We had a 2.5 hour walking tour of Avila set up at 10:30 am with our guide from Tours by Locals, another fellow named Javier. I did check, there is no requirement that a guide in Spain has to be named Javier, so apparently it is just coincidental.
With some time to kill before our tour, we walked around several blocks around the hotel. I'm not going to write a lot, but let the pictures/caption tell the story.
Well, this time the blog program has jumbled the order of the photos, so this is not in order of our tour. Javier was a solid tour guide, but he lacked the personality of our Javi guide in Toledo. Javier in Avila was not nearly as friendly/personable, he was there to do his job but that's about it.
That noted, the tour was great. Javier took us into the courtyards of multiple palaces that we would not have known to go into, talking about the history and design elements of the different family mansions. Apparently Avila was a tough city, with streets that certain families had to avoid or violence would occur. The section of the city within the walls is not that big, so the opportunity for violence was significant.
Then we went past an old synagogue, and a Romanesque church with interesting design features. Our next major stop was the Convent of St. Teresa. It was built in the 17th century on the spot where the saint was born. She was famous for her visions, and was a bit of a mystic. Not ever having been Catholic myself, I don't fully understand the whole "saints" thing, but the convent is definitely a shrine to her. There are numerous statues in Avila of her, and as we've been traveling through the region, other towns have statues of her as well.
The weirdest thing about the church is the room of relics, which includes one of her fingers, which is a relic you never realized you needed to see until you saw it, and even then you aren't sure you needed to see it!
Apparently General Franco would occasionally sleep with the finger at his bedside. I googled it, and found numerous different accounts. One said it was on his pillow as he lay dying, another claimed it was in his bedroom every night, whilst the version that seems the most real to me is he had it in his bedroom on occasional nights. Google it if you want, it's a rabbit hole you don't know you will want to go down.
Javier took us outside the city walls to an overlook with fantastic views of the mountains across the plains. Finally, we passed by some old churches and went into a museum that included many Celtic stone carvings, featuring boars and cows, still staples of the region's food today.
No comments:
Post a Comment