El Escorial, Spain
This morning after breakfast I boarded the bus for El Escorial. I saw the oldest theater in Spain and the Monasterio de San Lorenzo. Here’s the quick and dirty regarding the monastery. Felipe II married his cousin, his aunt, his son’s girlfriend, and then his niece. (Sequentially, not all at once.) When the last of these died, he decided to build a monastery – a “palace for god and a cottage for me.” It took 21 years to build, which is lightning fast. How did he accomplish such a feat? It’s all about the money. Pay increased or decreased depending on how quickly or how slow construction progressed, and nobody got any money at all until the whole thing was completed. (Talk about your incentive program!)
The monastery has statues of the kings of the Old Testament. It also has a statue of Christ on the cross, which they had to “dress” with a piece of cloth, because he was sculpted naked and apparently women flocked to stare, rather than attend service.
Felipe II had a traveling chair because of his gout. A traveling chair is a contraption where he gets carried by inserting two poles through a set of holes and then hefted up on (someone else’s) shoulders. He could also put up the top and sides if it were cold or sunny.
His son died at age 31 with a record 16 girlfriends. He was the first playboy of Spain, and on whom the infamous Don Juan is probably based. (In case you didn’t know, it was social suicide for a woman to be with don Juan or any man, because the second you were no longer a virgin, you were “ruined” and would never marry.)
The mausoleum is called the Royal Pantheon and has kings on one side and queens on the other, except for one queen on the man side because she was very kingly, and one king on the female side because he was very… queenly.
There are large paintings of bible stories on the walls because most text was written in Latin and the average person could not read.
Next, we visited the Valley of the Fallen, which was very impressive. It is a huge monument carved out of rock by Franco’s prisoners to commemorate all those who died in the fierce, bloody – and recent – civil war.
Tonight I went to the train station and hopped aboard the night train with service to Portugal! Tomorrow is a free day from school, and I thought it would be a perfect opportunity to visit Lisbon.
The night train had four bunks, two on each side. I roomed with a grandmother, mother, and daughter from Portugal, all of whom were very nice and full of useful tips.
