Tuesday 25th February 2025 – Burgos, Spain

 Jane decided to have a day at the campsite, what she calls a ‘poddle day’. I wanted to visit two museums in the city and so I caught the bus in again, arriving just in time for the opening of the Museum of Human Evolution. This is a very modern museum of huge size, housed in glass-fronted, five-storey building. No expense had been spared, there were lots of staff on duty and all of the exhibits had explanations in Spanish and English. For oldies like me, entry was free!
Atapuerca is probably the most important prehistoric site in Europe and was designated a World Heritage Site in 2000. They have found bones of early man dating to nearly a million years and evidence of the earliest known settlement of man in Western Europe. The museum has finds from a number of sites in the Atapuerca mountains and the results of the excavations of two caves are shown in dark, cave-like rooms. It was very impressive, especially coming face-to-skull with a pre-Neanderthal man and a stone hand axe, both approx. 400,000 years old.
That part of the museum was excellent. The rest of the museum, unsurprisingly, covered human evolution and was very well presented, although not of so much interest to me.
The next museum was the Museum of Burgos. This had two sections, one devoted to Christian art and the other to local archaeology. I have seen too much Christian art and walked through that section fairly rapidly. There was however some very good 15^th and 16^th century paintings in excellent condition.
The archaeological section was excellent although they obviously didn’t have the money that the Museum of Human Archaeology had. The displays were rather old fashioned and all of the information boards and find tags were only in Spanish. This made it difficult to follow but the quality of the finds, especially those from Iron Age sites, was excellent.
Time was getting on and I just had time to look in at the indoor market before it closed at 14:00. Both of the museums were on the opposite side of the river from the cathedral and it was obvious that this was much more an area for the locals with a large variety of independent, specialist shops.
I went back to the excellent Las Espuelas del Cid restaurant for lunch and had another wander around the centre before catching the bus back to the campsite.
Photos: The 400,000 year old pre-Neanderthal skull; An even older 500,000 year old hand axe; The courtyard of the Burgos Museum; One of the specialist shops near the Burgos Museum – it specialises in cod!