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| The walls of Avila |
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| Hotel Cancelas street |
On the afternoon of
November 8, we left Bayonne, France by train for Spain. It is still true that one has to change
trains at the Spanish border; in this case in the town of Irun. Apparently the track gauge in Spain is different
from that in the rest of Europe. We were
going to the town of Avila in north central Spain on a “Medium Distance” train,
which meant that it stopped at a town about every half hour. We went through the mountains while it was
still light; forest-covered and craggy mountains and tunnels. All of the mountains that we could see were
not so high as to get above the tree line.
We arrived at Avila about 10 p.m. to the lovely hotel of Las Cancelas,
which is right around the corner from the Cathedral in the old walled section
of town. And by corner I mean a narrow
passage way between high stone walls that looked like the taxi cab would not be
able to squeeze around. We stayed in
this hotel in 2003 when we visited Avila while Agnes was a student in
Salamanca. Even though we had been to
Avila before, we were excited to return.
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| Avila view of plain |
Avila is a wonderful
medieval city with an intact wall built in the 12th century
surrounding the old town. Of course the
modern city is about 4 to 5 times the size of the old one, but from the heights
of the wall you can still see the entire city and the surrounding plain and
encircling hills. Like most European
cities, it does not straggle out in suburbs with increasingly large homes and
gardens, but has a pretty clear demarcation between town and farm land. It is most well known as the home of Saint
Teresa of Avila and Saint John of the Cross in the 16th
century. Lest one get captivated by the sanctity,
let us
remember that it was also the home, at least on occasion, of Torquemada,
Grand Inquisitor, and that heretic burning occurred in the square outside of
the walls near our hotel. Apparently
Saint Teresa approved.
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| Cathedral fortress |
We went to many churches,
monasteries and convents. Many, but not
all, have a connection with these saints.
Most are more Romanesque than Gothic, by which I mostly mean that the
buildings seem heavy and thick-walled and very dark. Even the ones where the Gothic arch is used
and the nave can be much taller still are dark.
They do not have large stained glass windows letting in floods of
colored light. They have little tiny
windows (which might have stained glass) high up. They feel like fortresses. In fact the Cathedral is built into the city
wall and was part of the defensive fortifications. It feels like a Church which kept up the
Inquisition for a long time.
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| Cathedral door |
Many of the churches are
beautiful in their own way. The stone
carving around the outside doors is quite fascinating. Some of the interior carvings on the altars
and sepulchers are intricate and very three dimensional even in
bas-relief. Many of the altars are
gilded, but they do not shine out the way the Viennese ones did because of the
low light. Among the places we went to
was the Royal Monastery of Saint Tomas Aquinas.
This was built by their royal highnesses Ferdinand and Isabella. It has 3 cloisters, including one for the royal
court, which would come to Avila in the summers. It contains the sepulcher of their son Juan
who died of smallpox at the age of 19.
He had been
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| Cloister of Saint Thomas Monastery |
married for one year to the daughter of Emperor Maximilian
of Austria. Saint Teresa had her own
personal confessional built into the wall of one of the cloisters and opening
into the side chapel where she had so many ecstatic visions. Part of the royal cloister is now called a
Museum of Oriental art; 3 – 4 rooms with mostly Chinese art which the Dominican
monks brought back from their mission work – nice small pieces, much of it
Buddhist, Taoist or Confucian.
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| Sepulcher of Prince Juan |
We also went to the
Convent of Santa Teresa, which was built on the site of the house where she was
born. There is a little chapel to the
side of the main altar that is where the room used to be that she was born
in. Next to it is a small walled garden
where she used to read as a child. Below
the convent is a museum devoted to the Saint.
Finally we went to the Monastery of the Incarnation, which is where Saint
Teresa lived for 30 years. There are 3
rooms open to the public. 
Two of them
are recreations of what the convent has been like over the last 400 years, and
the final one full of relics from Teresa’s life and a few from Saint John of
the Cross. There is a half-life size
statue of Saint Joseph, whom she considered a personal father figure, whom she
used to put on her abbess’s chair when she traveled. When she returned, she would talk to the
statue and he would tell her everything that had happened in the convent while
she was gone. There were also a number
of other churches we went into besides the Cathedral itself – The Basilica of
St. Vincent, the Chapel of Mosen Rubi, and the Church of San Pedro. They were each interesting and different.
Although Avila primarily
feels like a 16th century city, it does have other history. New since we were last there was a museum
devoted to the Vettonia culture of approximately 500 - 0 BC. The main relic from their era and what they
are most known for are Verracos, life size and smaller granite statues of bulls
and boars scattered around the area. The
current best guess is that they were boundary markers and guardians. These Ibero-Celtic people were eventually
subdued by the Romans (Julius Caesar actually) and incorporated into the Roman
province of Spain. We also went to the Provincial
Museum of Avila, which had archeological exhibits from Palaeolithic times and
the Visigoths, as well as the Vettones and Romans. There were even some artifacts from 19,000
BC that were found on the block between our hotel and the Cathedral. Basically, everyone just skips the Moorish
era. The museum’s exhibit on traditional
and early 20th century life in the area is quite interesting. It is hard to remember how traditional and
remote most of Spain was until after WW2.
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| Ron and verraco |
Finally, we also went to a
few 21st century exhibits.
There is a Center for Mysticism right outside the walls. Their building and exhibits try to do the
impossible and demonstrate the mystical experience through a series of small
rooms with quotations, paintings and sculptures. Saint John of the Cross is perhaps their
biggest influence, but the quotations drew from many traditions and modern
writers from around the world, and were reasonably inspiring. However, most of the modern paintings and
sculptures and multi-media pieces did not inspire me with insight into the
mystic experience. However, it was an
interesting, but nearly impossible effort, and I gather that the Institute
hosts many ecumenical conferences. We
also stopped in at a Modern Art gallery, Palacio Los Serrano, which had an
exhibit which we actually liked of paintings by an Avila resident named Daniel
Quintero – mostly portraits, but also some interestingly crooked landscapes.
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| Daniel Quintero |
We had three and a half
packed days in Avila. We left by train
in the early afternoon for Madrid and then a train to Merida to the west. Avila is on a high plain – 3700 feet – and
the train ride goes for quite a while along and down forested hills that I
remembered from our last trip. We were
only an hour in the train station in Madrid and then on though the endless plains
of Spain to Merida, which I will write about soon!
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