Romanesque Churches Of The Boi Valley, 1

After our visit to the national museum of art in Barcelona (http://roadeveron.blogspot.com/2017/04/museu-nacional-dart-catalunya-romanesque.html), and viewing the murals there, we resolved to visit the Boi Valley in the mountains of northern Catalonia to see the churches and remaining murals ourselves. We took in three of the four churches on June 22nd.

The first church, St. Climentis; but the point of the photo is to
conjoin it with the ski resort condos that surround it

Inside, some original Romanesque era stuff

Contemporary iron buttressing; all these thousand year old
buildings lean precariously one way or the other

The main Pantokrator...projected on the wall...the real thing at
the museum at Montjuic

Real remnant

Fuller view

Our founder

Among the higher tech presentations...what the
chancel would have looked like originally

Helpful model

St. Climentis

Next church...other end of village..Santa Maria
de Taull

Some touched-up, some original

Leaning out

Not Romanesque, but still beautiful carving,
painting, and very old

Letting There Be Light In Ainsa

Still en route to the Boi Valley was the hill-top and wall-girted town of Ainsa (thanks again, Jane), with its nice and reasonably-priced aire. We explored and spent the night; for a buck fifty.

Increasingly vertical terrain

Tower and haze

 

Part of Ainsa's defensive wall; and terrain

Main square

Ambience; not unknown to tour buses

Tower of the little parish Romanesque church

Inside the church, 12th century, my guess

A good case in point about why they invented Gothic

But wait! There's a Divine Illumination Machine (DIM)! We've
seen these all over Italy, where you get a minute for a euro;
here, you get 5 minutes of light AND five minutes of Gregorian
Chant! Top that, Italy! (But not in English too)

The little cloister, part pointy, part Romanesque

Crypt; cryptic

Not so many of the funny face sculptors got here

Barrel vaulting; friction and gravity...and  maybe
a little mortar

I can't believe I did not take a picture when the lights were on;
sometimes you just get carried away...

Next morning, at the aire

Surroundings...well into the Pyrenees now 

Moving along, we are struck by how much the
terrain resembles the American Southwest

Water feature

Rockfall barrier

Reservoirs all over in and near the mountains

En Route To The Boi Valley

Our visit to Spain and Portugal was coming to an end. In less than a week, we'd be boarding a plane back to the US. The last few days saw us galloping across central Spain toward the Pyrenees, turning right at Aragon, and then into the Catalonian mountains to see the Romanesque churches whose murals feature very prominently at the national museum in Barcelona. The heat was pretty relentless, the shade pretty sparse, so we mostly just kept going...

World Heritage Site, Fromista (pretty much anything on the
Camino is; as we saw in France)

Back in the land of stork infestation

Right across from the church in Fromista

Thank you, Rotarians

Hundreds of kilometers from Santiago

The signage can appear almost anywhere

We stayed at the aire in Fromista, which is part of the municipal
recreation complex, and which includes the local fronton

Miles down the road, now in Aragon, I think, another Roman
villa

The birds circled above; "look alive!"

What was really interesting, however, was the gorge that opens
out to this spot

Hill top town

Another

And another