Burgos, Spain

Last weekend we travelled to Burgos, Spain, with our native Burgos friend Oscar. Normally when we travel we are on our own or accompanied by other ignorant tourists, so it was a lovely gift to have a local on our side. We were shown the best restaurants, told the best tapas to order, and made very funny friends.

The food is definitely worth mentioning. The best was a tapa called cojonudo...this isn't a name you want to throw around, as it actually means "to go in the nude." However, it is a slang word for, essentially, "AWESOME!" when describing food. And that is what this tapa was. They begin with a piece of bread and top it with a tiny, perfectly fried quail (or partridge?) egg. They decorate this with a red pepper slice, and add chorizo (or, if it is a cojonudA, they add morcillA). Really, this isn't my ideal dish. I have to admit that I internally cringed when Oscar brought it to the table, but...YUM!!! I learned to stop prejudging pretty quickly after the next tapa, tigre (tiger), which was a sort of pulverized mussel mixed with bechamel sauce, stuffed back into the shell and fried. It was so good I cleaned that mussel shell of every bit of fried pink mush clinging to it. YUM! Also worth mentioning is the morcilla itself (blood sausage) for which Burgos is famous for. I eat morcilla in tiny doses, but Craig ate every morcilla in sight! I also tried hard to eat a fois tapa with mango and burnt sugar, but while I desperately wanted to discover I loved it, liver just isn't my thing. Craig ate mine, of course.


Burgos was also special for me because it is part of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, of which I will discuss further later. We got to see many pilgrims headed toward the west of Spain, tired and dirty but extremely happy. Here are Craig and Oscar posed with the pilgrim statue in front of the cathedral. (I forgot to mention that Craig no longer has hair!)

The cathedral was amazing. Burgos' cathedral is the third largest in Spain (after Sevilla's and Toledo's) and is INCREDIBLE. It is of gothic design but allows in a lot of natural light, often bright with stained glass colors.


The best part about Burgos? It was chilly! I actually walked around in my winter coat. Native Burgos residents snickered at me, but they are used to -15 degree (C) winters, so I felt secure in my down feather warmth.