Today was a happy day and a sad day. Also a typical tourist day.

Sad because we said goodbye to a few of our camino friends. Tom and Eileen from USA are not having rest days so they carried on and will be one day ahead of us to Leon then two days ahead. Tom and Margaret from Ireland finish today and go home. Kevin, Stuart, Rose, Lynn and Eileen from northern England also finish today and got the bus to Balboa. These guys have been such good fun and we had many laughs together.

We met Victoria and Craig in the street which was great because we hadn’t seen them for a couple of days and wondered how they were getting on. Just on lunchtime we saw Carolyn and John and we decided to have some lunch together. In the cafe was Helen, who we have seen and walked with often, so it was a nice catch up. Ensalada mixta, which are large yummy salads with lettuce, tomato, olives, carrot, tuna, egg, onion, corn, asparagus.

This morning we spent 2 hours in the Museo de la Evolucion Humana, a wonderful new award winning museum. The museum has two parts starting with the history of the prehistoric caves at Sierra de Atapuerca, which we walked through yesterday, and contains over 200 fossils of Homo antecessor some up to a million years old. The remainder of the museum is devoted to the theory of evolution, human evolution, why we have a very special brain, the first tools, fire, Pleistocene hunter-gatherers, prehistoric art, symbolism and the complexity of the human mind. In the museum we met a couple from Wellington!  We didn’t recognise them as kiwis as their accents sounded so posh.

After the museum we went to the Catedral de Santa Maria. One of the most beautiful of Spain’s many cathedrals and the second largest. It is basically 13th century gothic but as it was enlarged, reshaped, and adorned over the next 500 years, it also has Plateresque, Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo art. It has a magnificent inspirational exterior with a profusion of highly decorated pinnacles and spires. Inside, the enormous space is a treasure trove of artefacts and art works. We each had an audio commentary and there was so much history and detail it became overwhelming and we had to escape and get some lunch.

In the evening we went up to the castle which is not that impressive and wasn’t open but from the hill there is a great view over the city. Also saw the statue of the warrior El Cid on his steed Babieca. Spain’s most famous medieval warlord has a cape that floats in the wind so the locals have a nickname for the monument: el murcielago (the bat). For my generation El Cid will always be Charlton Heston (with the incomparable Spohia Loren) in the 1961 epic historical movie.

Burgos (population ~ 200,000) is the capital of the province of Burgos and the historic capital of Castille. It contains a staggering wealth of art, churches, monasteries, convents, museums, monuments and it’s jewel the cathedral.

We enjoyed today, it was nice to be an ordinary tourist. We are about one third of the way to Santiago and walked the last nine days in a row so we probably needed a day off just to freshen up for the nine days ahead. Can’t wait to get on the road again.