Astorga: Gaudí's palace, Roman Asturica and chocolate: a self-guided walk
By Alleytale
Asturica, Gaudí's palace and chocolate
The walk follows the pilgrim road past the cathedral and a pilgrim hospital, then turns east and south-east into the Roman city of Asturica Augusta, with its baths, the town hall square and the forum gallery, before heading north to a chocolate entrepreneur's house and the museum in a chocolatier's mansion.
The stops
After a fire destroyed the old episcopal palace, Bishop Joan Baptista Grau i Vallespinós asked his friend Antoni Gaudí to design the new one, which is one of only three Gaudí buildings outside Catalonia. Gaudí was still working on the Palau Güell in Barcelona, so he planned it from photographs of the site that the bishop sent him; the result is grey granite from El Bierzo, with four round towers and a ditch around it. After the bishop's death in 1893 Gaudí resigned over disagreements with the cathedral Chapter; other architects took over, and Ricardo García Guereta completed the building, which now houses the Museo de los Caminos, about the Way of Saint James.
Photo: Ponscor — CC BY-SA 4.0 Santa Marta is the city's patron saint, and this Baroque church was completed in 1741 on a site where earlier churches had stood. On the French Way of the Camino de Santiago, pilgrims arrive in front of the Episcopal Palace, this church and the cathedral. Between the church and the chapel of San Esteban is a tiny cell where women walled themselves in for life as penance in the Middle Ages; a barred window let people give them charity, and an inscription above it reads, "remember my condition, for it will be yours. Me yesterday, you today."
Photo: Rodelar — CC BY-SA 3.0 Work on this Gothic cathedral began in 1471 and went on until the 18th century, so Renaissance and Baroque parts join the Gothic ones. Its main front, begun in the late 17th century, is arranged like a stone altarpiece, and the left tower, started in 1678, was not finished until 1965. Inside, the high altar by Gaspar Becerra, from 1558, is considered a masterwork of Spanish Renaissance sculpture, and on a turret outside stands a statue of Pedro Mato, a legendary figure linked to the Battle of Clavijo.
Photo: Fernando — CC BY-SA 4.0 Astorga lay on the Camino de Santiago, and in the Middle Ages it had many hostels and hospitals for pilgrims. The Hospital of San Juan Bautista is one of those that gave rise to modern charitable institutions, and according to tradition Saint Francis spent a few days here recovering. Most of the other pilgrim hospitals have vanished, leaving only their memory and descriptions in old documents.
Photo: Jl FilpoC — CC BY-SA 4.0 In the early 20th century the profits of the chocolate industry produced a wealthy middle class in Astorga, and among its sons were the poets Juan and Leopoldo Panero and the critic Ricardo Gullón, all part of the so-called Astorga School. This was the Panero family home, and it is now open to visitors in memory of that school's writers; Generation of '27 poets such as Gerardo Diego and Luis Rosales were among those who frequented it. Leopoldo Panero's family ran a prosperous confectionery in the city.
Photo: Rodelar — CC BY-SA 3.0 Astorga's best-known sweet is the mantecada, which has a protected geographical indication. Its origin is uncertain, but it is believed that the recipe came from a nun of this convent who left the order to marry and made the sweet popular. The first written mention of mantecadas is from 1805, and they began to be sold commercially in 1850.
Photo: Rodelar — CC BY-SA 3.0 Like most Roman cities, Asturica Augusta had public baths, which were places to wash and also centres of social life. In August 1984, excavations on Calle Santiago Crespo found the remains of the Major Baths, in the middle of the Roman city near where its two main roads crossed. They were in use from the middle of the 1st century and remodelled in the 5th, and the dig found a large cold room, the frigidarium, beside four other spaces, three of them with underfloor hypocaust heating.
Photo: Rodelar — CC BY-SA 3.0 Building of the town hall began in 1683 and was completed in 1703, and it is a listed Bien de Interés Cultural monument. Its central bell-gable, added in 1748, holds the clock and the bells, and the largest bell is struck to mark the hours by two figures dressed as maragatos, named Juan Zancuda and Colasa, who swing a mallet. The Plaza Mayor around it was laid out in the late 17th century.
Photo: xavi lópez — CC BY-SA 3.0 es This vaulted gallery of Roman concrete was linked to the city's forum, and its purpose is unclear: it may have been a passage or a prison for slaves. It dates to between the reigns of Tiberius and Claudius. In the early 20th century it was in private hands and divided into four storerooms, and from 1986 the town hall bought the four parts one by one. After renovation it became the Roman Museum, which opened in 1999 and shows everyday objects from Asturica Augusta found in the city's digs.
Photo: Rafa Esteve — CC BY-SA 4.0 This church began in the Romanesque style and was later altered, with Baroque decoration inside. Under the Leonese tradition of open councils, the townspeople's council met in its atrium, and went on meeting there until the town hall was built. In the 18th century San Bartolomé was one of the city's four parishes, with San Miguel, San Julián and Santa Marta.
Photo: Rodelar — CC BY-SA 3.0 Casa Granell was built between 1910 and 1915 by the architect Antonio Palacios Ramilo, known for the Palace of Communications in Madrid, and it was commissioned by a chocolate entrepreneur. Astorga counts it among its buildings raised under the influence of Modernism.
Photo: Rafa Esteve — CC BY-SA 4.0 Chocolate was a major industry in Astorga from the middle of the 19th century into the early 20th: in 1916 the city had 41 chocolate makers, and four are still working. A cloth merchant, José Luis López García, began collecting the machinery, tools, posters and wrappers, and first showed them on 13 December 1994 in what was the first chocolate museum in Spain and the second in Europe. Since 2015 the collection has been in the modernist mansion that the chocolatier Magín Rubio had built as his home, warehouse and chocolate factory.
Photo: Museo del Chocolate de Astorga — CC BY-SA 4.0
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