On our first full day in León after breakfast my friends Mary and Bob Wiese and I walked around Roman walls of the plaza next to the Hotel Real Colegiata San Isidro where we are staying for three nights, then we attended Mass in the Basilica de San Isidro. We prayed before the relics of St Isidore that are behind the main altar at the church. We waited for my friend from the Bay Club, Chang-Chi Liu, to join us and visited the Parador de León, originally a hospital for pilgrims on the Camino associated with the the Order of Santiago. The cloister within the Hostel San Marcos had various religious occupants over the centuries, including the Franciscans, Jesuits and Dominicans. We enjoyed the beautiful cool garden lined by statues of saints including the San Isidro. The whole area is rich in ancient and religious history with significance beyond what I can convey in a blog post. The scallop shell of the Camino de Santiago led us to the statue of the footsore pilgrim where we stopped to take a photo. After lunch at the hostel we visited the Antonio Gaudi designed Casa Botines and its museum of art and architecture. The ornate building is a six story maze with cylindrical towers each topped by conical roof. In fact everywhere we went we turned us around and around past Roman walls through cobbled streets to see all the places that were open on Monday. At the end of the day we walked 17,000 steps and climbed 30 flights of stairs. Even though we haven’t started the Camino we walked five miles just in León.in the evening we had dinner and a live classical guitar concert in the patio.
