Day 16

We arrived in Leon this morning having spent a rather weird night in Sahagun. The town itself is extremely interesting, an old eclesiastical centre that has fallen on hard times and is now a necropolis of tumbling monastaries and convents. We visited one church in particular, named San Lorenzo, where they had a display showing the procession they hold every Easter week through the town.

(From here)

The local men dress up in black and purple robes and carry enormous wodden statues showing scenes from the life of Christ through the streets. They pride themselves on how life-like the statues are, ensuring that they are made to perfect scale.

(From here)

(From here)

Here are a couple of pictures of past parades.

(From here)

In the above photo note the crazed expressions on the statues in the background. That seemed to be par for the course; part KKK rally, part zombie freak show.

Unfortunately we arrived too late in the weirdo season for this year´s parade but the promo poster for 2009 looks great!

From here

Just to add to the atmosphere we spent the night at the Santa Cruz convent of the Benedictine nuns. The convent itself is in a beautiful 17th century building next to the crumbling San Tirso church.

(From here)

In order to stay at convents and monasteries along the route you must be walking or cycling to Santiago and you must be in possession of a document called a credencial. Thus you usually share accomodation with like minded people; religous zelets, rosy cheeked backpackers etcetera etcetera. So you can imagine our surprise when we returned to the convent from a trip to the store to find the dodgiest, meanest, scariest looking druggie you have ever seen greet us at the door.

Druggie: Welcome pilgrims!

Us: Gulp.

(File photo)

(From here)

As welcoming and hospitable as the nuns are, they aren´t getting any younger. In fact, the median age for the convent was 82 (including Anna and I). Thus one of them had granted admittance to this savory character who could not produce a credential, nor passport, nor ID of any form and as it turned out, couldn´t tell us where he had stayed the previous night or indeed where he was going. The only sense that we could make from his ramblings was that the church is evil and the Knights Templar protected a great secret. At first we thought he may have been a latter day prophet but then we realised he was just recounting the plot of The DaVinci Code.

Needless to say we all had a pleasant nights sleep, holding our valuables under our pillows and keeping one eye on the nutjob.

I´ll keep an eye on the Interpol webiste for the next couple of weeks.

Hasta luego.