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.