Insert Tasteless Skeleton Joke Here

When I was doing my Spanish course I went on a guided tour of Pamplona with a few other people from the language school. I thought that because I’d been living here for almost a month by that stage I wouldn’t learn much, but it was pretty interesting. Our guide told us that next to the Cathedral they had recently uncovered a medieval cemetery, and we had quite a long discussion in the group about how creepy it would have been to have been walking around over graves for years without ever knowing it. I generally consider myself to be a bit of a rationalist, and I know realistically that they’re just bones. But there’s that little part of your brain that whispers at you that they were once living, thinking, feeling people, and that we’re all headed the same way they went.

Anyway, a few days later I was walking down an alley that I have occasionally wander down on my rambles, when I saw what I thought was plumbing maintenance or somesuch. Only to realise that it was in fact the remains of another medieval graveyard.

I suppose the reality of life in a place like this is that everything is built on top of something else, and that where we walk every day is where people have been living and dying for hundreds of years.The sheer concentrated volume of the history of this place takes some getting used to when you come from a country in which a house that is less than a hundred years old can be considered worthy of a hertitage listing.