Hi Everyboooody!
When we left Burgos we headed west again. Our first stop was
for lunch. Before we could eat we had to climb to the top of a very tall hill
to a big castle. The castle was very old and we even found lots of bones in the
ruins. There were workers trying to restore the outside walls. My Mom told us
that the castle dates back to the Roman period when this part of Spain was used
to grow wheat for the Romans. The Castle then was part of a people called the
Visigoths, then by the Moors (the Muslim people who had been living in Spain
for centuries, and then finally by Christian people. So, it has had many
owners. We climbed up and had a picnic in the main open area of the castle. You
could explore the inside, but it was not in good shape and a bit dangerous.
Following the road (the Camino) we went to a town called
Fromista. This town was also important to the Romans. The most important older
building here was a very small but nice church with very little decoration. The
cool thing about the church were the doors. The key holes were numbers. See the
picture.
That night we slept in a town with a population of 14! There
must have been many more sheep than people because we could hear them all night
long. The people were really nice and in the morning we had a great breakfast
and kept going.
Today, we went to Carrion de los Condes. This town had 7 churches and a monastery. We went to see
the monastery. They were fixing it, so we could see some of the way things were
built a long time ago. The cloister was really neat because the well in the
middle had a vine growing out of the water and it grew like a small roof over
the well.
On the way to Leon which is another big city on the road to
Santiago, we stopped to see some old Roman ruins. They were discovered about 40
years ago. The ruins were of a villa and Roman baths. The floors were made of
little tiles and rocks called mosaics because they make patterns and pictures.
We had lunch in the rain and kept going to Leon.
This morning we visited the 2 most important sites in the
city of Leon. The Cathedral which is really big and is built with light. This
means that it has many many windows. The builders figured out how to make the
walls strong enough to hold windows and the inside is full of color and stained
glass that tells stories from the Bible, shows the crests of the rich families
who built the Cathedral. The light makes you want to look up all the time.
We are all very tired and will take a rest this afternoon
before going into the mountains tomorrow.
I hope everyone is OK. Vaalik
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