I spend most of Monday walking around Leon. It was cold and rainy in general but it was a very good day for museums. Started in the cathedral and had a couple of hours walking through this amazingly beautiful church. The video below does a better job giving an overview than I can.

The diocesan museum was a guided tour in Spanish. The art contributed to the cathedral as well as the other churches in the diocese was quite extensive. Some is quite gruesome as it did show how some Saints were killed in a variety of forms of execution.

The rest of the museum was filled with historical items, some from as far back as the Celtic and Roman times. There was a spectacular chest that was proximally 3 m high by 6 m wide with individual panels displaying different geometric patterns of Arabic design. The complexity and the detail reminder boggling. It is a good reminder of how intertwined Christians and Muslims were in Spain.

The museum itself also included some architectural details that were quite unique. It included some rooms that had been used within the monastery as well as by the cathedral itself. So some rooms were quite small and low ceiling, others were high ceiling and expansive.

There were no pictures allowed so I don’t have any internal pictures to show you.

The next stop was the Claustro de la basílica de San Isidoro de León. It was the 12th century church with exquisite frescoes on the ceiling. Amazing detail in a Roman/Byzantine style. The Roman Chapel is one of the most amazing pieces Catholic art I have seen. The picture below doesn’t do it justice.

After lunch, the last stop was the Monastery of San Marco, one of the Parador hotels is built into it. It is a truly beautiful building and one whose cloister give you a sense of the truly internal live of a monastic. It was the. That the heavens opened and it began to rain.