Logroño on the Camino: Puente de Piedra to Calle del Laurel: a self-guided walk
By Alleytale
Pilgrims, soldiers and wine
Logroño grew up along the pilgrim road, and its churches, its walls and its general are strung along the same streets, with the grape harvest never far from the story.
The stops
Pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago still enter Logroño over this bridge, which appears on the city's coat of arms. The first written mention of a bridge over the Ebro here is in the town charter of 1095, and tradition credits San Juan de Ortega with building the original, which had twelve arches. After a flood in 1871 its last three arches were lost, and in 1880 a platform of two boats lashed together, carrying an infantry regiment across the river, overturned and 90 soldiers died; the present seven-arch bridge was rebuilt in the 1880s to a project by the engineer Fermín Manso de Zúñiga.
Photo: Jynus — CC BY-SA 4.0 This church stands directly on the Camino de Santiago, on the site of a medieval royal palace, and it is called Imperial because Alfonso VII gave his palace so the Order of the Holy Sepulchre could found its first house in Castile here. Its octagonal Gothic lantern with its spire is one of the principal landmarks of Logroño, and has been thought to echo an imperial crown. By 1671 the spire threatened to fall and carriages were kept off the Rúa Mayor, until works ending in 1750 reformed the church.
Photo: Javi Guerra Hernando — CC BY-SA 4.0 San Bartolomé is the oldest church in Logroño, with a Romanesque head and a Gothic doorway whose nineteen small scenes tell the life and martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew. It is a landmark on the Camino de Santiago, 612 km from Santiago de Compostela. When a French and Navarrese army besieged Logroño in 1521 its tower, close to the town walls, was hit by artillery, and it was rebuilt afterwards in brick with Mudéjar touches from Aragon.
Photo: Magnificus — CC BY-SA 3.0 es This palace on Calle Portales was built as the family house of the Jiménez de Enciso, at the historic site of the Herventia gate, and takes its name from the spired caps, the chapiteles, on its two towers. From 1865 to 1980 it was Logroño's town hall, and the kings Alfonso XII and Alfonso XIII and General Espartero were among those who visited it. The spires were taken down in 1954 and put back in 2010, and the building now houses the Instituto de Estudios Riojanos.
Photo: Jynus — CC BY-SA 4.0 Baldomero Espartero, the general who became regent of Spain for the young Queen Isabella II, lived in Logroño in later life, and his wife came from the city. This bronze equestrian statue by Pablo Gilbert, with four lions around its pedestal, stands in a fountain at the centre of the Paseo del Espolón; its bronze came from old cannon, and it was inaugurated in 1895. Every 21 September, the feast of San Mateo, the square is also where the first must of the grape harvest is offered to the Virgin of Valvanera.
Photo: Jynus — CC BY-SA 4.0 The name La Redonda, the round one, recalls an earlier Romanesque church of round or polygonal plan on this site. Its Gothic nave was built between 1516 and 1538 with slender round columns that the source likens to a stone palm grove, and the twin towers on the front, by Martín de Beratúa, are the icon of the city. In 1959 Pope John XXIII raised it to co-cathedral, so the diocese has three cathedral seats, and behind the high altar hangs a small Calvary painting attributed to Michelangelo, though the attribution is not proven.
Photo: Fernando — CC BY-SA 4.0 The pavement of this square beside Santiago el Real is inlaid with a Game of the Goose with Camino de Santiago motifs, which is why it is popularly called the Plaza de la Oca. Its squares stand for the stages of the pilgrim route, with the route's most representative monuments on the main ones, and visitors can walk it as a game. Spain's tourist board mentions a theory that the Knights Templar invented the game in the 11th century with the Camino in mind and that it began in Logroño, and beside the square a pilgrim fountain recalls an older one that the council restored in the 1980s.
Photo: El Pantera — CC BY-SA 4.0 Santiago el Real is the church of oldest origin in Logroño, and the story goes, though it is unproven, that Arcadio, a disciple of the apostle James, founded the first Christian church here where the apostle had preached. Saint James appears twice on its Renaissance doorway: as a pilgrim, carved by Juan de Amezqueta, and as the Moor-slayer, a figure dated to 1737 by an unknown Flemish sculptor. A brick arcade was added later to shelter the figures from the weather.
Photo: daneel.olivaw — CC BY 2.0 This convent was built in the 13th century for the Order of Mercy and largely rebuilt in the 16th, and after church property was confiscated in the 1830s it served in turn as a barracks, military hospital, storehouse and prison. Late in the 19th century it became Logroño's tobacco factory, which at first employed 400 women. Since 1988 its old cloister has been the chamber of the Parliament of La Rioja, and the rest of the building holds an exhibition hall and the regional library.
Photo: José Luis Filpo Cabana — CC BY 3.0 In 1521 a French and Navarrese army besieged Logroño, then called the key to Castile, and withdrew in the face of the town's resistance and the arrival of reinforcements from Castile. From 1522 the town built the artillery tower known as the Cubo del Revellín and the wall and Puerta del Camino beside it, paid for partly by a grant from the emperor Charles V. At the San Bernabé fiestas the Fish brotherhood hands out bread, fish and wine nearby in memory of the siege, a custom that dates only from the early 20th century.
Photo: Tournasol7 — CC BY-SA 4.0 The Museo de La Rioja has been in this palace since 1971; the building, put up in 1752 for the town councillor Pedro Ruiz de la Porta, takes its name from General Espartero, who lived here from 1856 until his death in 1879 after leaving politics for good. In the 1880s it was bought to be a bishop's palace, but no bishop ever moved in and various institutions used it instead. The museum shows paintings and sculpture from the 12th to the 19th century, among them the 14th-century San Millán panels.
Photo: Krzysztof Golik — CC BY-SA 4.0 This street runs beside Bretón de los Herreros, where Logroño's old walls stood until they were demolished in 1862, and the houses that line it were rebuilt after that. In little more than 200 metres around it there are over 65 bars and restaurants, and the custom is that each bar offers one or two specialities, from mushrooms and pincho moruno to patatas bravas, always with the local Rioja wine. The tapas circuit is nicknamed the path of the elephants, because it is said that everyone who goes in comes out on all fours.
Photo: Zarateman — CC0
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