25 June - Burgos to Salamanca. We spent most of the day driving on the high plain of Spain - 800 to 1000 meters above sea level - from Burgos to Salamanca via Valladolid and Tordesillas. We had time for a leisurely walk through Salamanca and an evening drink at a cafe in the Plaza Mayor.

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Drawing a line on history

The trip from Burgos south-west across the meseta towards the university city of Salamanca was meant to take us via Valladolid, a former capital of Castilla and site of a Sculpture Museum that was said to be worth seeing. This proved to be the second city where our maps failed us (a bad navigator always blames his charts): we failed to find either underground parking or, indeed, the museum we were seeking. We did however find a circuitous route through the city, somehow entering from the south (we'd come from the north-east, having left the main road and travelling through some very pretty country towns) and exiting to the east. On this occasion the map proved useful and we found a scenic cross-country drive back to the main road (N620) and fortuitously ended up in Tordesillas for lunch. Not only did El Rancho Grande turn out to be a very good restaurant where Margaret and Cath could indulge themselves with an excellent, if cliched, paella and I could have a fine mezze plate but this was the town that had given its name to one of the more bizarre agreements of the early modern world. You might say I bored my lunch companions with a history lesson, and why should they be alone. After the discovery of the New World, there was some conflict between the two main European maritime nations of the late fifteenth century, Spain and Portugal, as to which should own what parts of the Indies and the Americas. In 1494, Pope Alexander VI (a Borgia and one of the renaissance popes discussed in detail by Barbara Tuchman in her brilliant analysis, The March of Folly) convened a conference between the two Catholic kings in Tordesillas to nut out the problem. The resulting Treaty of Tordesillas drew a line of longitude 370 leagues west of Cape Verde. All lands to the west of that line were Spanish and all east were Portuguese. This is why, of Latin America, only Brazil is Portuguese and why the Portuguese dominated the Iberian colonial possessions in the east. I had taught students about this treaty on countless occasions and it didn't occur to me that we might pass through, and stop, in this place until we arrived.

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26 June - Salamanca. A day of exploring the wonders and joys of the university town of Salamanca.

A hill town

In a lot of ways, Salamanca turned out to be my favorite city of the pilgrimage. It's a hill town, that managed to survive the Falangist regime by being seen as a backwater and that has now re-established itself as major centre of learning. The main town of Salamanca is on a hill above the Rio Tormes. It's built around an eighteenth century Plaza Mayor, but its real heart is the university, founded around the time of Magna Carta, and housed in a series of buildings dating from the Renaissance to the modern. In this case, we had no trouble finding our hotel, outside the walls, on the southern verge of the city, across the river from the old town. The river was crossed by the Puente Romano, a bridge that was, amazingly enough, built by the Romans (I have been sceptical about the provenance of Spanish bridges ever since visiting Ronda in 1988 and discovering that the ravine is crossed by two bridges: the Puente Nueve, which is the elder; and the Puente Romano, which was built by the Arabs). From the river, the town rises above you, dominated by golden-brown sandstone buildings, particularly the catedral and the university. The Plaza Mayor hidden in their lee from that viewpoint is a surprise awaiting you as you climb through the town. Through the day the play of the sun on the township changes the colors from a light tan to a dark chocolate. Walking across the bridge you leave behind the twentieth century and enter the Renaissance, narrow streets and two and three storey buildings, with cars restricted to the outskirts and the town centre limited to foot traffic.

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A city centre

Entering the Plaza Mayor from the south is an amazing experience for which I was completely unprepared. A narrow street, the Rua Mayor, leads one away from the cathedral towards what looks like a small piazza with an arched doorway in it. But this turns into an arched entrance to the square out of which this magnificent vista opens up. The plaza is set just off the straight north-south and east-west axes. The sandstone buildings with three storeys above the colonnaded arcade surround the huge open space. Burnished gold would be the color I would use to describe the stone, although it appears almost bleached white in the direct sunlight and dusky brown at dusk. At the northern end is a more decorative facade, which is the facing on the Ayuntamiento, the town hall. Otherwise the buildings are fairly uniform and the square, with its rooftop balcony railed in sandstone, with pointed projections every meter or so. On all sides are tables for cafes, with the populace moving around through the day to avoid the direct sunlight. In the late afternoon it seems that the whole population of the town is sitting in the cafes, sipping coffee or soft drink, promenading across the plaza and meeting with neighbors and friends. This is the epitome of public space: the idea of the Plaza Mayor is one that is endemic in Spain. We had previously sat in the main square of Burgos and would do so in Madrid, but none comes close to the Salamanca Plaza Mayor for splendor and style. While we were wandering around town on the Saturday, I passed through the plaza on a number of occasions and there must have been half a dozen weddings performed in the town hall at the northern end of the plaza. Each wedding party and guests (all dressed to the nines) emerged into the plaza for a public display of affection, with their well-dressed guests mixing with the passing parade. And after them came the janitorial party, armed with brooms, Dr Peabody-like, cleaning up the remnants of confetti and rice before the next party convened. Popular perambulation, meeting and greeting over coffee, tourist office, souvenir and jewellery stores, internet cafes, town hall and royal apartments - the Plaza Mayor is the beating heart of Salamanca. We enjoyed coffee and people watching on the Friday night and returned for Saturday lunch (and even more people watching) while exploring the city.

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A learning curve

The university has been around since 1215 but the main building is of late Renaissance period, in the "plateresque" style. This means that the carving on the facade of the sandstone building was of an intricate style reminiscent of the sort of work normally associated with a silversmith (platero in Spanish). It took us some time to find the building because we thought that we were looking for a building that faced onto a rather large open square with a statue of Fray Luis de Leon (one of the more famous teachers at the university: a sixteenth century lecturer in theology who was detained by the Inquisition for seven years and, on his release, commenced his return lecture with "As we were saying yesterday ..."). I should have remembered experiences from other European cities (like discovering the Trevi Fountain in Roma not in a large open piazza but in a small claustrophobic square completely surrounded by tall buildings) because we eventually found the main entrance on a narrow lane and the square with the statue was a narrow plaza opening up from the laneway. The facade was fascinating and I could have spent hours looking at the details of the carvings (the image on the side shows the statue and the facade) and then there was the puzzle of finding the frog carving somewhere on the building. Apparently if you are able to spot this piece of frippery without assistance you will have good luck and marry within a year. We intended to tour the old campus on the Saturday afternoon but discovered that Saturday is nuptials day in Salamanca and, in addition to the wedding parties spilling out of the Plaza Mayor, there was at least one taking place within the confines of the university and, thus, the place was closed to tourists. Bugger.

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Some old; something new

Instead we took a walk around the cathedrals. There are in fact two cathedrals in one in Salamanca. The Catedral Nueva was is a gothic pile built in the early sixteenth century right next to the Catedral Vieja, a romanesque design from the twelfth century. You have to pass through the former to get into the latter where, surprise, surprise, a nuptial mass was being performed. Like many Spanish gothic cathedrals, the proportions of the newer building is ruined partly by the positioning of the Choir right in the middle of the nave but the older one (see right) was a lovely and simple building with a beautiful cloisters off the side. Because of the wedding we passed quickly though the nave, with its whitewashed walls and faded frescoes, and into the cloisters off which were a large number of interesting chapels with tombs of early bishops, as well as art, costumes and reliquaries from the church's history. It was somewhat better than just another church, but no real substitute for the missing university.

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Shell be right

The link of Salamanca to the Pilgrims' Road to Santiago - it was one of the byways on the road from the south, via Madrid, when the reconquista had spread Christian culture through Spain - is shown by the fifteenth century Casa de las Conchas, covered in carved cockle shells over all its walls as well as wooden versions on the doors, with intricately decorated wrought iron window grilles. As much as it was interesting primarily for the weirdness of its external features, the house's interior patio was magnificent in its proportions and simplicity. The same could be said of old Salamanca's streets, with their narrow laneways and small piazzas. Just wandering around the town, discovering the towers, churches and squares was a series of constant revelations: here the Escuelas Menores with its lovely patio and art galleries in the old school rooms; there a statue of an old music maestro. And, after, exploring all day Saturday, driving out to the west of the city, about 5 kilometers out on a rise, to watch Salamanca at sunset. And discovering a completely new palette of colors. It's definitely a town we'll be going back to.

27 June - Salamanca to Madrid. On the high meseta road again, for a longer day in the car, we proceed to Madrid past Avila and Segovia and discover our hotel in Madrid and its immediate environs.

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A quick look

Sunday turned out to be a remarkable day - we arrived at the intersection of fortune and serendipity. We had planned the drive so that we'd arrive in the capital in the early evening. Ha! First we went off the highway to explore some hinterland and find breakfast, tripping over Penaranda de Bracamonte, a charming Castillan village with an open cafe where coffee and churros were available. (For those unfamiliar with Spanish food, churros are the local equivalent of donuts, extruded dough in an elongated cylindrical form, fried in oil and coated with sugar. It is the staple of Spanish morning meals, eaten either with hot chocolate or strong black coffee - cafe solo.) Thence to the walled city of Avila. Approaching it from Salamanca, we saw the complete picture of crenellated walls (twelfth century), watch towers and narrow streets. The old city remains completely enclosed by the wall, and the suburbs around the city house the modern industrial areas and residences. Naturally cars are forbidden in the city and we could not find parking in a place near enough and protected enough to satisfy us. So Cath dropped Margaret and me at the old gate nearest the cathedral and drove around the town. We were able to explore the township (which Cath and I had visited at more length in 1988) in and around the Gothic cathedral: the narrow laneways and the medieval buildings. The whole medieval-world feel was overwhelming and the visit could have been extended but fortunately for us, given what we were to find in Segovia, it wasn't.

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Dancing in the streets

The old town of Segovia is 100m above the meseta, with the Alcazar (the old fort/castle) at the western end, on the top of the cliff, overlooking the valley, jutting like the prow of a mighty ship above the plain. To get to it from the newish town to the Plaza Mayor, we had walk up a narrow, winding roadway, hemmed in by houses, now mainly shops, cafes and restaurants, that climbs through a series of switchbacks from the remains of a first century Roman aqueduct which still operates to bring water from the valley below to the town above. We were standing there looking at the aqueduct and marvelling at all those things the Romans brought us when a band struck up. We'd arrived in Segovia on the day of a festival - for John the Baptist I think. Suddenly a mass of humanity was moving from the new town towards the laneway to the old town. The guitar band we heard first went ahead and was followed by a pipe band. Then there was a parade of papier-mache giants, dancing through the streets, and more bands, and dancers and tribes of celebrating humanity. There was nothing we could do but join the parade and we made out slow and sinuous way up the hill, occasionally moving down a little to suss out a different group of entertainers. A straight walk up the hill may have taken 10-15 minutes. It took us over an hour. And near the Plaza Mayor, almost at the peak of hill, we found the restaurant we had been looking for (we hadn't been looking for a particular eatery but one that looked attractive and featured Castillan specialities). There we had a fantastic, if heavy, three-course lunch with a suckling pig main course for me. It was moving towards 1400 before we sat down and 1500 by the time we'd finished. For most of the time, the passing parade continued to pass up the remainder of the hill into the Plaza Mayor, visible (and audible) through the window behind our table.

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Nothing like Minas Tirith

The Segovia Plaza Mayor is of a different style to that of the others we saw: an open area, with buildings on three sides, dominated by the catedral on the western side and the town hall opposite it. Leading out of the north-western corner, along the side of the cathedral was a narrow, cobblestoned alley, with tourist shops and cafes among the houses, going down towards the prow of the town and the Alcazar, a thirteenth century castle, upgraded around the time of Ferdinand and Isabella, and then rebuilt again after a fire in the nineteenth century, that is now a museum. It is a little fantasyland in its look with spired turrets and crenellations, along the top of its light brown sandstone walls. As noted earlier, it commands the heights at the western end of town and is shaped rather like a large stone ship, with its prow sailing into the valley below. Inside it has been fitted out with period ceilings and adorned with art and painting that reflect the Isabelline era. There are also armor and furnishing from the era of Los Reyes Catholicos (late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries). A highlight was the view out of the windows onto the valley hundreds of meters below, and especially the vista from the open area right at the front of the castle, where an opening to the castle's cistern is also located.

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Size matters

The catedral, an early sixteenth century gothic construction, demonstrates all the faults and a few of the virtues of Spanish cathedral architecture. A huge and intrusive choir cuts the church in two and spoils whatever interior attraction it might have. Given that size and awfulness seem to be more important than aestethetics, it is amazing that there is any attractiveness in the high-vaulted late-gothic interior. Off to one side, there is a lovely and gentle cloisters, with a number of smaller and well-proportioned chapels. These cloisters are the remnants of a previous cathedral and were transported stone-by-stone from their original site and reconstructed as an adjunct to the newer and less attractive pile. Externally, the size and decorative nature of the cathedral, and the way it dominates the main square, and the town, attract the visitor and convey the apposite religious message. It remains one of those puzzling contradictions that summarises Spain, and epitomised the surprising and interesting day on the road to Madrid.

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Urban adventures

Even then the day wasn't quite over because we had the adventure of getting to, and into, Madrid and finding our hotel. We didn't leave Segovia until about 1830 and, as noted in an earlier Fit, we decided to use an autopista, despite the cost, as a way of getting quickly to the capital. And ran straight into a traffic jam. We did, however, soon clear that and made a relatively quick transit to Madrid, where we located all the right entries into the city and found the main road off which our hotel was located - the Gran Via, which sounds so much better than Big Street. There our luck ran out. We missed the small side street we were looking for and ended up driving around the block a few times before we found it. As Cath pointed out on a number of occasions, the "around the block" took us through what was obviously a red-light district where the denizens were commencing their trade for the evening - it was barely eight at night so the night was very much a pup. When we found the hotel, what we discovered was a doorway in what was an alley with no parking anywhere close. Margaret and I unloaded the car in record time while Cath stayed in the car. She had to move off very quickly because a police car joined those lined up behind her, exercising their car horns in the urban evening. Once more around the block for Cath while I sussed out the situation and then guided her to the underground carpark where we were to park our car (about four blocks from the hotel, on the other side of the Gran Via) until the next morning when we were to return the car. Our day continued as we left the hotel at about 2300 for a walk up the Via and dinner. If you find this a strange time for eating, I can only point out that the temperature was still in the 30s and the locals were just coming out to eat. We had a good tapas meal and a local beer.

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28-29 June - Madrid. A couple of days to explore the city, do some shopping and look at some art.

Around the town

To an extent, Madrid was a bit of an anti-climax after Salamanca and Segovia. Enjoyable as an experience - it remains my favourite inland city - but not the same quality of discovery and surprise as the other two cities. For one thing I'd seen a little of it in 1976-7 and Cath and I had spent quite a bit of time there in 1988. For another the heat on the two days we were there took a toll on us, at the end of a long month of travel - particularly Cath, who suffered a dose of heatstroke on the Monday afternoon (luckily this was the only serious illness of the pilgrimage, except for our bouts of flu around the time we were walking the Cinque Terre). As we had in Barcelona, we decided to use the tourist bus to take us around the city to the various sites. Like the earlier experience, we found three routes covering different aspects of the city. We determined to leave El Prado, Madrid's premier art museum, for Tuesday. The tour enabled Margaret to get a good overview of the city, seeing a number of the major attractions, including palaces, churches, squares and gardens. If memory serves me correctly we went past Atocha station, the centre of the terrorist bombing during the recent Spanish elections and through a very ordinary tourist centre built near the beautiful remains of the Puerta Toledo. Walking from the Puerta de Alcala to the Plaza de Cibeles, with its magnificent fountain, we arrived at the huge main post office, known locally as the Palacio de Communiciones. Just before lunch we were in the vicinity of the Puerta del Sol and its huge Corte Inglese department store, where Cath and Margaret once again went to the altar of the shopping gods. We sat for an afternoon drink in the Madrid Plaza Mayor, a lovely seventeenth century square with stones of a darker color than its Salamanca equivalent and not quite as overwhelming, perhaps because it was largely deserted on the Monday afternoon we were there. It was historically the site of inquisition autos-de-fe and now hosts a stamp and coin fair on weekends but doesn't seem to serve the same central role in the life of the city as Salamanca's. It was there that our day was cut short as Cath became increasingly sicker in the open sun, on a day where the temperature hovered in the high 30s, a heatstroke that we treated with cold compresses in the hotel room until she recovered some hours later.

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Ars Gratia Artis

As a result of Cath's unwellness, we spent most of the next day indoors - touring El Prado museum. This art gallery exhibits works from 1200CE to 1830CE and, while in concentrates on the greats of Spanish art, Goya, El Greco, Velazquez, Ribera and Murillo, it also features a number of great works by some northern European artists, particularly Bosch, Rubens and Brughel, and the Renaissance Italians like Titian and Tintoretto. Two things stood out for me on my third visit to the gallery: the obvious one is the Goya "black room" and the less obvious one was the room of Hieronymus Bosch canvases. El Bosco, as he is known in Spain, was a Dutch painter of the early sixteenth century whose work seems to me to be centuries ahead of its time. His best works have all the color and movement of the impressionists. The Garden of Earthly Delights is perhaps his best known work. A triptych (like many of his works) it depicts the creation on one side and hell on t'other and in the middle (see right) there is a crowded and busy scene of men and women enjoying all the sins and pleasures of the world. With its vivid presentation of the supernatural and the sensual, it invites continued study and offers little in the way of the expected moral lesson. More obviously moral is his Table of the Seven Deadly Sins that has, on a black background, a large inner circle and four smaller circles in the painting's corners. They represent death, judgment, heaven and hell. The middle circle has around the risen Christ seven segments depicting the seven deadly sins, shown as scenes from contemporary Dutch life. The Hay-cart is an earlier version of some of the ideas in The Garden of Earthly Delights. Although less colorful and less busy in its central panel, it also shows, in more details, the creation and fall of Satan on the left and Hell on the right. The central panel, which gives the painting its name, shows various classes of society trying to get their part of the hay bale - an illusion to the pleasures of the world, more overtly shown than in the Garden. Painted in greens, yellows and browns, The Temptation of St Anthony shows a very human saint on the side of the road, with its imaginary and interesting background and landscape and all sorts of strange demonic creatures responsible for the temptation that has been resisted. The "black room" has the fourteen paintings executed on his own house's walls by Francisco de Goya. Known in earlier times for his court portraits and colorful scenes, as well as a large series of 'cartoons' that show the design of his paintings, Goya's private demons weren't as well understood until the artwork from his final residence were revealed. The fourteen paintings are dominated by the color black and feature scenes of decadence, magic, evil and death. Saturn Devouring One of his Children may be the best-known and the most grisly, but many of the others are equally disturbing and thought-provoking. It's a room where you walk in unprepared and are so stunned that you have no choice but to sit and try to assimilate the insight into the artist's mind provided by the images. How the artist who painted the Naked Maya could also paint these images is a question that comes immediately to mind. How segmented his imagination must have been - or how deteriorated his mind was by the time he came to create these images and live with them every day. Those two rooms were the highlights of a series of experiences in which the art of centuries ago communicated its ideas to me. You've got to love an art gallery that provides so many questions and provokes so many emotions.

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Cleaning up

After the museum we had time for a further bus-trip around the city, to parts we hadn't seen before, particularly the northern parts of the city, including the new and growing areas around Salamanca (the suburb as distinct from the city) where the newer shopping and tourist districts are being developed. And a pilgrimage to the Bernabeu, the stadium for Real Madrid, completing the cycle of visits to major sporting facilities. It was a calm and relaxing end, on the top of an open double-decker bus, driving through the peak-hour traffic, past the high-rise residences and upmarket shops back to the Puerta del Sol and a good tapas dinner at a cafe near the hotel.

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30 June - 3 July - Madrid to Sydney via London and Singapore. A plane to London, and an overnight in an hotel in Heathrow. A plane to Singapore and a time to explore the city before a night there. A flight to Sydney.

Coming home

Three flights in three days with two overnights meant that the trip back took much longer than the trip over but was just as boring. One last coffee and churros breakfast in downtown Madrid and then off to an incredibly crowded airport: it was the end of a school/uni term and hordes of 16-20 year olds were going to the US and the UK for intensive English classes over the vacation. We sat in the airport coffee shop and spoke with a couple of English examiners - former academics who spend their retirement travelling to Europe and South America administering international English exams.

Once in London we decided against a trip into town - Margaret was too tired - and moved to a Heathrow Holiday Inn for a good steak dinner and a sleep. I say "a" Heathrow Holiday Inn because there are apparently three Holiday Inns in the area and the taxi driver we hired at the airport decided to take us the furthest one, which was not the right one. The hotel we were actually booked into was good enough to send their courtesy bus around to us: apparently this happens all the time.

The trip to Singapore was long and quite boring, with very ordinary movies, with the exception of a Frank Hurley documentary that was available (Hurley was the Australian photographer famous for his recording of Antarctic expeditions, particularly Shackleton's spectacularly disastrous one, and the western front in WWI). Singapore itself we spent about 6 hours touring, largely in the Chinatown area where, appropriately for the last leg of a pilgrimage, we found a Hindu Temple, a Buddhist temple, a mosque, a church and a synagogue within a few blocks. Given that we'd seen enough churches, the synagogue was closed and the mosque was conducting services, we limited ourselves to actual visits to the Hindu temple (with it colorful iconographic entrance) and Buddhist pagoda (with its more austere, if colorful, statues and art) and then enjoyed a Chinese/Indian lunch from a local food seller. We also did the obligatory visit to the Raffles Hotel, another pilgrimage site, which was within walking distance of our residence (high up in a newish hotel, from which we had a good view of the emerging skyline), and looked through a local shopping mall where we found a buffet Chinese restaurant for a good final dinner of the pilgrimage.

The next morning we boarded the plane from Singapore to Sydney. Having left Madrid on the Wednesday and spending what appeared to be Wednesday and Thursday nights in sleepovers, we somehow arrived in Sydney on Saturday, having lost a day along the way. With the obligatory kissing of the Sydney airport tarmac, the pilgrimage was at an end.

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First written: August 2005

see also Fit the First of the European pilgrimage - Bologna, Ferrara, Ravenna, Siena

Fit the Second of the European pilgrimage - Pisa and the Cinque Terra

Fit the Third of the European pilgrimage - Barcelona

Fit the Fourth of the European pilgrimage - Santiago de Compostela

Fit the Fifth of the European pilgrimage - Northern Spain

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