Madrid and Toledo

In April 1998 I was for a few days in Madrid for work and attached some vacation to that to see some more of that city and of Toledo which is not so far from there.

I made a bunch of pictures of which I am only showing a few here.

The 'Palazzo Real' (royal palace) is one of the major sights. This shows the large dining room. There was a seperate room for eating desert which apparantly could hold considerably fewer people. We considered that was because most of the guests would by that time expected to be drunk under the table of the room here.

This is the interior of the palace chapel. I hope that you can discern the two royal seats, the other deats in the chapel are benches without back.

Another famous place of Madrid is the Retiro park.

This park is rather stuffed with sculpture, this showing the largest monument of them all. I don't recall who is the guy on the horse on the large pedestal, he must have been considered quite important at some time.

This kind of display also turns up in the streets of Madrid.

Such as here at the rooftops of some financial institutions on the Calle de Alcala.

In a museum on that same street they show some of the older artifacts than the predominantly 18th and 19th century buildings.

Again: I am sorry that my scanner is not making very clear imiages, otherwise you would be able to see very well that the statue at the top clearly shows that the system of cellular phones is much older than the phone companies try to make us believe.

The most important museum of Madrid is the Prado from which I will show you two pictures.

This shows part of the Rubens picture called 'the garden of love'. I think that the Prado has by far the largest collection of paintings by Rubens I have seen anywhere, including in Antwerp where he is from and where he worked most of the time.

And this is the famous self portrait of Albrecht Duerer, or Alberto Durero as the spanish say. I have a better scan on the CD-rom I bought on the Prado, but I don't think that I am supposed to put pictures from that on my web site.

Toledo on the outside looks very different from Madrid. At the time around which Spain was being made into one state, around 1500, it's inhabitants were expecting that Toledo would become the capital of this new state instead of the nearby and at the time very insignificant Madrid. That is why a guy like El Greco decided to take up residence there. When it appeared that this expectation would not be true, Toledo by and large stopped further development, that's why it is now still very much a renaissance city. The situation of the city is absolutely marvellous: on a hill top surruounded for three quarters by a curve of the river Tago which is flowing for yet a very long way to the Atlantic at Lisbon.

The street are narrow and winding there way through the city. You get lost there very easily. Luckily it is not so big that you can get lost for a longer time, otherwise I think I would not be here writing this now.

It is overwhelmed with tourists, but most of them leaving in the evening. And though lots of the buildings are carefully restaurated, there are also still lots of places with high degree of authenticity.