Old Hands, part 10

The day I returned to Madrid was a holiday, and we had planned to go to Burgos with the Gronningsaters. I had told Mike by phone from Chicago that I still wanted to do that. “Are you sure?” he asked. “It would be no problem to cancel.”

“No, I really want to go,” I said. “It will keep my mind off my troubles.” So he and the kids picked me up at the airport, and we headed north right away. I was tired, of course, and I slept in the car for an hour or so.

The Gronningsaters went in their own car, with their daughters Sarah and Anna and a visitor, Matty Shepard, who had been Julie’s and Anna’s schoolmate in fifth grade and had returned to the U.S. the previous summer. When we met them in the cathedral town, Julie was delighted to see her old friend.

“I’m so sorry about your dad,” Amy said. “Are you sure you’re okay for this?”

“I am, thanks,” I said. “I really wanted to come, and I think this will be good for me.”

Our first stop was the cathedral, but there wasn’t too much for us to see there, as it was being restored. En obras, the sign said—under construction. That sign was familiar to us from many, many tourist sites in the country—everything needed work, and we could at least be happy that the work was being done. But for the Burgos cathedral at that moment En obras meant that the exterior was covered with scaffolds and most of the interior was covered with netting.

It was damp and cold outside, but we decided to walk across the old town anyway, to see the Monasterio de Las Huelgas Reales. This convent had been founded around 1200, and according to the guidebook it had been renovated in 1988, but there were cement mixers and piles of construction materials all around it anyway.

My Fodor’s guide had hardly ever let me down, but its description of the convent turned out to be an understatement. “The convent was conceived in the Romanesque style and housed a royal mausoleum; the tombs of its founders are still there,” it read. This in no way prepared me for what we actually found there—an ancient and beautiful collection of tombs of medieval Spanish monarchs. I thought about the much more famous mausoleum at El Escorial, housing the remains of Spanish kings and queens of the last four centuries, shiny with marble and gold—what a contrast with this more modest, yet more moving place. Each tomb was individual, some with sculptured marble decorations, and the dates on them shook me—the 12th century, the 11th century, and older.

“All but one of the royal coffins kept at Las Huelgas were desecrated by Napoleon’s soldiers,” the guidebook continued, “but this last contained clothes that form the basis of the medieval textile museum housed in part of the convent complex.” And the textile museum was equally stunning, with beautifully lit robes and ecclesiastical garments displayed in climate-controlled cases. The experience of seeing those tombs and those textiles brought me immediately back through the centuries. In Burgos I experienced the medieval period more dramatically than I ever had.