the present church in the 17th century. Throughout the centuries, it has been a magical-religious object of worship and of veneration for thousands of Camino pilgrims travelling from Santiago to Muxía. In legend, it’s the place where the Virgin arrived in a stone boat to inspire courage in the Apostle James. The church was closed, but Jane managed to get a photo of the interior through a window

and if you look closely, you can see small models of boats hung inside.

We are told that when a fisherman gets a new boat, they offer a model of it to the church to ask for protection – presumably similar to those we saw hanging from the ceiling of Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours Chapel (The Sailors’ Church) in Montreal, Québec when we visited last year.

I would have liked to spend more time at Muxia, which is a very charismatic location, but, once again, it was time to head back to the coach for our homeward journey. This was interrrupted by one final Tourist Attraction, probably the most unusual of the entire day. This was

the longest and oldest hórreo in the world. Well, the oldest one with an actual documented history anyway. – 27 metres in length with 22 pairs of legs, and looking rather like a millipede.

The size of your hórreo depended on many things, such as the size of your harvest.  Each harvest used to be subject to a tithe – a tenth, given to the church. A large hórreo such as this might well have belonged to the church and been used to store the tithes that had been taken. One nugget we learned on the trip was that in Galicia the hórreos are under a preservation order – they may not be destroyed.  That accounts for why there are still so many around the province, as well as why so many of them are so obviously disused and decrepit..

That was it for our day trip. It was great to see Finisterre and Muxia, and I expect we will visit them again as end points for another Camino, possibly even from Lisbon. The other destinations? Well, they had some charm, I suppose, particularly Pontemaceira, which I think would have been stunning on a decent day. But we learned a few things and saw some more sights and, moreover, got back to Santiago in time to do a final bit of shopping to (eventually!) get hold of a bottle of a particular Galician gin,

to which we’d been introduced in Casa Marcelo, and which we wanted to contribute to our hosts on the final segment of our stay in Spain.  We are now headed for the wilds of the Galician countryside to relax and eat and drink a great deal more than is in line with current government guidelines. Thank you for joining Jane and me on our journey from the south of France to the west of Spain. These pages are about to go quiet for a few months until our next expedition, which is planned for February next  year. I hope that you’d like to subscribe to the blog (provide a comment, provide an e-mail address and ask for future updates) so that you don’t miss out on what we hope will be a spectacular holiday travel. Until then, hasta luego!

After the Camino, part I – Santiago

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Sunday 1 October 2023 – I hope you’ll forgive a couple of days of not posting updates, but I haven’t had a lot of time, what with having Nice Lunches and that. After finishing the Camino last Thursday, we had three nights’ stay in Santiago before moving on. The first day we had a guided tour of the city; the second was spent on a day trip that included two other key Camino destinations. This post is about our time actually spent in the city. The photos are selected from pictures taken on the evening after we finished walking, during our guided tour and after it; no particular order, no particular theme, but I wanted to try to give some impression of the city.

Which is quite overwhelming. Getting back to dealing (a) with life in a bustling city after six weeks in the wilderness and (b) the sheer amount of detail, history and massive religious buildings was quite tricky. But here goes….

Let’s start with some statistics. These were reeled off by our guide, Joaquin,

among a vast gout of information which meant that our brains were full after only about 10 minutes.

Despite its feeling of huge size, Santiago is by no means the largest of the cities we passed through. Burgos has 350,000 residents, and León has over 122,000. Santiago has just 90,000 residents, but receives 2 million overnight stays each year, of which over 300,000 are pilgrims. The resulting crowds, buzz and ubiquity of great lumps of religious masonry means that Santiago felt much the largest of the three to me.

At the heart of the city is the cathedral. It is massive, a very imposing presence across the city.

The above video shows it mainly from the west; in front of it you can see a large square, the Praza do Obradoiro, which is where today’s pilgrims tend to end their Camino. There are also squares on the other three sides: North, the Praza de Inmaculada, the historical end of the Camino, where we bade farewell to Susan and Bob;

with its stunningly intricate façade;

and Praza da Quitana, to the East (pay attention, now; we’ll be returning here later).

To the south of the main bulk of the cathedral lies Praza das Praterias and the cloisters, which we visited as part of our time with Joaquin.

One interesting fact came out of the welter that Joaquin deluged us with – atop one tower is a pyramid shape influenced by the architect’s visit to Mexico where he saw Mayan pyramids. The other tower around the cloister is similarly Aztec-influenced.

In the centre of the cloister courtyard is a huge stone bowl, made in the Romanesque style,

which used to stand in the square to the north of the cathedral – the historical end of the pilgrimage. Its purpose was to enable pilgrims to finally wash and purify themselves as part of their pilgrimage. There were four parts to the ritual:

  1. Wash and purify
  2. Burn the old pilgrim’s robes
  3. Don fresh white robes
  4. Finally wear the cockle shell that the pilgrim had acquired from shell sellers (in the city, rather than by the sea shore)

This then granted a “plenary indulgence” – forgiveness for all past sins. I’ll return to this topic later as well, so better keep paying attention, here.

The cathedral was built between 1035 and 1211, which is a pretty impressive feat of building when you consider the vast size of it. It has been renovated in the 17th and 18th century with the last titivation being in the baroque style. This means that if you look at the building through the eyes of an architect you can see a great mixture of styles: medieval, romanesque and baroque.

Inside the cathedral is probably the most impressive of the three great Camino cathedrals – Burgos, León and Santiago – at least to my eyes.  The nave is large

whereas in Burgos, for example, the huge number of fancy chapels around the nave actually served to reduce its area and thus its impact. Notice the hortizontal organ pipes – these are are used for sound effects rather than musical notes.  Horizontal pipes were once very common, but almost all other sets have been discarded over the years.

Behind me, as I took the above photo, is the Portico of Glory, the original, and very imposing, entrance to the church. Entrance to the cathedral can be free, but if you want to see the Portico, which has been very carefully and beautifully restored, you have to pay extra and join timed groups of a couple of dozen at a time to stand and marvel at it. That’s all you can do, since the buggers won’t let you take photos of it, or touch it (the sculpted Tree of Jesse bears the marks of millions of pilgrims in the form of the deep imprints of fingers and thumb – but one can no longer place ones fingers into that piece of history).

Another way that the cathedral parts punters from their money concerns the eponymous St. James – Santiago, you’ll remember. His statue forms part of the altar piece, and for an extra consideration, people are allowed to file down into the crypt to view the actual tomb of the Saint, then queue up

and climb up behind the altar to “hug the saint” and whisper their problems to him in the hope of getting inspiration, resolution or absolution.

There is, of course, a wealth of detail in the endless architectural flourishes inside the cathedral. A couple of things stood out for me: some of the original windows at the back of the church,

which predate glass – they are actually wafer-thin slices of alabaster; the original medieval baptismal font, the oldest item in the cathedral, which survived the destruction of the original medieval building by the muslim hordes;

and some of the various chapels around the side of the nave are used for taking confession in various languages.

In my post about Villafranca, I mentioned the concept of Holy Doors – special doors passing through which (along with other flummery) confers a plenary indulgence. The one in the Santiago cathedral is not hugely imposing.

However, if you look at it from the outside, there’s an impressive portal.

Peering through the bars of this portal reveals a dark secret – the portal is kind of a fake.  Through the bars, you see

the back end of the original church building! This was deemed to be not impressive enough, and so the façade was put in place to gussy the whole thing up to give it more gravitas.

Another thing the cathedral is famous for is its thurible, which is vast – it weighs 60kg.

On holy days and religious festivals – and, yes, if one is prepared to stump up the necessary moolah – this incense burner, called the Botafumeiro, becomes the centre of a spectacular piece of theatre after communion has been taken at mass.

We were lucky enough to see this twice in one day – from the side, as above and, earlier in the day, from the back, by the Portico of Glory, which was better musically but not so impressive to see.

Joaquin got us into the cathedral early on in the day, which was good because one could take photos without there being too many crowds around. He also took us into the cloisters and the museum, where, as ever, he drowned us with fascinating facts which neither of us can easily remember. Taking of photos in the museum is not allowed (yawn), but I managed to sneak one shot of a prized item,

an alabaster-and-wood altar piece depicting the life of St. James. This is a pilgrimage offering from the 1456 Holy Year of Compostela carved in Nottinghamshire at the behest of “Johanes Gudguar” (thought to be the English priest John Goodyear from the Isle of Wight).

Outside the cathedral, as you can imagine, there’s an ongoing hive of activity, particularly on the huge western square, with pilgrims arriving, sometimes en masse, like this bunch of schoolkids who had just been on a one-day “pilgrimage”

There’s often a piper.

Bordering this western square,

are the Town Hall (on the left above) and the Hospital Real de Santiago de Compostela. This is now a posh Parador Hotel with an impressive entrance with bouncers an’ everyfink

but once it really was a hospital intended for pilgrims.  It’s a regrettable fact that around half of pilgrims never made it to Santiago, having died en route, or been killed, or any one of a number of causes. Having arrived in Santiago, a surprisingly large proprortion of them fell sick and many of them died, too – hence the need for the hospital. Originally pilgrims might sleep in the cathedral – women upstairs, men downstairs – but this became intolerable (I’ve heard it said that the huge incense burner was a defense against the smell!) and the hospital took over the brunt of this care.  Not all of them survived this care, so, conveniently next door to the Hospital is the Igrexa de San Frutuoso, which is where the bodies went – a funerary church.

Another interesting nugget from Joaquin was that pilgrims who had arrived safe and well often simply stayed in Santiago – I had assumed that they would just go back to where they came from, but this was apparently not the case. So there developed language-based communities of pilgrims across the the city, with French pigrims congregating in one part, Germans in another and so on.

One final piece of cathedraliana: the lightning conductors. There are three in the squares around the cathedral, and at street level they are lead into concrete posts.  In the Quintana square (remember that one?) after dark, the street lighting leads to an interesting illusion:

called the “Secret Pilgrim”. See?  It was worth paying attention, after all.

Other religious buildings that we noted included the Franciscan Church, just down from our hotel.

To the left in the picture above, you can see a remnant of the old city walls, with the church

therefore being outside the walls – no room for Franciscans in the city, it appears. On the other hand, just outside the cathedral and hence inside the city walls, is the Benedictine Monastery, Mosteiro de San Martiño Pinario.  This is so huge that it took me some time to realise that the front, by the cathedral

and the side, considerably nearer our hotel

were actually both parts of the same complex. The monks were once very rich and influential. so between 1835 and 1837, a series of decrees from Juan Álvarez Mendizábal was published, which confiscated, without compensation, monastic land estates. Well, if the dissolution of the monasteries was good enough for Henry VIII, it’s good enough for anyone, that’s clear.

Another subject that Joaquin covered was the pre-Roman history of Santiago, which means Celtic.  Something I hadn’t appreciated until walking the Camino was the extent of Celtic population and culture in Spain. Celtic presence may date back as far as the 6th century BC, until their influence was subsumed by the Roman Empire, starting from about the second century BC. There’s still evidence of Celtic culture in the presence of decorative materials (particularly jet) showing Celtic symbols

including a particular Celtic protective gesture to ward off evil.

Other things we saw included the market, Mercado de Abastos

the courtyard of the city library, which has a lovely cloisters

and features a statue of Alonso III de Fonseca, a Galician archbishop and politician and a major supporter of the university of Santiago de Compostela. He is depicted in a pose of deep thought

and not on his mobile phone, after all.

We wandered around other parts of the city, which is handsome

and quite busy in all the areas around the cathedral.  We even tried some shopping, as we wanted to buy for friends some of the so-called “Santiago Cake“, the almond cake with the St. James cross outlined on it, which is ubiquitous in these here parts. Seeking out an artisanal shop, we were spoiled for choice

but were allowed a taste test, which was nice of them.

This has only scratched the surface of our time in the city. For example, we had two Very Nice Lunches (a major factor in me not posting before now), at Asador Gonzaba where they served us 95% of a cow, and Casa Marcelo, where they served us what they chose; both very fine meals from very fine establishments. And we walked around for some 12km, almost none of which was on the straight and level – it’s quite the uppy and downy place.

As well as wandering the city, we had, as I mentioned earlier, a day trip to, inter alia, two important Camino destinations. It was an interesting trip and I’ll post about it in the next thrilling instalment. I bet you can’t wait, eh?