Vic spent the day yesterday resting her blistered feet and started today in a Tylenol/codeine fog. It lasted most of the 16 km, or until noon anyway. The only coffee stop was a km off track, considered to be too far, so it was a forced march to the hotel. She is among the walking wounded.
Nájera is another small medieval town, this one nestled between a cliff embankment and a river. It has quite a large industrial area that we walked through interminably. There are two churches behind the hotel; one locked, and the other of significant enough historical/religious importance to be behind a 4 euro wall. Its story is rather confusing, but you can look it up.
There were few ups and downs today – it was mostly level gravel farm road through vineyards. The vines are small, but heavily loaded with large bunches of very small blue grapes. They are quite tasty, but full of seeds and of course, they are off limits for sampling. They are apparently not wine ripe yet.
As I walked along today I got to thinking. I remember reading once that most of the gold that the Spanish explorers brought back from the New World rather quickly made its way into the hands of the Church, by donation, taxes, or tythe, where it remained, effectively removing it from the economy. I always thought that meant that it ended up in the basement of the Vatican. However, after seeing all of these Spanish retablos I got to wondering if that Aztec gold ended up being thinly spread over the front of the altars of these many churches. The timing would be about right.
So, doing some mental calculations: if a retablo is 30 meters by 30 meters, that is roughly a thousand square meters of frontal area. However gold leaf is put around every curve of every grape of every bunch on every column, so there must be 5 or 10 times as much actual surface area. Say 10 thousand square meters. Now gold leaf is about a tenth of a micron thick (about 4 millionths of an inch), so, resorting to scientific notation for calculations, that is a volume of about one one-thousandth of a cubic meter, or one litre of gold. Gold has a density of about 20, so that is about 20 kilos of gold per retablo. That is about 600 ounces at $C1500/oz these days – say a round million dollars. A pretty pile of gold for each of (say) a hundred churches, but nothing compare to what the conquistadors brought back. No wonder that one church used gold paint for restoration. So we are still looking at the Vatican basement for the rest…… Things that keep an engineer sane while walking. Somebody should check those figures too, in case I stubbed my toe in the calculations.
We had fish for dinner tonight. And it came without chips. First meal I’ve had without chips, and it was fish! I’ll never figure out the Spanish food.
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