Burgos

I got off the bus at Burgos in a wind that felt like it had come straight from Siberia, even in what was supposedly spring, and understood immediately why every Castilian I’d met so far talked about this plateau with a kind of grim pride. Nueve meses de invierno y tres de infierno, they say — nine months of winter and three of hell. I’d landed in month nine.

A Cathedral That Refuses to Be Small

Nothing prepares you for the scale of Burgos Cathedral once you’re standing under it in the Plaza del Rey San Fernando. It was begun in 1221, modeled on the French Gothic cathedrals at Reims and Bourges, and it never really stopped growing — chapels and spires kept accumulating for three centuries until UNESCO declared the whole thing a World Heritage Site on its own, the only Spanish cathedral with that singular honor. I spent an embarrassing amount of time just looking up at the openwork spires of the west façade, added by a German architect named Hans of Cologne in the fifteenth century, all that stone somehow made to look like lace.

Inside, under the crossing, is where El Cid is buried — or at least where his bones ended up after centuries of being moved around Castile like a relic nobody could quite let go of. Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, the medieval warlord who became Spain’s great national myth through the epic poem that bears his name, was born near here, and Burgos has never stopped claiming him. There’s a bronze statue of him on his horse Babieca down by the river, sword raised, looking considerably more heroic than the messy, mercenary reality of an eleventh-century nobleman exiled twice by his own king. I liked him better for the mess, honestly. Myths are more interesting once you know they’re lying a little.

The Way of Saint James, Passing Through

Burgos sits on the Camino de Santiago’s Camino Francés route, and you feel it the moment you walk the Arco de Santa María, the fortified gate that was once part of the medieval city walls. Pilgrims with sunburned necks and walking poles move through the old town in a steady trickle, stopping to eat menú del día lunches — three courses, a full bottle of wine included, for a price that still seems designed for people walking eight hundred kilometers on a budget. I sat at one of those tables on Calle Sombrerería with a plate of morcilla de Burgos, the local blood sausage made with rice instead of the usual onions, and thought that Castile’s cuisine, unlike its cathedral, does not try to impress you. It just feeds you, honestly and without flourish, the way this whole region seems to operate.

In the evening I walked the Paseo del Espolón along the Arlanzón river, a promenade of plane trees that the whole city seemed to be using for the same slow, unhurried ritual — the paseo, walking simply to be seen walking, to talk, to let the day close properly. Across the water, the cathedral’s spires caught the last orange light and held it longer than anything else in the city, like they’d been built for exactly that purpose.

When to go: Late May through September avoids the harshest cold of the meseta, though Burgos rarely gets truly hot; September especially brings clear skies and a thinner crowd of pilgrims than the peak summer months.