Fiesta Rest Day

After nine solid days of walking a straight line (or so it appears) through wheat fields, we entered the city of Leon. It was beyond a bit of a jolt to enter a city after days of quiet solitude, as it was the festival week of Leon's patron Saint, San Froilan. Bunting hung across all the streets which were jammed packed, with food stalls of paella, black pudding and buckets of sangria.

As a result the city was a wave of medieval markets, music parading down the streets, jousting matches and noisy revelry. On our rest day we had a hotel room picnic of local sausages, cheese and bread, along with a bottle of red wine given to us by grateful Korean pilgrims for whom Martin had shown great service over a few hours (lost baggage and no Spanish), when a rowdy band of brass and percussion players with the usual tag of beer soaked supporters in tow moved under our window. They stopped by a bar of people eating paella, already a colourful and loud crowd, and made it a full on party, while we 'joined' them in our room with the windows wide open.

San Froilan himself was born around 832 AD and became a devout hermit from a young age. A local boy, he became bishop and every October celebrates him in a wild party of markets and medieval mayhem. We saw his relics in a grand carved silver chest in the cathedral. On the very day we entered Leon, there had been the annual processional to the brutalist modern church of St. Froilan a few kilometres away, which replaced a 16th century church on the same site.

the apostles as designed in 1961

Saint James is depicted with his hand showing the
way of the Camino, just down the street

I had thought that Leon had derived its name from the word "lion," a rampant form of which is the city's emblem, but actually the name of the city comes from the word "legion" (le/gi/on), as it was the seat of the Roman 7th legion from its founding in the year 70AD. It soon became the Roman northern capital of Spain, and the local indigenous peoples were all but wiped out. Those that weren't killed off by the Romans were finished off by the Visigoths in 585. In 712 it was the Muslims that took over the city, until 846 when the Christians took it over and kept it.

This week there is a medaeval market (mostly selling modern jewellery and bath products), jousting tournaments, and a lot of drinking. Loud parades of brass bands with groupies holding two beers each move slowly through the town, stopping in front of bars, and then slowly moving on. One of these moved directly below our window/terrace and we at our room picnic with the windows full open, reveling in the noise and chaos below while we ate sausage and cheese and bread and wine two storeys above.

We ended up having a rather social time of it, spending one evening with three peregrino friends over a dinner comprising 5 bottles of wine and a few olives, and our rest day evening with four other peregrinos over dinner and laughs, as we prepared to move on the next day and part ways after more than a week of travelling together.