The past two days especially, we’ve seen some stunning churches. I showed photos of the romanesque church in Santillana del Mar yesterday. I’ll post some photos below of churches we passed today. It amazes me how low key people here are about these magnificent buildings. In the US they’d be major tourist attractions, I think. Henry and Moira, I always think of you when we see these.
The above is all by itself in a large field west of Oreña. It’s quite large. When we passed it in 2018 we heard beautiful music coming from it that lured us inside. This year it was closed. There were two other pilgrims there wanting to go inside. Here is our 2018 blog post about this church, with some more photos: https://wynchar.com/cnblog/2018/04/29/church-in-the-field/
We continued along the camino and not too much later came across this one.
And then not much further along:
And almost next door:
Hard to capture these in photos, especially the last two. They loom over the town of Cóbreses. Striking!
We love the churches, especially the one outside Oreña. From the outside it looks Romanesque and might well have been here when medieval pilgrimage was at its height. Looking at your 2018 photos it appears that the nave vaulting was redone at some point in Gothic.
That one outside Oreña is my favorite, too. It is so strange to see something like that in the middle of a large field of grass.
You certainly chose the right country to see churches. Do you stop to go inside to look around or just pass by as you walk? I find I like them best with good stained glass windows.
I especially like the little churches along the way but they are rarely open. When we were chatting with the Episcopal minister she was lamenting that the charade never open.
For good stained glass you need to go to the big churches in the bigger cities. Leon is very nice.
It’s interesting how in our travels through Argentina and Uruguay how unchurchy it’s been. There are the Spanish colonial iglesias, but they don’t stand out.
That is interesting. I would expect South Americans to be more religious. The modern Spanish people are not very religious but they sure must have been in the past. Although I think some of these churches were just to show off power and wealth.
More likely to get in God’s good graces for the afterlife. Muslim rulers and the rich did this too, providing drinking fountains, madrasas, mosques and other community assets.