Zaragoza

The big city: Zaragoza.
It's about 2 hours' drive from Jaca including parking time. While Jaca has about 14,000 inhabitants, 700,000 live in the Aragonese capital of Zaragoza, so it's a real contrast to go there. Busy streets, innumerable shops, cars, buses, noise almost all the time.
We had to go this week to sort out our flat there; we'd had tenants there since we bought it- now it's free and we can spend the occasional weekend in the big city. After the summer the boys will be staying there when they are at the university.
Apart from time spent getting the flat sorted out, waiting for furniture to be delivered, we went to an exhibition about the sieges which took place in Zaragoza in 1808 and 1809. Napoleon's troops beseiged the city, and the people resisted. Thousands were killed. It was heroic and terrible-very famous at the time. The exhibition was held in two wonderful buildings in the city centre; the Lonja with its Mudejar exterior and Gothic arches inside, and the enormous Sástago Palace. In these we saw paintings-some by Goya, others less well-known artists, texts, artefacts such as the long rifles and bayonets they used. There were maps of the city and explanations of the progress of the sieges. Really well done, but very sobering.
In the streets of the city you can find plenty of evidence still: the Carmen gate, now dwarfed by the modern buildings which surround it, some of the many convents and monasteries, now just parish churches, stretches of city wall, even bullet-scarred houses.
This was on Maundy Thursday, while the streets were coloured with processions of hooded penitents playing their drums, not to mention the elegant women dressed in black with their high combs and mantillas. All very traditional.