Little people

The Munchkins have come to Burgos. Little people with square cheeks and the deeply chiselled bronze faces of years in the fields. They giggle and sigh in their matching lime neck scarves that announce them to be on a pilgrimage to Burgos from their home in Avisto - wherever that is. Pilgrimage or coach trip, we're swept up in their stream through the cloisters of Burgos Cathedral, bobbing above them like fishing floats. Later, free range Munchins can be detected in most bars of the city centre.

A friend once told me that in his Spanish wife's family, the parents and grandparents were tiny; but with the generations raised from the waning of the Dictatorship onwards, her relatives were all giants in comparison. Could good nutrition and freedom from poverty really have such an impact in a single generation?

5th September 2008