The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

principal façade, and a wonderful window called la cacería (the fifth of the high windows on the north of the central nave). It is a mediaeval hotchpotch representing castles, knights hunting in the woods, falconers, fair ladies, symbols of Trivium and Quadrivium, the obligatory subjects of the mediaeval schools, such as Grammar, Rhetoric, Poetry and Dialectic. According to tradition, that lovely window belonged to the royal palace of King Ferdinand III, the Saint, which was destroyed in the fifteenth century, and thus its subjects are more apt for a palace than a cathedral. * The fifteenth century is represented by many famous artists, such as Master Johan Burgalés, Masters Lope and Valdovin, and the famous painter Nicolás Francés. In the sixteenth century the great master was Rodrigo de Herreras, whose masterpiece crowns the central chapel in the apse.
    Many fascinating examples of thirteenth to sixteenth century sculpture and mural painting are to be seen in the cloisters by Juan de Badajoz, Nicolás Francés and others. The carved capitals on the columns give fascinating scenes from the life of the people; tavern scenes of brawling drinkers, wandering musicians, struggles between Moors and Christians, men and women picking grapes, killing pigs for Martinmas, mingled with scenes of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, the Last Judgment and a charming illustration of the story told by Alfonso el Sabio of the monk in a garden who listened to a bird singing for a hundred years.
    When I returned to the central nave after a long visit to the library and the sacristy, the deeper glow of the setting sun had woven more elaborate harmonies of light and shadow, and before leaving I paid as a Jacobean my respects to the shrine of ‘Our Lady of the High-road’ behind the sumptuous thirteenth-century tomb of King Ordoño IL This chapel has beautiful stained glass windows of the sixteenth century, and at this magic hour their amber, red and blue panes are cut by the slanting sunbeams into rubies, topazes and sapphires as they dance on the sculptured figures beneath.
    No wonder the artificers inscribed upon the stone near Nuestra Señora la Blanca the proud epigram:

    Sint licet Hispanis ditissima pulchraque templa,
    Hoc tamen egregiis omnibus arte prius.

    León, like Burgos, was exceptionally well provided with hospitals and hostels for pilgrims. The canons of St. Isidore instituted a hostel for the poor, which in 1597 they entrusted to the care of the Franciscans, and later to the Crown, and they had another hospital near the riverside which received pilgrims on their arrival. The most celebrated hospital was that of San Marcos, which was built near the bridge of that name in 1171. The ancient hospital is of simple, austere architecture and in complete contrast to the magnificent Renaissance Baroque monastery which has nothing directly to do with pilgrims, though Manier in his account makes no distinction between the two institutions, and says that the whole edifice was ‘comme une maison royale pour recevoir les pèlerins qui vont à St. Jacques’. He also says that the pilgrims on their way to Compostella were housed and fed in San Marcos, but on their return they were sent to a hostel in the city called Hospital de San Antonio. León in the heyday of the pilgrimage was one of the great rallying places, for, in addition to the numbers of pilgrims who came by the main Jacobean Road, there were all those who came from the south of Spain and arrived at León by the Valla-dolid-Mayorga road, and there were those who after making the pilgrimage to Compostella by the coast road by Irún, San Sebastian, Bilbao, Santillana del Mar, and Oviedo, returned by León.
    Even today Leon becomes, in the month of July, a city of pilgrims, and on the four occasions on which I have made the pilgrimage I have always met many pilgrims there, especially in the Holy Years. At night in its picturesque old plazas and narrow streets Leon possesses a subtle, evocative poetry of its own that speaks of the past centuries.
    Here one moonlit night I met my student-pilgrim friend and a group of companions. After roaming through the narrow calle de Don Gutierre with its sinister nooks and corners that evoke the tragic days of Alfonso XI, and the crazy, twisting calle de Azabacheria, which perpetuates the memory of the artisans in the Middle Ages who fashioned for Jacobean pilgrims their jet keepsakes, we gathered in the plaza and while I