Continuing our journey in the Northern regions of Spain, we move from Asturias to Castilla de Leon! We were warmly welcomed by Pablo at the bus station and after a quick freshen-up, Isma joined us for a nightly city tour and tapas!
As it turns out, Leon has many fun historic anecdotes, starting from a series of “fake buildings” that have a much smaller size than what they seem- or even entirely “stolen” facades from buildings in other cities. An annual procession for the burial of Genarin, a character in Leon who was run over by the city’s first garbage truck in 1929 while peeing on the city walls. After his death, people decided to commemorate him through lyrics and poetry and now, almost 100 years later, this has evolved into a huge event that brings the city closer every year.
In general, we loved the city and we were incredibly lucky to be at exactly the right place and time to witness the procession of Semana Santa. Our host, Pablo, happens to live EXACTLY in front of the church where the procession starts, so had VIP seats and the best view in town!
The Semana Santa, also known as Holy Week in English, is the week that leads up to Easter and every day there are different events, traditions and liturgies that take place and hold great value for Christians. As you may see in the photos if you look it up, the Semana Santa involves some very “peculiar” masks, unfortunately (or fortunately) we were not able to witness that ourselves.
On our second day hosted by AEGEE Leon, it was finally time for our workshops! Both took place on the same day and believe it or not, our venue was A PUB! Now we’re not going to lie, having a workshop about such a sensitive topic as gender-based violence is in an environment where people come and go as they wish and Metallica plays in the background- isn’t ideal. Still, we managed to successfully finish our workshops and convey to the participant’s everything we wanted to.
The first one was “Gender-based violence in the Digital World” where some of the experiences we