The summer I turned sixteen my family and I took an overnight car ferry to Northern Spain. Once there we roughly followed the route of the pilgrims’ Camino to Santiago di Compostela, but as godless folk we did so in our aged Ford Sierra estate. We stayed in the excellent state-run Paradores hotels which offered welcome cool, crisp shade at the end of long, hot days. We also discovered that Spaniards (wisely) eat very late as the evening cools, so we did too, and that cars made in Dagenham in the eighties didn’t have air conditioning, even when they had a Spanish name.
At some point on our trip we stopped in a village in the middle of a baking day, perhaps to look at the map (a map! the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there). With few frames of reference for such heat-soaked torpor—in my memory saturated with the colours of an over-exposed photograph—at the time it reminded me of the movie Bagdad Café, which is set in the Mojave. A far cry from Clerkenwell, it was deserted save for a couple of wild dogs and an old lady in black who just said Que calor! Que calor! as we passed. Que calor indeed.
Our final arrival point was Santiago itself where, even as an often tiresome eye-rolling teenager, I still recall my delight in our hotel. The Hostal de los Reyes Católicos was founded by Ferdinand and Isabella for weary pilgrims who must have imagined themselves in paradise. I certainly thought so: cool, calm, verdant cloisters; tinkling fountains; a gauzy curtain billowing gently in the breeze as I lay on the bed and, treat of treats, drank an ice-cold mini-bar Coca Cola from a glass bottle glistening with condensation.
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