If you look at a map, you will see that Pamplona and Burgos are quite close to each other, in the province of Navarra. Well, they are not, and getting from one to the other is like going to the Moon. For some reason there are no direct buses between them, so first you have to take a bus from Pamplona to Vitoria and then, on a different line, from Vitoria to Burgos. Of course the bus lines don't talk to each other, so it is a toss of the coin if you will only wait 30 minutes or 2 hours for the transfer. Double the annoyance if you want to go there and back on the same day.
I took the bus at Pamplona at 8h00 and arrived at 13h00 in Burgos, so there goes the full morning "wasted". Not really a waste because my left foot needed rest and recovery, and we were crossing some very pretty landscapes. Here in the foreland of the Pyrenees the sedimentary rocks are uplifted but not folded, so mesas form where a resistant unit of limestone covers softer sandstones and shales. One of these limestones has beautiful ramp structures, indicating that it was formed in a backreef lagoon. Another mesa, Atapuerca, is a famous anthropological site (but more about that later).
I was not going to have a lot of time to be a tourist in Burgos (my return bus was at 17h45) but I only had two goals in mind. First, of course, was to visit the famous Burgos Cathedral and its cloister, masterpieces of the XIII century gothic. I had been here 10 years ago, and well remember its monumental architecture. What I didn't remember (and maybe this is something that happened in the years in between), is that its statuary art has been restored with amazing care, so every scene is bursting with color, like it would have been when completed. The retables were shining in their fresh gold leaf, and the Annunciation, Nativity, and Ascension were an explosion of color. Unfortunately Medieval art was somber, with everyone at the Nativity wearing serious countenances as if tired of too many selfies. I had to chuckle at a scene where a bishop was addressing a crowd because, this being Spain, the bishop had an afternoon shadow on his cheeks and jaw (Spaniards have dense beards and this look is common amongst men in the late afternoon).
From there I went to dinner, because if you are not eating between 2 and 3 pm you will end going hungry. Primer plato was Moronga de Burgos (blood sausage with rice mixed with the blood into the sausage, which is then cut in pieces and fried to give it a crackling skin), and the segundo plato was churrasco con chimichurri, well irrigated with a 1/4 liter of wine and topped with a flan de huevo. Yummy!
My last and most important reason for wanting to spend the day in Burgos was to visit the Museum of Human Evolution, which besides doing a great job at addressing the greater themes of evolution and human evolution, is the repository of the many anthropological discoveries of the Mesa de Atapuerca. As I said before, this mesa is capped by a thick limestone unit, where many caves were formed as the region started being uplifted. Some of these caves are long galleries with the usual assortment of stalactites and stalagmites, which are "open" to the surface by steep pits (simas), elongated fractures, and grotto openings at the edge of the mesa. The museum does a good job explaining how climate changed significantly over the last two million years, spanning humid and warm interglacial episodes and cold advances of the Pleistocene glaciation, and illustrates the changes with impressive, large-scale dioramas. It is in this scenario that humans come into Atapuerca, including Homo antecessor (1.4 to 0.8 million years ago and defined for the first time at Atapuerca), Homo heidelbergensis (0.6 to 0.15 Ma), Homo neanderthalensis (0.12 to 0.03 Ma, or 120,000 to 30,000 years ago), and Homo sapiens (0.04 to date, or 40,000 years go to date). Of course the human family bush has many branches and different subspecies occupied other regions of Africa, Europe, and Asia at overlapping times, but at Atapuerca itself we had these four subspecies evolving into the next, or coexisting.
Atapuerca is a unique site in that the many simas accumulated an incredible variety of animals that simply fell into the holes, and in one case a subterranean sima that was used by the Neanderthals to "dispose"of their dead. It would have seem that they were just tossing them into the hole, but the finding of a large and well-crafted biface ax inside the sima has been interpreted as a sign that the burial site had some spiritual significance.
Highly satisfied with my trip I took the 17h45 bus to Vitoria, missed the bus to Pamplona by 15 minutes and had to wait 2 hours for the next one to leave at 21h00, and finally got to my lodgings at 23h00. Oh, but my foot is still hurting a lot. Let me see ... OMG, I have a huge blood blister in the ball of my foot that is pressing as if I were walking on a pebble! Nothing to do but lance it, after which I felt immediately better.
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