Burgos was the first capital of Castilla (breaking away from León), the birthplace of El Cid, and the base of power of Franco. It's politically and religiously conservative, and a strong bastion of the Cathtilian lithp.
I spent the morning sight-seeing, making the rounds of the cathedral and the parks, and finding and tracing the camino through the core of the city.At noon we trooped up to the Iglesia de San Gil to rehearse, then had a break, after which we dressed and were bused out to Las Huelgas to sing to the nuns.
El Monesterio de Santa María la Real de Las Huelgas
This Cistercian convent was founded just outside Burgos in the 12th century as a retreat for the royal family ('las huelgas' translates roughly as 'vacations') and a refuge for nuns of noble blood. It was funded through the dowries of the novitiates. Nuns still live here in seclusion (the public hours are arranged to allow them to sing the offices) but now must work to support themselves by baking cookies and doing laundry for the restaurants of Burgos.
It's also the home of the 13th century manuscript Codex las Huelgas. Instead of our normal program, we sang songs and motets from the manuscript for the nuns. They loved to hear the music, but better loved to kiss the cheeks and tousle the hair of the two-year old with us. Afterwards, they fed us cookies and soft drinks, showed us a facsimile of the manuscript, then all kissed Stejn one last time and filed away to the church to sing vespers.
After that we were bused back into town, and walked back up to San Gil for our concert. There had been no publicity to speak of, but we has a reasonably full house, including a batch of pilgrims who had heard us sing in San Juan de Ortega on Monday afternoon.After the concert, and after dinner, a few of us went off in search of an internet cafe. (The one we found was filled with young men enthusiastically playing multi-player games over the network.) We paid for 15 minutes of connection time (since they were that close to closing for the night) and I wasted half of that figuring out how to type my password correctly on a Spanish keyboard. (The alphabet is all in the 'right' place, but the punctuation has been moved around.)
