Astorga

Last weekend I went to Astorga, a town about 300 km to the northwest, because during my pre-trip browsing -- bit much to call it planning -- I saw, or thought I saw, that it í a few buildings designed by Antonio Gaudi. In fact, I discovered before I even went, that it actually has only one Gaudi building, but it was certainly worth going anyway.

I managed, this time, to get myself to the correct train station and on the correct train -- no thanks to the people at the national train company Renfe. The Madrid-Chamartín had just as bad wayfinding as the "cercanias" train stations. I stood with 250 other people staring up at a destinations board to learn what platform their train was assigned to; when the platform number was posted just 10 minutes before the train's scheduled departure, there was a rush -- and so on.

Once I got on the AVE -- the 300 kph line --- I enjoyed the ride. So about two and a half hours later, I found myself at the train station at Astorga, where I debarked from a local train. I found a deserted train station in an isolated part of town.

Waiting for the taxi

But I was prepared for this via a Reddit post that also warned there were no taxis waiting at the station and that you had to call one; the post even gave the phone numbers. So after waiting for twenty minutes or so, I was taken up the hill to my hotel.

In the morning, the usual confusion about whether I had already paid for breakfast. It was raining gently, and my goal, the Gaudi building, was a five-minute walk away. I waited at the hotel a while and then went out when there was a break.

On the right, the Gaudi "Palacio Episcopal" or Bishop's Palace; on the left, the cathedral, which is actually three times as large

Gaudi designed a building to be constructed next to the cathedral to serve as the residence of the bishop. By the time it was finished, fifty later, Gaudi was dead, the civil war and the second world war had come and gone, and Spain was beginning to benefit from US investment in the anti-communist, albeit fascist, government of Franco. And the current bishop gave the structure back to the town and never lived there, and it's now a museum. The caretakers have put enough furniture in the rooms to allow you to visualize the room's express purpose -- a dining room, a reception room, an office for the bishop.

The real pleasure was to walk through the light-filled rooms and appreciate the beauty of the spaces, their proportions, and the stained glass that filled the windows. There was lots of religious art, as one might expect. It was just beautiful.

Dining Room

Office of the Bishop

This, and above: Bishop's Chapel

Then on the second floor when you've gone almost all the way through, you come into a small room and there's this:

No label, no explanation.

After that, you go to the cathedral next door, and it's a huge disappointment after the Gaudi. Dingy, with all kinds of poor choices -- for example, they moved the choir stalls to an enclosure right in the middle of the church, so that the enclosure's 15-foot-high wall keeps you from seeing from one end of the church to the other. Aside from that, numerous altars covered in gold mined at the expense of god knows how many lives of enslaved native people from North to South America. Bit hard to enjoy that part. Nowhere to be found was any recognition that this aspect might be troubling.

One of the several side altars, not even close to being the main altar of the cathedral

Then you just walk around the town, which is quite enjoyable. The buildings date back as much as 250 years.

There was nothing to do the next day, Sunday, and I should have gotten an earlier train. But the kicker is that when I asked the hotel to call a taxi that could take me back to the train station, there were no taxis. Simply none. And no alternatives. The nice young desk clerk explained that it was Sunday afternoon and maybe it was more important to the taxi driver to have Sunday dinner with his family than to work. That was a sentiment I could only support, but it meant I had to walk to the train station. It was doable and all downhill, so it worked out all right and I got some extra exercise.