North Castile: 2000 Years Of Spanish History in One Afternoon
Part I Valle de los Caídos
The summer air in Madrid is immobile. It just hangs there, smothered in cigarette smoke and car fumes. Not a breeze to stir the smoke. Not even at night. Only that at night it's worse because everyone smokes like its going out of fashion. Perhaps it's the altitude. Madrid is, after all, the highest capital in Europe and it sits right in the middle of the high Castilian plain like a golden oasis in a vast rocky desert.
We're up in Chueca, Madrid's trendy hipster-alternative quarter. The outdoor cafes and rooftop bars are packed with the beautiful people soaking up the warm summer night under a dense layer of cigarette smoke. We're living in a 1940's noir movie set in Old Havana where all the dames smoke and the men wear white linen suits and Panama hats. We have to get out.
The next day we drive down La Gran Via, Madrid's main high street, at a snail's pace but in air-conditioned bliss. The noon traffic is crawling, but we don't care because the A/C on our rented Mercedes coupe is cranked up to 11, and we're heading north to escape the stifling heat of the city. Besides, we're eager to explore 2000+ years of Spanish history in one afternoon by driving north to Segovia via the Escorial and the infamous Valley of the Fallen.
Madrid just ends. There's no sprawl to speak of. One minute you're in La Gran Via, surrounded by fashion boutiques and massive billboards promoting Netflix shows, and the next, you're driving through dry badlands with black tar snaking ahead of you as the road hugs gentle hills that seem to get bigger and bigger the further north we go.
Soon the dry shrubs and olive groves of the Castilian plane give away to foothills dressed in pine forests. We're going up. The air cools down with the elevation, and we can see massive brown boulders stacked on the tops of hills above us. We're in the Sierra de Guadarrama, a mountain range that separates the northern reaches of the Castilian Plane from the rest of Castile & Leon.
"They get snow up here in the winter," Monica blurts from the passenger seat. She's wearing her big black Prada sunglasses and a broad smile. I know she's happy to get away from the unmoving air of Madrid. Something's unsettling about it. “Hemingway set the main parts of ‘For Whom The Bells Toll’ in these hills’,” she continues, “you know the part, when they’re trying to blow up that bridge…it was all set here, in these mountains.”
We stop at a guard post, pay our fee and are given driving directions to "The Cathedral."
"I'm surprised they call it 'The Cathedral’, " I tell Monica as we park in a mostly empty car park.
"I think the pope blessed it or something," she responds.
"Not the current pope, right? I hear he's a bit of a lefty".
"It was back in the '50s I think," Monica says, scrunching her nose against the bright sun peeking through the pines.
There's a low building ahead of us. More like a big step in the rocks with stairs leading up to a broad esplanade.
We walk up the steps and reach the esplanade. The tallest cross in the world looms above us. It seems to have sprouted from a rocky hill above the wide mouth of a tunnel carved directly into the rock ahead of us.
"I guess this is what they call 'The Cathedral'," Monica says, admiring the brutalist sight.
"More like Darth Vader's lair."
"Welcome to the Valley of the Fallen," Monica whispers as we approach the mouth of the cave. The entrance is massive; Cathedral sized in fact and crowned with a gigantic pietà statue carved in the same gray rock.
The Virgin Mary holds the sprawled body of Jesus above us. Their stone bodies are massive. It's a pitiful sight at first, but as we get closer, we notice that the Virgin's face is an evil looking skull under her hood of carved rock.
"Subtle," Monica says as we enter the massive cave with the feeling of walking into an abandoned subway tunnel built for a race of giants in the 1940s.
Monica holds my hand as we walk deeper into the tunnel. The first half of the cave is relatively barren. Just a corridor flanked by large rock statues of hooded figures carrying longswords with oversized crossguards. The swords are meant to resemble crosses. Onward Christian soldiers.
There's a narrowing ahead, and we enter the church section. There are pews, an altar and a massive Romanesque golden dome carved deep inside the rock. On the floor before the altar is Francisco Franco's tomb. Close by is Primo de Rivera's, the founder of the Spanish Falange.
At both sides of the altar, additional wings extend into the rock with the remains of hundreds of Civil War dead.
"So when are they yanking Franco out of here?" Monica whispers in the dim light of the altar.
"Soon, I hear," I respond. The air inside is even more stifling than Madrid's. "Let's get out of here," I tell Monica. I suddenly need fresh sunlight. I need to escape the weight of all the war dead, of the bombing of Guernica, and the tears of the hundreds of war prisoners who built this place.
As we leave the mouth of the cave, a man passes us by. He's walking inside the cave and holding a Spanish flag and a bunch of roses. Looks like the Falange is not yet dead.
"I guess he wants to visit Franco before he gets evicted," Monica whispers.
We'd been expecting a memorial/museum about the Spanish Civil war. What we found was a church-sanctioned monument to the Falange. Time to move on.
Part II El Escorial
Just over the hill from the Valley of the Fallen, we reach the town of El Escorial. King Philip II of Spain selected this spot to build his massive retreat in honor of St Lawrence (who was literally roasted by the Romans). The palace was designed in the shape of a gridiron in honor of the king's favorite saint on account of helping Spain win the battle of Lepanto against the Turks on St Laurence's day.
El Escorial gives the Vatican a run for its money with its cathedral-sized chapel and a library with frescoes and paintings by Titian and other masters.
We climb several stone stairways inside El Escorial and find ourselves in the mausoleum wing. King Philip II wanted to create a grand sepulchral pantheon for the Kings of Spain and other Habsburg nobles, and he did. One section looks like a massive multilayered wedding cake. It holds the remains of the countless princes and princesses that died in childhood. Close by is the very elaborate tomb of Don John of Austria, half-brother of the king, who led the victory at Lepanto only to die brokenhearted in Flanders awaiting for the arrival of the ill-fated Spanish Armada.
A dark stairway takes us down to the Pantheon of the Kings. It's a gloomily lit room of gold flake and dark wood with twenty-six marble sepulchers containing the remains of several Habsburg and Bourbon Kings (and one Queen) of Spain.
There's no other way out but to walk back up the same dark stairway. Halfway up there's a landing with a side door. This is the door to the "pudridero" of the rotting room where future tenants of the room below have to wait for up to 15 or more years before they are in a condition to fit inside the small urns that line the walls of the Pantheon of the Kings.
I keep climbing out, I need more air than ever. More stone passageways and stairways finally deliver us to King Phillip II's personal apartment. The bed looks so impossibly small for a King who ruled an empire where the sun never set. The king died in this room, surrounded by wooden carved saints and other icons. Miguel de Cervantes, who lost a hand at the Battle of Lepanto, and who later went on to write the first modern novel and Spain's biggest literary classic, Don Quijote of La Mancha, sneaked into Seville's Cathedral during a mass for the newly deceased King to recite a picaresque sonnet that made fun of the extravagant excess and expense of the funeral mass and also alluded to the King's infamous last days marred by horrible boils and severe incontinence:
"Y luego, incontinente,
caló el chapeo, requirió la espada
miró al soslayo, fuese y no hubo nada."
"And then, incontinent,
Pulled down his hat, put back his sword,
looked sideways, away, and there was nothing."
Part III The Alcázar of Segovia
From the barren landscape, we see the Alcázar rise like a giant ship up in the clouds. It's a magic castle straight out of the Disney movies, way up on a ledge. It seems to defy gravity, hanging there on the edge of a barren stone hill. You just don't know where the rock of the hill ends and the castle walls begin. Its pointy turrets reach up to the sky like a castle that belongs way, way further north. I stop the car and look at it. There's a town behind the castle, we can see a Romanesque basilica and medieval towers.
"Wow," Monica says, stepping out of the car, "It looks just like Cinderella's Castle."
"Hope we don't run into the Evil Stepmother inside."
"Queen Isabella was crowned there," Monica whispers. She's been reading about Isabella and Fernando and she's convinced that it was Isabella who wore the tights in that relationship.
When we go inside the castle we see more reminders of Isabella. There's a massive wall-sized painting of her coronation day. She stands by the castle entrance (Fernando was in Aragon that day) looking blond, young and pious. Isabella is dressed all in white and is surrounded by soldiers, priests, and nobles. A complex and violent Game of Thrones war lies ahead of her for the Crown of Castile. The King of Portugal was supporting Isabella's half-sister's rightful claim to the throne. But Isabella wasn't having it. The deceased king, her brother, was known as "The Impotent" and the heir to the throne was said to have been conceived by his right-hand man, Beltran. Hence Isabella's sister's nickname of La Beltraneja.
"Isabella convinced the nobles that La Beltraneja was a bastard," Monica whispers to me in front of the massive painting.
Isabella finally got her way, beating back the armies of the King of Portugal, and locking up La Beltraneja in a convent for the rest of her life. Then she spent the next few years expulsing the Jews from her realm and fighting the Moors in the Province of Granada until finally taking possession of the Alhambra Palace in 1492, where she decided to support Christopher Columbus's idea to sail west to reach China.
We stand in front of a pair of thrones. Above the thrones is Isabella's and Fernando's Motto: "Tanto Monta, Monta Tanto, Isabel Como Fernando."
The motto was meant to placate medieval minds that a woman got her strength from her husband, but in reality, Fernando just knew a good partnership when he saw one. His marriage to Isabella merged his kingdom of Aragon with Castile, without having to fight for it, and hence creating modern Spain (with all the regional separatist problems it still has to deal with today). At the time of their marriage, modern Catalonia was under Aragonese control and the North Basque country under Castilian. Navarra (the part on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees) eventually pledged alliance to King Ferdinand in 1512.
The Alcázar was originally a Roman Fort, the foundations are still Roman and can be seen on the way to the toilets in the basement. The wily Romans were responsible for building Segovia's famous aqueduct with the sole purpose of bringing water to their fort on this hill. Then along the way came the Moors and then the Castilians, who liked to build Castles on top of Moorish fortifications, hence the Moorish inspired name of Alcázar shared by many Castles in the Iberian peninsula.
Part IV The Roman Aqueduct
We leave the Alcázar and walk down narrow medieval streets towards the main Plaza. The sun is setting and bathing the ancient rocks in golden light. It's the golden hour, or 'la hora del paseo', as they call it in Spain when families leave their homes (previously shuttered against the heat) to enjoy the cooler breezes of sunset.
We walk under the 28 meter high arches of the Roman aqueduct as it glides over the plaza like in a dream.
"Queen Isabella loved the aqueduct," I hear Monica say as a Spanish guitar and laughter from kids fill the air around us. "She rebuilt the bits that were destroyed by the Moors."
Looking at the aqueduct that the Romans left behind is like looking directly into the past with your own eyes. These rocks are set in such a way that they don't require mortar to form such a thing of practical beauty: An aqueduct to bring water from the mountains into town, just like it has done for 2000 years.
A restaurant in the square is selling whole suckling pigs, grilled to golden brown perfection. A tapas bar next to it welcomes us in with cold San Miguel beer on draft and tapas of pork cracklings fried in virgin olive oil. Serrano hams hang from the ceiling, a requirement since Isabella's expulsion of the Jews and Moors to prove that the establishment is good and Christian. Never mind that most tavern owners during Isabella's time were conversos or converted Jews, hence the importance of the hams to prove the fervor of the converted. Or perhaps hanging hams was simply the smart thing to do when Isabella's inquisition was burning your neighbors at the stake.
I look at the old aqueduct on the plaza again and wonder how much history has it seen in its time. But yet the water continues to flow, just like some Roman engineer designed it to do 2000 years ago.