Travels with my Donkey

tourists waiting for its towering doors to open.
    I wasn't about to join the queue, but the cathedral's exterior featured all I desired in such an edifice: a huge rose window and flying buttresses. For no good reason that I can think of, flying buttresses have ended up lodged in the sieve-mesh of my mind, along with other random reminders that I once went to school. An ox-bow lake, the vas deferens and Venn diagrams: it's an elite club, and a sighting of any member in print or in life always raises an inner cheer.
    A Pacman route through more tight alleys, a few more high-profile road crossings and finally across the manicured plaza gardens — sorry about those petunias — to the frankly astounding Parador San Marcos, a great block of gilded history crowned by a proudly regal St Jim. Here was the longest Renaissance façade in Spain, and certainly the most richly embellished, and tonight, a small part of it was to be León's Moore-ish quarter.
    I walked Shinto up to the soaring arched entrance; linen-suited men and their copper-faced, lavishly coiffed consorts strolled ostentatiously out, memorably contorting their nonchalant features when presented by a donkey who'd apparently just run through a dirty campsite covered in glue.
    With my animal attached to the nearest available item of street furniture I jogged into the echoingly vast reception hall and up to the desk. The bald incumbent didn't blink at my rather disappointing presentation — it's by no means unusual for pilgrims to spend a night or two here to reacquaint themselves with civilisation — but his rear-facing assistant's shoulders shook with some violence when I mentioned my travelling companion. But when you're paying — oh, filthy nude goblins — that for a room, and that for the one next door, you don't expect too many questions. Salvador Dalí once took a sheep up to his room in a grand Parisian hotel. And shot it.
    Sure enough, when I went back out the bellboys and porters were fighting over Shinto, each of them loudly eager to assume responsibility for valet-parking him round the side. Watching the most senior blue-jacket lead my donkey off along the longest Renaissance façade in Spain and through an arch at its distant conclusion, I understood that despite the umpteen trials of that day and every other, the way of the ass was the right way, the true way, perhaps the only way. Though obviously this was before I'd followed the pair of them into the car park and found the poor, wet-faced porter distantly pursuing Shinto in and out of the Mercs and Audis.
     
    León was the most Roman town on the route, a military stronghold whose name itself is a contraction of 'legion'. For 350 years the city was the capital of this entire quarter of Iberia, and after the last centurion popped his sandals the Dark Ages hardly had a chance to get going. Despite regularly changing hands in the usual manner it remained a city of prosperity and vigour: whilst London remained a benighted outpost of Wessex whose grunting citizenry cowered from Viking raiders in wooden hovels, tenth-century León was a thriving metropolis, the capital of Christian Spain, its grand market squares thronged with international wool dealers and flanked by monasteries and palaces. Its Jewish population was one of the largest in Spain — we have a resident of León to thank for kabbalah, the mystical offshoot of Judaism now so popular with many of our most dreadful celebrities. Madonna based her silly children's book on its central tenets, which I'm afraid means I never want to know what they are.
    León got knocked down — all of it — but it got up again. There was so much money in early thirteenth-century León, from both trade tariffs and protection money extorted from the now cowed Moors, that the cathedral still standing was built in less than a century — a blur by the standards of large-scale medieval construction. It was drunk cycling Rob who'd revealed León cathedral as a 2/3 scale model of the one in Reims, which seemed a splendid encapsulation of what the pilgrimage achieved. It was a theme, like so many others, upon which Rob had expanded: as a museum designer with an enhanced appreciation of ecclesiastical architecture he'd described how in any Gothic church along the camino he'd find a ceiling boss or some other modest decorative feature that precisely replicated one in a slightly newer structure back in Britain. In florid terms he imagined the scene, a pilgrim from