Architectural ambition and technical innovation characterize the winery of Bai Gorri, where we had a three-and-a-half hour "tasting lunch."
Having
completed the first three full days of our pilgrimage, I have far more to
relate than would fit into a single essay, or indeed several essays, not that I
am entertaining any serious ambitions in that direction. The brief report is most positive. Our random companionship of thirty
pilgrims is cheerful and cohesive, the kind of students any teacher is blessed
to have—and certainly the kind who justify both the glad learning and the glad
teaching ostensibly characteristic of this blog. The weather, though for one moment approaching the brink of
catastrophe has been tolerable to excellent. Unlike medieval pilgrims we are enjoying motorized support
that allows us to see all manner of wonders and still cover the required
distance. One might describe our
rather modest walks along the Camino as “scenes from a pilgrimage.” Our rather minimal hiking, while enough
to task my soles and calves, can hardly make a dent in what appears to be a
mandatory daily intake of seven thousand calories, more or less.
Almost
everything has been new to me. I
was last in the Basque country in 1959, and then only briefly. I was young and Francisco Franco not
only alive but considerably younger than I am now. It was, in short, a different world, and though Navarre’s
antiquities and its dramatic landscape are unchanged, the general “vibe” was so
radically different as to make it feel a different country as well. It was a few years before the serious
phase of the Iberian revolution in tourism. There were at that time comparatively few automobiles in
Spain--paradoxically that fact made for pretty good hitchhiking—and the whole
country seemed coated in dust and impecuniousness. Now, by contrast, amidst a universally recognized economic
crisis and a twenty-four percent unemployment rate, it seems pretty
prosperous. Any American has to be
impressed by its bright and shiny infrastructure of roads and bridges. Of course the only economic “sectors”
with which we have had much first hand experience—tourism and the wine
trade—are doubtless anomalies in the larger picture.
We
started out in Pamplona. It is a
very interesting place, of course, but I found myself rather annoyed by the
young English-speaking guide who seemed to think that all we would want to hear
about was the running of the bulls and role played by Ernest Hemingway in
transforming an obscure local Spanish tradition into an international
phenomenon. My late senior
colleague Carlos Baker, who wrote the “official” biography of Hemingway, was
both a mentor and a friend to me; and I know how seriously tedious he found
Hemingway’s tauromachic machismo.
John (the aforementioned Anglophone cicerone) was a font of surprising
statistics. Would you believe, for
instance, that “only sixteen” runners have been gored or trampled to death in
the running of the bulls since the publication of The Sun Also Rises in 1923?
Or that the town fathers have erected a bronze monument for them worthy
of war heroes? But one statistic
was enough to explain all the enthusiasm.
Last year, during the eight-day festival of San Fermin in July, the merchants,
hoteliers, restauranteurs, and (especially) bar-keepers of Pamplona grossed a
cool seventy million euros. No wonder that there are statues to
Hemingway all over the town.
Eunate
We
did zip down to Roncevalles, just to be able to say that we were truly
beginning at the beginning of the Camino in Spain. But our progress is of course westerly, and we have seen
many beautiful things, all of them new to me. They include the hauntingly beautiful and rather mysterious
octagonal church of Eunate, the splendid medieval bridge that gives its name to
the town of Puente la Reina, the extraordinary cloister of the church of San
Pedro in Estella and the yet more remarkable church of San Miguel in that same
town. Its location fully
vindicates the well-known opening sentence of Henry Adams’s Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres, “The archangel loved heights.”
Puente la Reina
