Total luck that we would be in León for Castilla y León Day, the anniversary of the Battle of Villalar, in which Castilian rebels called Comuneros were dealt a crushing defeat by the royalist forces of King Charles I in the Revolt of the Comuneros on April 23, 1521. It coincides with Saint George’s Day and this whole area celebrates with a day off, parades and feasting.
We ran into the couple from Tasmania the other night, the ones we met three weeks ago at the Spain/French border. They’re doing this portion (Burgos to Leon) of the Camino on bikes. It looks like cheating to us but we didn’t say as much. And we saw a few familiar pilgrams, fellow Camino travelers, here in León. This is a perfectly livable city. It is 75 degrees today and we just had the best salad of our lives. Of course it was augmented with Jamón Ibérico, atún, walnuts, raisins, white asparagus, anchovies and drenched in olive oil.
There is a Gaudí building here, something he built for a fabric merchant and there’s a church on every block in the city center where the Roman walls surround us. We had coffee in a café called “Converso” where the sugar packets had a quote from Juan Manuel Serrat that read:
“De vez en cuando la vida
Toma conmigo café
Y es tan bonita que da gusto verla …”
translation?
Once in a while life has coffee with me
And it’s so beautiful, so pleasurable to see it.
A perfect poem; wish we were having that coffee with you