BOX 169: El Escorial and Avila.

This imposing 1919 building faces one of the grand squares of Central Madrid, the Plaza de Cibeles. It used to be called the Palace of Communications, because it was built to be the headquarters for the post office and telegraph and telephone services, though now, renamed the Cybele Palace, it's Madrid's City Hall. But I didn't know any of this when I took this picture of what I thought was a cool-looking building.

It was my first photo on my first trip to Spain, and the only photo I took of Madrid on the whole trip. The shot doesn't take in the whole building--I'm offering it as more of a hazy, jetlagged impression of Madrid on the morning I arrived. I was rushing from my friends' hotel to the Prado, the great art museum, to see one special painting before we were to leave the city in an hour or two. The painting was Velasquez' famous Las Meninas, which is 10 and a half feet tall and thus all the more a reason to see it in person.

As for why the rush: Earlier that year my friend Gloria was planning a trip to Spain with her mother, Evelyn, and her two young sons, Nigel and Lucas. (See BOXES 163-164 for pics of the boys from January 1986.) A particular motivation for the trip was to visit a young man named Pablo, a good friend of the Garvins who had resided at their place in Santa Monica. Pablo was planning to spend the summer (or part of it) with his family in Vigo, Galicia, and his parents invited his American hosts to visit them in early June. I knew Pablo as well, and things worked out so that I would be able to join Gloria, Evelyn and the kids for three weeks of their planned stay in Spain. Gloria, Evelyn and the kids arrived in Madrid a few days before I did. They'd rented a car for the day I arrived, with plans for a leisurely drive (a week or so) northwest to Galicia. After the stay with Pablo's family we would drive along the north coast of Spain to Basque Country in the northeast, then down to Barcelona.

So, on a cool and crisp but sunny morning, I left my bags at the Garvins' hotel and, while they got packed and went off to pick up the car, I had just enough time to run off to see Las Meninas. (I don't recall having extra minutes to make a mad dash through the Prado to see other masterpieces.) Then it was into the car for the first leg of our trip--a short drive through the Castilian countryside to El Escorial, the vast Renaissance palace-and-monastery complex of King Philip II. My next shot shows our first glimpse of the towers of El Escorial, followed by a view of the austere facade of the monastery and the stone courtyard in front of it:

That courtyard seems to have impressed me more than the buildings themselves, considering the number of photos I took of it (or them--you may be seeing more than one courtyard). Here for example are my traveling companions: Gloria with Lucas in the stroller, Evelyn and Nigel:

And here are three more views. My favorite is the child with the ball, though the others give even more of a sense of the severe architecture:

These next shots are I think from later in the day with more tourists:

And here are a couple of myself--I'm guessing I was feeling jetlagged enough to take a break from our exploration of the many buildings of the complex.

I did manage to take a photo of the dome of the Basilica of San Lorenzo el Real, at the center of the complex:

And here are two glimpses of details of the large frescos in one hall depicting victorious Spanish battles:

After El Escorial we made a stop at the nearby "Valley of the Fallen," the grandiose monument to the Spanish Civil War which to me had a strongly Fascistic vibe; I didn't care to take any photos. Our goal for our first overnight stay was the city of Avila, to the west, with its medieval walls still intact. I took this photo the next day, as we were leaving the city, but I'll place it here to give you a perspective on the whole town:

Our hotel was somewhere in the old town, probably near the Cathedral, which you see in the upper left above and in two shots I took the evening before. I see from the clock on the church that it was still quite light at 9:15 pm.

Here are a couple of views of the interior of the Cathedral the next morning:

We also visited the much smaller Church of San Pedro, which has two beautiful Romanesque portals built in the 1100s:

And finally, here are two more pictures I took as we walked around that morning. The first shows the apse of the Cathedral--i.e., the building "from behind," where it becomes part of the walls surrounding the entire city. The second shows a stork in its nest on top of a church bell tower.

Storks nesting on top of towers and chimneys turned out to be a common sight in this part of Spain. Another was red poppies in the countryside. Our first sight of them as we drove along a country highway toward Segovia led us to stop and take pictures of them:

(Another traveler once told me she loved the sight of the poppies she saw on her first trip to Spain so much that she stopped in a garden supplies store to buy some seeds to take back to the States. But the clerk only laughed at her: apparently it was like asking an American clerk for dandelion seeds.) Eventually we got to Segovia, northeast of Avila, and stayed there two nights, I think, since there was so much to see. I'll report on Segovia in my next post.