Frómista – October 13, 2016

I know that Ivy has nothing to do with Frómista but you did want to see these, didn’t you?

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When we first looked outside before dawn this morning it was teeming with rain and the Camino beneath our window was flowing with water.  We made a quick executive decision to not walk and to find alternate transport.  The 28 km was going to be too much anyway, and in the rain – way too, too much.  We are too old to slip and fall on a slippery rock.  The weather fined up over the day though, and it never did rain again.

The internet said there was a bus going our direction, but only at 6 PM, so we got the breakfast cook to arrange a taxi for 10 AM.  We did see a few hearty pilgrims plod past, but not many.  We assumed God would not deduct too heavily from our Purgatory reduction for the distance we have not walked.

There are things we did miss by taking a taxi.  There is the initial long walk up and over a high ridge that we definitely missed.  There is a thick vein of mica on the way up that was mined by the Romans, although I have no idea why the Romans would need a supply of a good electrical insulator.

We missed the town of Boadilla del Camino which I’m sure has a lovely church with a baroque gilded retablo.  It is also apparently surrounded by unique dovecotes.  The doves serve three purposes: they eat insects, they fertilize the fields with droppings, and they themselves are good to eat.  Images on the internet show they are relatively large buildings with multi-tiered roofs.  No sense you missing out just because we didn’t go there.

The Camino then apparently follows a canal that was begun in the 1750s as a major irrigation and transport project.  It never succeeded as transport because of the introduction of railways, just as happened elsewhere in the world, but has provided water and water power even up to today.  The locks at Frómista are just a trickle because the water is used for electrical generation.

Frómista itself, where we arrived fresh from the taxi ride at 11 AM, looks different than the previous towns.  It is much more open and appears newer.  A book says there is no local rock, and cut stone for the church had to be brought in at great expense.  It seems most of the building construction is brick, and I think that implies that the medieval adobe construction just didn’t last, and what we see is much newer.  It also has allowed the streets to become a modern width.

There are three major churches, all more Romanesque than others previously.  Iglesia de San Martin dates from 1066, and is built in the style of the Jaca Cathedral – whatever that style is, it is said to be the purest example extant.  In particular it has a large number (400+) of carved capitals and corbels.  They are in remarkable condition, so I think they are a result of a c. 1900 complete restoration.  It is very spare, with virtually no interior decoration (other than the capitals).  There is a very good 16^th century Santiago statue, and they appear to have a mini swinging censer, a la the cathedral in Santiago.

The great pulse of some 300 nose-to-tail pilgrims that left St Jean that morning some three weeks ago and arrived as a group at Roncesvalles that night is now spread out evenly over the 25 or 30 km of each stage of the Camino. They are also probably much reduced in number.  Many had prearranged a shortened walk and gone home (e.g., the Irish contingent), and many have dropped out because of health reasons (the buzzards circling over the Pyrenees come to mind).  As we walk, looking ahead or back a kilometre we can only see a half a dozen or so pilgrims.  Fewer people pass us, or we them.  We now all go at much the same rate.  The colourful cast of characters has been reduced – we no longer see the people with kids, or the Aussie in bare feet, or the back slapping young lads at the bars.  What remains are a more sober group of plodders.  We have a different set of friends we chat with every day: the elderly Brazilian fellow with the bad Achilles tendon; the rather devout retired Korean, Kim; the Canadian teacher and his South American wife.  We will miss them when we (or they) take a rest day and a different group forms.