Santillana del Mar

The place we were headed to in Cantabria is called Santillana Del Mar, and it's the town where the Cave of Altamira is located. We stayed in a really adorable casa rural halfway between Santillana Del Mar and the Cave, so we could easily walk to both. It was lovely and the air was crisp and fresh and smelled faintly of cow manure. (In fact, P&E claimed that the cows were chewing their cud so loudly that they could hear them over the passing traffic on one trip to town).

The town was super-cute and the country-side was absolutely gorgeous. Plus, it was really lovely escaping the city and breathing in some fresh mountain air for a while. Anyone who says that we don't need trees doesn't know how to breathe properly. 

Burgos

Sorry it's taken so long for me to get the blog back up and running after the petty thievery and the holidays. I kept wanting to, and then it seems like I continued to have more pressing business to attend to elsewhere. I've been to the MLA, written a (horrid) draft of my dissertation introduction which needs a ton of work before I let my advisors see it, more or less replaced everything that I lost (including my fancy pair of gloves with an even FANCIER pair of gloves). And now I'm going to try to pick up more or less where I left off, which was with a road trip with some friends up to the Northern province of Cantabria.

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On our way up to Cantabria, we stopped in Burgos for lunch and some delightful exploration. Funny story, I'll actually be back in Burgos this coming Wednesday for our Fulbright Mid-Year Seminar, which will be very fun and also incredibly cold. It was chilly even when we were there at the end of fall. I'm mildly dreading going to the deep-cold and windy middle-of-winter weather (and rain!) that they've got going on right now.

But Burgos is really a lovely town, with some delicious food (that I will tell you ALL about next week), along with my favorite cathedral in Spain.

The Burgos Cathedral is where El Cid is buried, but I love it more for the pretty glass-topped domes that grace the main nave and a secondary chapel.

El Cid was a Castilian knight/mercenary during the Middle Ages in Spain. He was played by Charlton Heston in the movie El Cid (wife Doña Ximena played by Sofia Loren). The Cantar del Mío Cid is a classic of Spanish Golden Age literature, and the man himself is a symbol for how discombobulated life on the Peninsula was during the Reconquest, as he fought under both Muslim and Christian kings for his own personal profit. 

More about Burgos next week!!