Before reaching Pamplona, the sun sets behind a jagged ridge of blue mountains fringed with fluffy golden clouds, and the villages begin to show specks of brightness from a distance, for all are lighted with electricity, owing to the cheap power which is supplied by dozens of mountain torrents and streams.
Villata has an old bridge, a ruined convent, a small river falling over a dam, and a main street of tall houses, some of them ornamented with classic sculpture. It also has a notice warning cars to reduce speed. Soon afterwards an avenue of trees dignifies the road as one approaches
PAMPLONA
From the exterior, the lofty walls, the citadel and bastions of the city, with the towers of its cathedral and churches rising above, set in an amphitheatre of mountains, make a most attractive picture, but within there is a want of antiquity which is disappointing. There are no streets of old houses, and the churches lack, to some extent, the spirit of romance, although one of them dates back to the twelfth century.
The Cathedral was founded in 1397 on the site of an older building, and the façade was built in 1783. The interior has three naves and richly carved choir stalls dating from 1530. In the south transept the doorway leading to the cloisters, of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, has a carved tympanum showing the death of Mary. It is painted and gilded, and is a very beautiful example of late fourteenth-century work.
The Chapel of Santa Cruz, in the south-west corner of the building, has an iron fence made of the chains which surrounded the tent of the Emir at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212. The tomb of Charles III. and his wife, Leonor of Castile, has been taken from the choir to the old kitchen of the canons.
The Church of San Nicolás, in the Paseo de Valencia, is an interesting building of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
San Saturnino has been restored and altered a great deal since the fourteenth century, and is now a curious building containing a dreadful atmosphere of human decay, the wooden floor being almost entirely composed of numbered trap-doors leading into the vaults beneath. On this dusty floor the ‘devout’ kneel to repeat prayers in front of little altars and shrines, and seem to disregard the pestilential odours of the dead, which make the church intolerable for more than a few minutes. Perhaps the dirt and the smell are regarded somewhat after the manner of a penance, although the Roman Church, which inclines to a monetary basis for all the forms of absolution it dispenses, would be hardly likely to give it any recognition. Before hurrying out of the building the large representation of an armed knight in low relief high up on one of the walls should be noticed. The north door has a fine carving of the Last Judgment.
The Citadel is a great star-shaped fort at the south-west corner of the city’s defences, which have been attacked at different times down to the Carlist War of 1875-1876, when the city endured several bombardments without the Carlists being able to gain an entry.
In 1521 Pamplona was besieged by the French, and a young Spanish captain named Iñigo Lopez de Recalde was wounded near the gate of San Nicolás. During his convalescence he planned the rules of the Order of the Jesuits, and became their first vicar-general, being known after his death as St. Ignatius de Loyola. Near the gateway a chapel was, in 1691, erected to the memory of the founder of the Jesuits.