Saturday afternoon, we took the commuter train to the town of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, or just El Escorial on all the signs, to see the royal monastery erected for Philip II.  The name of the town is a mouthful, and since nobody seems to use the whole thing anymore, we thought that “San Lorenzo” was part of the name of the Monastery until we looked it up.  And that had us confused, since everything inside the monastery itself said it was dedicated to St. Jerome.

When we got home, I realized we’d even forgotten to take a picture of the outside, which was pretty impressive.  So, I yanked the pictures off of Wikipedia.  I mean, really, this is what we saw, and I’m not sure if I care if we actually took the picture :).

By the way, if you hadn’t tried — you can click any of the photographs for a larger version.

The entrace to the Monastery at El Escorial

Aerial view of the monastery -- OK, there is no way we could possibly have taken this ourselves

Philip II was quite the ambitious, hard-nosed Catholic.  Among his wives (apparently he had several), was Bloody Mary, and he had a hand in her goal of converting England back to Catholicism with flame and sword.  This building was his royal residence, a cathedral, a monastery, and a school all rolled into one.  If you can’t tell from the aerial pic, it is ENORMOUS.  And they built it in just 20 years, which is pretty impressive for the day.

As usual, no photographs.  Actually, the “no photographs” prohibition was worse than most.  I figured that we could take pictures of the outside, but I actually got poked by a guard for taking photos of the grounds from a third-story window.  I’m not sure what that was about — I can hardly do damage to the greenery by photographing it.

As a result, this panorama is a bit lopsided:

Part of the monastery grounds

Some of the really intricately sculpted shrubs

An Italian-style courtyard with fountains

This was probably the most confusing tour we’ve taken yet, even though it was totally linear.  Maybe that’s WHY it was so confusing — they wanted to direct everyone in a single line going in one direction all over the castle, when it wasn’t exactly designed that way.  But there were some great things to see. Of course, I couldn’t photograph them.  But, since ripping the Wikipedia pics worked so well for the outside, I ripped a couple of pictures I saw online.

One thing I didn’t see a good picture of was the crypt of the kings, where every king (I think) from Carlos I (aka Charles I, aka Emperor Charles the V of – um, I think – the Holy Roman Empire) through Alfonso XIII (king before Franco) is buried, along with “queens who were mothers of kings.”  It was this amazing underground room made entirely of polished jasper and marble, with some metal accents.  Essentially, the whole place was shades of purple.  There were stone casks for each of the kings and queens built into the walls.  There’s a small picture here on the official tourism website that doesn’t really do it justice: http://www.patrimonionacional.es/en/escorial/bdescor2.htm

It was a pain in the butt to get into the crypt of the kings because the Monastery museum had decided to charge extra for access to it.  OK, that’s fine, but instead of just charging an extra fee, they required you to buy an audio tour.  When we got there, all the audio tour devices were in use, and there was about a half-hour wait.  So we ended up going through the entire tour, coming back, buying an audio tour, and then going back to the crypt.  Weird, but it worked.

Here are a couple of pictures I did yank of cool things:

Ceiling fresco of the Main Stair of the Cloister area

This picture might give you a bit of an idea, but this was bar-none the most amazing fresco I have seen to date.  I could have been looking at it with 3D glasses — the perspective was so good that some of the robes just seemed to jump off the stone and dangle in the air.  The subject matter is pretty generic; the title is, approximately, “The Glory of the Spanish Monarchy,” and it features the royalty of the day being revered by angels and Greek heroes.  We saw probably four that were indistinguishable in style in the Palacio Real at Madrid.  But this one just seemed to do it better.

The library

In perhaps the most confusing part of the whole tour, we almost didn’t find the Library.  We finally figured out where to turn and what stairs to go up about 10 minutes before closing.  That’s a real shame because the library was amazing.  It was a treasure trove of ancient texts in all sorts of languages, some stenciled and illuminated, and some handwritten.  Examples were laid open behind the glass to see.  Apparently, the oldest book here is something from the 5th century by St. Augestine.  They were all shelved in the way Terran read about in The Book on the Bookshelf, with spines facing the back.  Some had their titles stenciled onto the edges of the pages facing forward.  We could have spent an hour here, but I don’t know if we’ll make time to come back or not.

At any rate, we toured until our feet were about to fall of and they kicked us out.  Then we took the train home and had dinner.  The end.

So, we managed to make it to Segovia on Saturday.  We actually got up earlier than we needed to and found ourselves at the train station with 45 minutes to wander around.  I discovered that the overpriced Burger King in the train station, which advertises that it sells breakfast, does not actually open until 10:30am on Saturdays.  Mirror World.  A pastry shop sold a dreamy egg and ham croissant, though, which I was mostly able to order in Spanish.

Historic Segovia is a walled city with a functioning Roman aqueduct that, so we have heard, was still in municipal use until the 1980s.  It’s an amazing and awe-inspiring structure to see.

The great aqueduct

The acqueduct carried water over/through the city walls, which are also intact.

The city wall

We tried to follow the aquedect until it terminated but it wasn’t that clear, so we just wandered around the narrow streets of the city for a while.  For a town with a heavy tourist trade, Segovia is surprisingly unpretentious.  The shopping streets were almost completely free of sovenier shops and mostly filled with practical stores for locals — grocery shops, cooking stores, lamp shops, clothing stores.  We picked up a little pizza pan for cooking in our small covertable microwave/oven.

Eventually, we found Plaza Mayor and the The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Ascention and of St. Frutos, the last gothic cathedral constructed in Spain.

The Gothic Cathedral

It was built in the 1500s on the ruins of another cathedral that was burned down in a war I’m not familiar with.  We couldn’t take pictures inside, of course, but we were able to take pictures of the cloister, which dates from the 1100s and 1200s, I believe, and was moved over stone-by-stone from the original burned church.

The cathedral cloister

After visiting the cathedral, we settled down for a three-course high-end Spanish lunch.  We’d been planning for the splurge, and we picked a nice historic inn that had converted its courtyard into a restaurant.  The food was very good, though the soup and dessert courses outshone the entrees.  I think this is because we didn’t order the pork — we’ve been getting just a bit sick of ham.  After we got home, I double-checked our book and was reminded that Segovia is renowned for its suckling pig.  D’oh!  Also, we think that I may have been served the wine that went with BOTH meals, since Terran refused his.  The wine never seemed to run out, and I was just a bit drunk by the time we left.  Still, it was some of the best red wine I’ve had yet.

After lunch, we hit the castle of Alcazar.

Alcazar viewed from below

Interestingly, the castle had no restrictions about photographs at all, so we had a field day.  They had an armory exhibit that was much smaller and less spectacular than the one at Palacio Real, but it was still cool, and I took the opportunity to get a few pictures of armor.

Jousting armor on models

We finished up our exploration of the castle by climbing to the top of the tower, which was used as a prison in its day.

A prison door in Alcazar tower

We had a bit of time and energy left after that, since we’d schedule the last train home.  We took a switchback path down from the city walls and visited a 12th century romanesque church that featured an inner sanctum used by Knights Templar for all-night vigils.

Inner sanctum

We made our way back to town via a nice public park that kept us cool and refreshed (as refreshed as we could be because now we were REALLY exhausted).

We have devoted today to sleeping in and noodling around on the computer.