We explore the province of Navarra: mountains, churches

Two weeks ago, the government lifted some quarantine restrictions in some areas of Spain where there have been fewer cases of covid-19. Since then we have been exploring Navarra.

On Friday, we drove about a half-hour northwest of Pamplona to the Sierra de Aralar, which has lots of mountain hiking trails. I can hear Cindy on a video call with her siblings right now, and she is describing it as "awful". It was sunny, 85 degrees, uphill. What's not to like? Seriously. I enjoyed it.

We were lost, however. The maps of the various trails were very confusing (here's the map of the trails leading from the village of Iribas, where we started), and we weren't sure exactly where we were except that we were somewhere on a mountain. At one point, as we tried to figure out where we were, we stopped to rest, and some cows came down the trail from the direction we were headed.

We were a little bit scared. The cows entered the clearing where we were resting and blocked the trail in both directions. And they were so close, they looked enormous, even though they were very docile. We don't know from cows.

A Basque house in Iruntzu, starting point for many hikers.

Today, Saturday, we decided to take advantage of the cloudy, cool weather to hike up to the top of the mountain El Perdón (Forgiveness). It's about seven or eight miles or so from our house to the top of Perdón, but we decided we would just do the top part, from the village of Zariquiegui (a Basque name, pronounced zar-ee-key-AY-gy). We drove there and parked the car we rented.

We were in no hurry, so we spent a lot of time admiring the tiny wildflowers that were all along the path.

This purple wildflower (viper's bugloss, Echium vulgare) looks even more fascinating the closer to it that you get.

Asters and allies, according to my iNaturalist app.

Get close to those little flowers.

Cindy on the Camino.

The path from Zariquiegui up to Perdón is one that we have walked with Mary, Tom and Nancy, Lainie and Joe and Danny (Jimmy was nursing an injury), Timmy and Mady. . . . so we're waiting for Betsy and Tom, Mike and Mourine, Danny, and Rich and Janet.

The path, by the way, is part of the Camino of Santiago, a pilgrimage route that is more than 1,000 years old. The route leades to the city of Santiago de Compostela in the northwest of Spain.

The Camino passes right through Pamplona. In fact, it passes right through the campus of the University of Navarra, where I teach. So I have often see pilgrims as I walk to work at around 7:30 in the morning. What's the attraction? The legend is that some of the mortal remains of St. James (Santiago), one of the 12 Apostles lie in the church.

All along the pilgrimage route through the north of Spain, there are great cathdrals built, in part, with the contributions of pilgrims. We have visited some of them. Burgos has a wonderful cathedral. We also visited one in Arcos a few weeks ago.

The yellow line marks the Camino route that passes through Pamplona. The route is about 500 miles from the French border, and many people take around 30 days to walk it. Much of it is quite hilly.

Flat steel sculptures of pilgrims from the Middle Ages on the peak of Perdón. More wind-power generators are on the ridge in the distance.

Last week we visited one of the churches northeast of Pamplona that is also on the Camino. In Los Arcos. It is modest outside, magnificent inside. We happened to walk in as someone was practicing on the organ, which dates from the 18th century.

But I digress.

The grain in Spain

It was extremely windy today on the top of Perdón, and the wind generators were whump-whump-whumping. The ones in this photo are around 150 feet high to the point of the rotor. Some of the blades are manufactured here in Pamplona.

That's Cindy at the bottom, to give you a sense of scale.

You may recall that Don Quixote, that famous latter-day knight created by Cervantes, mounted his trusty steed, Rocinante, to attack what his deluded mind saw as ferocious giants. In reality, they were windmills. The point being that even in 1600, when Cervantes was writing his comic epic, wind power had been harnessed for processing the grain in Spain.

The view from up there is fantastic: dozens of little villages, a patchwork of farm fields, and off in the distance, the foothills of the Pyrenees. But our smartphone photos flatten everything out. That's the tradeoff for not using a more sophisticated camera.