A failed hunt for history

My project for today was to get some overview of the history of Pamplona. I failed in a material sense – although I did read up on it in Wikipedia.

After class I went to visit the Navarran Archives. Which turned out to be closed for Summer. There was a rather neat wooden model of Pamplona – which was impressive, but short on history.

The Museum of Navarra turned out not open until 5pm so I had lots of time for some homework. When five rolled around the Museum was mostly closed for renovations.

It was not all bad. There were some amazing artefacts from hundreds of thousands of years ago. I find the idea of our ancestors chipping stones and scraping maps onto bones utterly awe-inspiring. The stone at bottom right in the collage below is a map made 11,000 years ago.

From a much later period there were also some pretty Roman murals.

All in all not my most successful outgoing. But I can’t complain after a couple of hours sitting in a very cool bar built on a bastion on the walls.

Walking home I noticed something interesting. The Cathedral has a clock on one tower and a sundial on the other. The clock was showing it to be just before 7pm, as was my watch, while the sundial was showing just before 4:30pm. And that’s the perfect illustration of how Spain is in the wrong time zone and why the afternoons are so hot.