Travels with my Donkey

Shinto, just before a train — sorry, the train — clattered deafeningly past and sent him careering madly over a bridge and through two red lights.
    The refugio wasn't just next to a church, but actually in it, upstairs, below the mighty beams: it was in one of its cubicled, nautical-style bunks that my friend Nicky had enjoyed her very nearly mystical experience, lying there after lights-out with haunting yet heavenly choral ululations seeping up through the floorboards.
    Behind the desk was a jolly young hospitalera. I explained the situation with Shinto; she smiled and made a phone call. 'Bombero,' she announced after putting down the receiver. As a stand-alone statement this sounded fearfully alarming, and the ensuing wait allowed ample time to colour in the image of Shinto meeting his end in a controlled explosion.
    After ten minutes a bristled, silver-haired man in a stained yellow shirt sauntered merrily in, and at the hospitalera 's behest I followed him back out. There in the street was a fire engine. It was a surprise to see him clamber up to the door with 'BOMBEROS' painted in fading white on sun-bleached red; he certainly didn't look like a fireman, and during the introductory process I'd been made unavoidably aware that he was slightly drunk, with the suggestion of having recently been prodigiously so. With a discoloured grin he beckoned down from the cab, and after untying Shinto there we were, following a drunk fireman through the streets of Sahagún, back over the railway, over to the right and... and up through the back entrance of a building we'd passed on our way in. A round building with no roof. My donkey would, fantastically, be spending a night in the Plaza de Toros.
    The bullring's shambolic interior complemented the decrepitude suggested by its scabbed outer walls. Grass and dandelions had pushed through the sand of the ring proper, and it was evidently some months since a pair of Sahagúnese buttocks had burdened the amphitheatrical terraces. A ramshackle VIP pavilion looked across the weeds: I tried to imagine it sheltering the mayor's over-rouged wife, clapping her plump hands at some preening matador, but instead saw a bored Falangist major with his boots up on the rusty barrier rail, overseeing the execution of political prisoners.
    This was a donkey photo op I couldn't possibly pass up, but no sooner was one hoof on the sand than Shinto lost it, bucking about crazily and doing the whole Mr Ed thing at the sky, at the royal box, at me. 'Fantasma, fantasma!' chortled the drunk fireman, and once I'd brought Shinto under control we followed him into an area once given over to bull pens but now a sort of open-air municipal warehouse. Corroded street furniture nosed through the succulent weeds, and the drunk fireman splashed an oily hand through a bath full of lichened rainwater: 'Agua por burro,' he said, before brazenly folding back
    Shinto's top lip and appraising his teeth with a gypsy's cocksure showmanship. His verdict: 'Harnrgggh!'
    Enclosed by walls, Shinto could at last enjoy a night of untethered browsing: he was happy, and once the big gate slammed shut so was I. The drunk fireman vaulted theatrically up into his tender, and giving him a wide berth I set off in search of Sahagún's nice bits.
    I knew I'd find them, because though the town's quiet streets now exude an air of bypassed provinciality, Sahagún was a big noise back in the Middle Ages. Surrounded by wheat and rivers, and linked to the world by the camino, it prospered after the Moor-ousting Christian reconquista, both as an agro-commercial hub and a stronghold of the Catholic fundamentalism that underpinned it all. A charter of 1085 listed residents born in England and Germany as well as every corner of France. There were nine churches; a university was established in 1348. Its Benedictine abbey was the most powerful in Spain, controlling ninety monasteries across the land, and Sahagún's monks became pioneering New World missionaries. One, Fray Pedro Ponce de León, devised the first sign language for the deaf; his brother Juan discovered Florida.
    No other sizeable town along the camino demonstrates quite so dramatically how abruptly the liquid assets dried up when the pilgrim tap was shut off in the seventeenth century. The Lord gaveth, then tooketh away. I ambled down a pleasant but studiously unremarkable commercial thoroughfare, past windows half-full of bad shoes and electronic appliances from the predigital