Segovia and Madrid

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All good things must come to an end and so did our visit to Spain. During our final days in Spain we visited the town of Segovia and the metropolis of Madrid.

Segovia is an ancient town about 60 miles northwest of Madrid. Our first sight was the aqueduct. It was built by the Romans (who else?) about 0 CE. The highest section in Segovia is 38 meters (114 feet) tall and uses a double-decker arches design. The entire thing was built without mortar. The remaining section is almost a kilometer long and was restored in the 1990’s so looks very nice.

At the top of the hill in the center of town was the cathedral and it was as big as Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. It is still an official church but it felt more like a museum primarily because they charged admission. It was started in 1525 and completed over 200 years later in 1768. It was built on the site of a cathedral that was destroyed in a war but they were able to save and re-use many things such as iron gates, marble fonts and even the 200 seat choir carved in walnut. It has 20-odd chapels around the outside and each one contains lovely works of art. The outside is very gothic with its serrated edged spires in yellow stone.

Finally we walked to the far end of town to visit the Alcazar. It is a castle with a large tower surrounded by spires with round pointy roofs. It supposedly inspired Disney in his design of Sleeping Beauty’s castle in California. There were lots of coats of armor and other weapons because it’s most recent purpose, starting in the 1760’s, was as a military academy. In the 1800’s there was a bad fire which destroyed all of the roofs and much of the furnishings but it has been beautifully restored. It was built on the top of a 100 foot cliff and our guide told a sad story about how a nurse had accidentally dropped a royal baby over the side and the terrified woman had thrown herself after the child.

The next day we drove into Madrid. As you are probably aware, we are not fond of driving into the big cities and Madrid was just another example of why we don’t like it. It was a pretty drive from Segovia into Madrid but then we reached the big city and were on a ring road around the city. The exit was not labeled as we expected so by the time we recognized it we had missed it. Worried that turning around would get us even more lost, we continued on around the loop driving an additional 30 km and took another go at it. This time we made it but it took three more wrong turns before we reached the rental car office. We were glad to get back to just our feet where things move a lot slower.

According to our guidebook there are two reasons to visit Madrid: art museums and nightlife. Since we are not party animals we spent most of our time in the art museums. Our first afternoon we visited the Reine Sofia which houses the painting Guernica by Pablo Picasso. The collection focuses on Spanish art from the first half of the 20th century of which Guernica is the highlight. John really appreciated Guernica and I…well let’s just say I thought it was very big.

The next morning we headed to the Sunday Market. It is a weekly street market held on…you guessed it…Sunday. Our guidebook says it is one of the biggest in Europe and it is certainly the largest we have encountered. We saw at least 500 vendors and I don’t think we saw it all. It was mostly clothing (new and used) but had a good amount of miscellany thrown in such as keys, plants, books and food. There were literally thousands of people shopping which provided fantastic people watching opportunities.

We elected to go to Madrid’s most famous art Museum, the Prado, on Sunday evening because it is free. Of course several thousand other people also decided to go Sunday evening for the same reason. But the lines moved quickly and the museum is big (I mean BIG). The guide book says they have 3500 works on display and I believe it. John and I looked at a couple hundred and barely scratched the surface. The building is beautiful and, as a former palace, it is well suited to be an art gallery.

We had planned to have paella but the restaurant was closed on Sundays. We wandered until we found a tapas bar and had a reasonable dinner. We both agreed that we never got the hang of eating in Spain. In many other countries you can tell who serves food when but in Spain they may or may not be serving food. Bars are a good place to get tapas but it is difficult to tell which ones serve them. The days that worked the best were the days we had our main meal in the middle of the day.

The next day I flew to Greece and John took the train to France. For the next six weeks John will be walking the Camino de Santiago from St Jean Pied de Port in France to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. I will be doing some volunteer gardening then exploring Greece on my own. So you will be getting blog entries from both of us…aren’t you lucky!

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Photos

Alcazar
Supposedly the inspiration for Sleeping Beauty's Palace in Disneyland.

The Painting with the Longest Title
Discourses on love passions: psychogeographical slopes of the drift and localization of ambience units. (Yes, that really is the title.)

Street Musicians in Madrid
They were having so much fun!

It was a Short Knight
Get it? Short night vs short knight? He-he-he-snort.