The first stop on the journey was the Monastery of San Zoilo in Carrión de los Condes (Palencia), where workshops were held on reading medieval walls and 3D digitalisation of medieval heritage. There, researcher Zoilo Perrino, president of the Cluny Ibérica association, coordinated the practical activities and conducted a guided tour of the monastery's medieval facilities, which he has been working on for years to preserve. Perrino, an expert in digitalisation of cultural heritage, is also part of the research project. Thesauri Rituum which Dr. Pazos-López directs at the URJC. The students were then able to visit different sites in Carrión de los Condes, highlighting the important doorway of the Church of Santiago, one of the best examples of Spanish Romanesque sculpture.
In the city of Burgos, a night tour of the portals of the Gothic Cathedral took place, with special attention to its iconographic programs. For this, the collaboration of Jamal Bouzecour (FAH-URJC), Naiara Ortega (FAH-URJC) and Daniel Petrón (FCEE-URJC), who are staff of the INTERVISUALAB Laboratory from the URJC, a research support center of the FCEDEI that has been launched in recent months dedicated to providing consulting services to companies and entities on visual studies and digital humanities applied to museums.
On the second day, the group moved to the town of Oña to enjoy a lecture about the Monastery of San Salvador in the Middle Ages given by Dr. Ana María Cuesta Sánchez, academic secretary of the CAPIRE research group at the Complutense University of Madrid. In this medieval monastery, workshops were also held on medieval stone polychromy and on the spatial dimensions of the medieval monastery, in which students were able to experience the role of Benedictine monks for a day.
An important part of this day consisted of the simulation of one of the medieval canonical hours from the monastic choir, in which the students had the opportunity to receive a master class in Gregorian chant and rehearsed the execution of several psalms, a Gregorian hymn and a litany procession through the church and the cloister. For this, they were accompanied by several students who are part of the Medieval Music Classroom, an interesting student initiative that students can still join and which is coordinated by student María Soto from the FCEE of the URJC, who was able to accompany the singing with the baroque organ of the monastery.
The programme of activities culminated with a cultural itinerary through the monastic natural landscape, combining a short walking route through the green surroundings of the monastery with the discovery of the external monastic rooms, including the fish farm and the educational areas of the Modern and Contemporary Ages.
Dr. Pazos considers the activity a success because “while the students sing the litanies of the saints and simulate a procession through the medieval cloister, their minds are transported to a different time in which the monks inhabited the walls of the monastery, without having to resort to complex textual narratives or educational technological devices.” Precisely, taking into account its experiential nature, this teaching model of immersive field work has numerous theoretical references that support it as a successful innovative methodology that has been implemented for many years in different universities through teaching innovation projects such as the one coordinated by Ángel Pazos at the FCEDEI and in which some of his most brilliant students also collaborate.