I was quite desirous of seeing the fabled first century Roman aqueduct in Segovia, the one in constant
use from the first day under Roman rule right into the 1970's. And who said that institutions were not reliable
for more than about a hundred years? It is obvious that you can change types of governments and still retain
the basic survival infrastructure for a town.
At the end of the tour I was able to sneak up almost to the top of the aqueduct, but barbed wire kept destructive feet off the very top of it:
I also wanted to see, in Segovia, the very throne room where Columbus reported his findings to his royal sponsors, Ferdinand and Isabella:
The throne room, of course, sat in a palace that was largely destroyed and rebuilt, over time, including a fanciful recreation of the defensive portion, sufficiently fanciful to have been used in several Disney movies according to our guide:
The right hand side (see picture below), is supposed to have a lot of the original walls and ceilings of the original Moorish Alcazar (castle), including the scenes below from the throne room and Isabella bedroom:
Isabella bedroom was nicely decorated with tapestries, but the original Moorish stone designs were left over the doors. Not believing in graven images, both Jews and Moors became real artisans in terms of designing and executing very fine geometric and symbolic patterns into stone.
This was especially true of the higher reaches of walls, and ceilings! Ceilings in Moorish castles and palaces were beautifully decorated, without pictures as in contemporary Christian castles and palaces.
Obviously, the Moorish ceiling below was expertly complemented with some Christian imagery by the new owners of the castle-palace!
Coming back outside, our tour was favored by a couple descending on their nest, a stork couple that is. Every high place, roofs of large buildings and trees, had stork nests on it. There were storks everywhere. It was that time of year when storks mate and produce their offspring. Later in the year they return to North Africa, every Spring they come back here to reproduce. They picked a nice place.
Where did the royal twosome of Ferdinand and Isabella hear Mass? In the Segovia Cathedral of course. Although not one of the largest, like Toledo's, it has to be among the most lavishly appointed cathedrals in Christendom. It is just beautiful inside, but most of my pictures are not worth posting.
From the Alcazar, located on the cliff that is the eastern extent of the city, this is one view of the cathedral in the midst of the city:
At the east end of the Cathedral, some reconstruction kept people off the terrace, allowing a familiar face to bloom, what we would call the California poppy:
The working entrance was on the Plaza Mayor, of course, the main square of every town:
The only interior picture worth looking at in my collection is one of the nave, poorly showing some of the ornately designed royal symbolism at the top of something as mundane as a grillwork to keep unauthorized people out of the ornately carved choir seats (both sides) and the beautiful wall of wood and statuary in the background. Behind us, a similar grillwork protects the incredibly ornate altarpiece of painted and carved works of art showing highlights of the Christian story, placed together in an immense two dimensional array with gold leaf borders. It is worthy of protection:
It was just an 'extra' that the tour I signed up for also would take me to Avila, made famous by its Moorish city walls, still standing,
and by its most famous Saint, among several native Saints, St. Teresa of Avila, who has a richly decorated convent dedicated to her memory there, including a museum where her personal effects and handwritings are housed, including a preserved ring finger (but relics of Saints as magical objects is not what the religion or place is about, anymore -- it is behind glass for anyone to see along with other personal effects):
Interior pictures I took did not do justice to the subject matter, so I am not showing them here.
Avila also has a Cathedral, one built into the city wall and that served as part of the city fortification and survival machinery, its walls were defendable and it had two interior wells to provide in case of siege!
As usual, interior pictures did not come out at all well and are not shown. The lady in front of the Cathedral was an Italian tourist on our tour whose husband was always posing her in front of monuments, a common practice. But he took so long to take his pictures that inevitably several others on the tour ended up snapping her along with each monument, it was either that or lose sight of the ever moving tour group, and we thought we had lost these two several times but they were obviously expert joggers.
Both destinations, Segovia and Avila, were on the northern slopes of the Sierra de Guadarrama, and as we drove over the pass (through a tunnel actually) and entered the dense pine woodlands and green pastures over the top, our guide told us these mountains were used to represent the at times snowy and at times flower-filled Ural Mountains in the film Doctor Zhivago. I was surprised, but why not?
The two pictures above show different views in the Guadarrama mountains taken from a moving object, the train from the previous day that covered some of the same territory as the bus did the next day. The picture below is one of the few that came out decent when the train was moving even faster, on the plain (that obviously does not mainly get the rain that falls in Spain!).
It was amazing to me how the plains, both north and south of Madrid, resembled the Palouse region of Eastern Washington State. Grass and scrubland with about half the hillslopes bare, but with greenery in drainages, marshes where drainages were blocked. As far as agriculture, it was also very similar: dry- land grain on smoother and longer slopes and hillsides, some of it fallowed to add soil moisture for next year, and intense irrigated agriculture and lushly green towns in the flat valley bottoms. The only real difference was the sight of an occasional village or even big city on a butte or hilltop, obviously located there for protection, Medieval-style, like Toledo. Not found in Washington State! The Guadarramas reminded me of the Blues, dividing the eastern parts of Washington and Oregon.