2 March 2011

Course

THE CATHEDRAL OF PAMPLONA. A VIEW FROM THE 21ST CENTURY

The Cathedral as seen by travellers

Ms. Carmen Jusué Simonena.
UNED of Pamplona

Travel books, travel literature, have always had an enthusiastic readership, and at the same time have been the passionate entertainment of many generations who have forged some of their first dreams thanks to them. Travel stories, like adventure books - after all, often travel books - have aroused people's curiosity and stimulated that need that yearns to break, in a certain way, the monotony of everyday life.

We have chosen a group of travelers who made several trips through Spain and, when they stopped in Pamplona, they made different appreciations of the cathedral, some offer brief news, however others make extensive and curious descriptions of the Pamplona cathedral. Evidently they could have been others, however, the selected ones reflect, each one in their own way, a different vision, which leads us to appreciate more or less poetic, more or less dark or more or less descriptive nuances.

The selected travelers offer their vision of Pamplona and the cathedral from the 15th to the 20th centuries. Not all of them are included, although a good part of them are; some, such as Antonio Ponz in the 18th century and Victor Hugo in the 19th century, offer really interesting and detailed descriptions. Others, many of them, limit themselves to confirming the presence of the cathedral within the city, given that many of the travelers were interested in other aspects such as the Sanfermines, the walls or the human types who lived in the city, among many other things. 

We will see, throughout these minutes, the impressions of different travelers, starting with the vision of J. Müntzer at the end of the 15th century and ending with the brief words that Álvaro Cunqueiro, already in the 20th century, mentions about Pamplona and its cathedral. It is a pity that the Dutch writer and journalist Cees Nooteboonm, award Europa de literatura, did not make references to the city and its cathedral in his work El desvío a Santiago (The detour to Santiago).
 

Cloister of the cathedral, according to a 19th century engraving.

Exterior of the cathedral of Pamplona, according to a 19th century engraving.