Sept 15: Leon's Cathedral

Today we hiked to Leon, which is the second largest city we will visit on the Camino, after Burgos.  There are a lot of wonderful churches in Leon.  The main cathedral rivals Burgos' cathedral in terms of taking your breath away when you first see it.  It isn't quite as large as Burgos' cathedral, but the front has a bit more of an imposing presence, and what makes it special is: 1) the inside is all one large area, whereas Burgos had a bunch of mini-chapels built off of the main sanctuary, and 2) the stained glass.  When we took the tour of the Leon cathedral, they said that the only other cathedral in Europe that had more stained glass was in Chartre, France.

The first picture is the front of the cathedreal in Leon when you first walk into the main square.  The second photo is of some of the stained glass in the church.  The audio tour said that most medieval churches with stained glass are oriented with the altar pointed towards the east.  That way, when the sun first comes up, it will hit the stained glass behind the altar first and cast that light down on the main area of the church.  And the windows that are on the southern side of the church will often have darker colors in them than the northern facing stained glass because they will get more direct sunlight, and thus the colors can be deeper and richer (if it was lighter colors, they might be washed out by the sunlight).  The last picture is of a doorway within the church that leads to the choir area, which is right in the middle of the church.  Both Burgos and Leon had the choir right in the middle of the church, perhaps because of their overall size.  Anyway, the carvings that were in this entryway or doorway into the choir were pretty amazing.  Through the entryway to the choir, you can also see the altar and the stained glass that is above it.

One other interesting fact about the cathedral in Leon: back in the 1800's, pieces of the roof were starting to fall down into the main congregational area.  So they literally removed all of the stained glass (numbering them and putting them into separate boxes) and they removed the roof of the building.  Then over a period of roughly 10 years, they rebuilt the roof.  They said that when they finally removed the supports of the new roof and let the full weight of it go onto the buttresses, the building literally groaned but it all held.  Then they reinstalled all of the stained glass, and of course, there was a huge celebration in the city when the church was reopened for use.