Walking to Santiago and The Castile Music Festival

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Still one of the most splendid walking routes in Europe, the Camino de Santiago runs almost 500 miles across northern Spain. Normally, the journey takes a month on foot. We are setting out to walk the highlights in ten days (not including Festival days), taking in the most historically charged and beautiful sections. For earlier pilgrims, the lure was a reduction of the soul's time in Purgatory; now the motives are more usually historical and cultural, and sometimes also deeply personal. Religious commitment is less in evidence. But for all who undertake the magnificent walk there is also a spiritual dimension. Asceticism is not a necessary ingredient. Instead of staying in bunk beds in pilgrim hostels, we repose in hotels, some among Spain's finest. Instead of carrying huge packs with all our necessities, we carry only our own day sacks while the luggage moves by road. Our vehicles intersect with walkers every two or three hours, allowing respite to anyone who needs to ride. We eat well, often picnicking in deep country, and try some of the fine wines grown along the route. But as with all pilgrimages this is a linear walk, involving a new hotel each night except on two rest days. We are like pilgrims, rather than tourists, visiting what time and tiredness allow at the end of the day's walking. There will be interpretative commentary by the lecturer and an introduction to the major buildings. But the experience of walking the Camino is what is essentially on offer, along a route which has for centuries compelled the imagination.

******************************************************************************************************* Spain was the dominant power in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and her musical life gloriously reflected that status. Whatever the causes of Spain's subsequent slippage from the centre of European affairs, the twin facts are that, first, some of the finest Renaissance and Baroque music is Spanish and, second, much of this heritage remains unknown. A Festival of Music in Castile provides a unique opportunity to hear some of this music in the right settings - palaces and churches which are not only masterpieces of architecture and decoration in themselves but, more pertinently, are also contemporary with the music, or even the actual building for which the music was composed. The repertoire is broadened with music from elsewhere in Europe, and extended too by introducing music of the nineteenth-century Spanish nationalist revival. The performers we have engaged are among the best: the Gabrieli Consort and Players, with Paul McCreesh, Orphénica Lyra, led by vihuelist José Miguel Moreno, His Majesty's Sagbutts and Cornetts together with His Majesty's Consort, and guitarist Carlos Bonell. Music is but one of the ingredients in what promises to be a magical few days. We are accompanied throughout by four expert lecturers who introduce the music, Spanish art and history through a series of morning talks. Special attention will be paid to the food and wines. The Festival locations - Burgos, Lerma and Peñaranda de Duero on the Castilian plateau north of Madrid - are replete with historic buildings and streetscape and are enchanting. Away from the usual tourist routes, they remain remarkably unspoilt.

Burgos, a former capital and the principal base for the Festival is conveniently compact. No Festival site - hotel, concert venue, restaurant - is more than ten minutes away on foot from any other. The cathedral is one of Spain's finest buildings, a cornucopia of Gothic and Renaissance architecture and decoration, richly endowed by pilgrims on the road to Santiago de Compostela and by Castilian kings and vice-regents. There are several other outstanding churches and some grand palaces, beautiful open spaces and winding ancient streets. In the shade of the pleached planes on the Paseo and beneath the shuttered windows of the houses, the authentic rhythm of Castilian life continues as it has for generations. The little town of Lerma was rebuilt by the eponymous Duke (1553-1625), Philip III's first minister, promoter of the ostentatious and spectacular entertainments loved by the King, and a major patron of music. The town remains much as he left it, a rare example of Renaissance planning to create an ideal courtly and Christian community. Peñaranda is a wonderfully preserved village with a splendid Renaissance palace, venue for the final concert of the Festival.