Monday 23 September – A town hall, a hospital, a couple of churches and a stubborn pooch.

From ghost town to main street peak hour: when we arrived in Corbins late yesterday afternoon there wasn’t a soul to be seen.  Then this morning, alerted by the noise, we look out of our front windows to see people everywhere.  It then dawns on us that we are staying opposite the local school and every kid in the village, and their parents, have turned up and are waiting for the school gates to open.  The gates open, the kids shuffle in, the parents go home – and it’s a ghost town again.

We drove into Lleida this morning, passing fields of corn and fruit trees as far as the eye can see - our hosts gave us half a dozen huge peaches from their own trees for us to enjoy – deliciosa!.  We parked the car near the Rio Segre and walked across the Passarel·la del Liceu Escolar (footbridge) to the old city.

Lleida is one of the oldest towns in Catalonia, with recorded settlements dating back to the Bronze Age.  During the Middle Ages it was ruled for several centuries by the Moors but was reclaimed by the Christian conquerors in 1149.  After checking in at the Tourist Information Office and learning that many of the attractions are closed on Mondays, we set out to explore what was available to us.   First stop was the archaeological remains under the present town hall, which has been the site of the town administration since the 13^th century.  Not a great deal to see: some medieval walls, a well, traces of  9th/10th century baths, and a round stone wall plate bearing a Roman head and with Julius Caesar’s famous phrase “Veni, Vidi, Vici” inscribed on it.  On the other hand it provided a good indication of where street level would have been a thousand years or more ago – some five or six metres below the current level. 

Then to the 1454 Santa Maria Hospital, an imposing two-story Gothic building that now contains a library and some offices.  It was briefly used as a military hospital during the reign of Felipe V in the early 18^th century. Then on to the House of Giants which contains a selection of oversized statues, heads and costumes, for which Spain is famous.  We have seen the life-sized giant statues carried in procession during a previous visit to Spain and, from the photographs on display (and from the cap-thieving giants we saw prancing around in Huesca yesterday), it is clear that they still hold an important place in Spanish popular culture.

After totally decadent elevenses, a shared pastry from which thick chocolate oozed every time you took a bite, washed down with orange juice squeezed fresh before our eyes, we walked uphill a bit to the “new” cathedral (as distinct from the “old” cathedral, perched on top of the hill, which we will visit during the next day or so).  The new cathedral - after all, it’s only 250 years old – is rather austere inside and has none of the grandeur and glitz that we have come to expect from Spanish cathedrals.  So we continued up the hill to the 12^th century, Romanesque Church of Sant Llorenc, a smaller but much more interesting church, with four naves, two of which contain detailed altarpieces.  It is dark inside, however there is a little machine where you can put in anything from five Euro cents to one Euro and different sections of the church are lit for a short time – a sensible, environmentally-friendly innovation for a church that would not receive all that many visitors.

Back down the hill and a stroll along the busy main street, past buskers and artists and a small black dog that had gone on strike, flopped down on the footpath and refused to walk any further despite threats and exhortations from its owner, and then along the boulevard above the river, noting a lone stork resting on a rock shelf in the river, perhaps recovering from a difficult delivery. Then the drive back to Corbins for an afternoon of rest.