Week 4 – Friday 25th July – El Escorial and Pedraza

We’re sitting in the square in Segovia at 9:15 on Saturday night, with hopefully an hour of daylight left to get the blog all up to date. A band is playing outside a couple of restaurants away, children are tearing around the square, the café’s are filling up and the temperature has dropped to a very respectable level from the highs we’ve been experiencing the last couple of days.

Anyway, off cruising in the car today. Being Friday, we decided we’d do the traveling today, so that we could be around Segovia on Saturday and avoid the Madrid traffic that might be escaping the city on the weekend. Two quite different stop offs today – firstly El Escorial – the monastery of San Lorenzo el Real. It’s a very austere building that was built in the 16th century to reaffirm the Catholic faith in central Spain and fight off the threat that was coming from the upsurge in Protestantism. The monastery is situated between Segovia and Madrid about ¾ of an hours drive away.

The drive out was on the motorway and uneventful, except for the 3.5k tunnel, which is quite an airy experience to drive through with the roof down. The exit to the tunnel was only a couple of ks from the exit to El Escorial and as we came out of the tunnel, we noticed the traffic going in the other direction backed up for miles. Never mind, we’d be in the monastery for 2-3 hours, so it would be well cleared by then – yeah right.

When I say the Monastery is austere, I mean it is very plain on the outside. Although it is a large building, there is no exterior decoration and as you can see from the photos it is somewhat plain. For the tour inside, we picked up an audio guide, which was great as you can listen to what interests you and not get bogged down if the detail gets too much to bear. We passed several tour groups on our way around and I was glad not to be with them, having been talked at on enough tours in my life where you are given an endless stream of immediately forgettable dates and facts.

The monastery houses many works of art, tapestries, architectural tools and models of the monastery, books and dead monarchs and these were on display as part of the tour. Unlike the Guggenheim, the art was “real art”, people painted pictures, which suits me much better. We particularly liked the war art. It came in two sorts – the war journalist type that was a painting of a battle scene that was reasonably reflective of the “what” and “where” of the battle, and the “propaganda” art that was usually created for a monarch so that he could boast to all who would listen of his magnificence and military prowess. The interesting thing was the perspective and scale used in the propaganda art, where the people were made much bigger such that they were about the same size as the castle they were conquering. There was one long room – 52m – which had been dedicated to this propaganda art, which the kings of the time obviously entertained in. Historians found the art interesting as it showed the weapons and tactics that had been used in various battles, but from a lay mans perspective, it appeared more as a monument to the kings ego.

There were some very good exhibits of the building tools and models to show the construction techniques that had gone into building the monastery.

As a purchaser of an audio guide, we were privileged to get to see the royal mausoleum and this was very impressive. The first room you go into contains marble caskets containing the remains of the past kings and queens. It is a very impressive room, all the caskets are black marble, with gold plaques identifying who is in each casket. The room has been in use since the 16th century and there are two un identified caskets that are for the current King and Queen of Spain, so I don’t know what they do when it goes beyond that – maybe build a new room. Unfortunately, we weren’t allowed to take photos, so I can’t show you what the room was like, but it was very impressive.

After that, were 9 rooms with white marble caskets that contained the remains of the Princes and Princesses of the Spanish Monarchy. Again, it was impressive.

As we finished the tour, we stopped in for a comfort stop. Nothing unusual about that, except that the loos were at the end of a long corridor that had some of the most impressive murals we’d seen on the whole tour and if you didn’t go to the loo you wouldn’t have got to see them.

Outside the monastery in the grounds they were setting up a massive stage for a concert that night. All of Europe is either a soccer ground or a concert venue, but what is frustrating is that you can’t find out what the concerts are, as there is no banners advertising who is playing. It could have been anybody from the 10 tenors to the wiggles, but we will never know because there was nothing around the stage to tell us who was playing and even google could give us the answer.

We went for a walk around the town of El Escorial and then headed off to our second stop Pedraza de La Sierra. Heading out of El Escorial and onto the motorway, we immediately hit the same traffic ham we had seen building up 3 hours earlier. Needless to say, it delayed us for a while and caused us to take some detours to try and get past it, but never mind, it’s the first traffic jam in the entire holiday, so we can’t complain. Unlike the guy in the new Citroen C5. We noticed him pull over a few hundred metres ahead of us pop his bonnet up and as we went past him, there was this dreadful stink – an engine awfully overheated stink. “He’ll be here for a while”, I thought. Five minutes later he cruises past on the hard shoulder, with his hazard lights flashing and the same dreadful smell in the air. We passed him another couple of times before we got fully clear of the jam, so that will be one sick Citroen for someone to buy down the track.

Anyway, Pedraza, when we got there, was a tiny Spanish town, with it’s car park at the far end of the town. The gates into the town (shown in the photos) should have been an indication, but we charged on in, and then had to wind our way through ludicrously narrow streets, past parked cars, pedestrians and rock walls to the car park. The town which is a rated Michelin stop is very small and not any better than other little towns that we’ve visited, so we did the customary walk around the town before heading back to Segovia, and beers, wines and blogging in the square before having dinner.