El Escorial y El Palacio del Pardo

Our first field trip was this past Friday. We visited El Escorial  and El Palacio del Pardo. El escorial was amazing. It used to be a monastery, castle, fortress, and tomb. The location of Escorial is breathtaking. It is in a mountainous region of Spain not far from Madrid. Directly behind El Escorial are beautiful, tree-covered mountains. Below Escorial is a small town (all with orange roofs) nestled around a large church. Outside of the town, there is nothing but hills, a lake, and in the distance, you can see the four skyscrapers of Madrid. Photography was prohibited so I got these photos from the internet, but I made sure to pick things that I actually saw.

 This is a picture of the tombs, which are on the lower level of escorial and contain almost all of Spain's kings and his close relatives. There was even a room reserved for dead infants of the kings.

 

This is of the church inside escorial. It was breathtaking, especially the ceiling, which was the tallest in all of escorial and contained intricate paintings of angels on vaulted ceilings.

 This is of the library which had such old globes that one of them showed California as a gigantic island off of the coast of the U.S.

 This is an example of the paintings on vaulted ceilings that is so impressive.

 Los jardínes

This is a picture to give you an idea of the size of escorial.
 Muy bonito, no?


El Palacio del Pardo was the home of Francisco Franco Bahamonde, one of the most infamous kings of Spain. This palace was actually used mainly for hunting trips until Franco lived there. Because it was in a part of Spain that gets very cold and because it is much smaller than most palaces, it was not the "ideal palace" for Franco. But Franco did a lot of things differently than other kings and his is one of the only bodies not in the tomb of Escorial. Instead, he demanded that he be buried in a valley. But inside the palacio del pardo, everything is extremely opulent. Everything is covered in gold, tapestries designed to look like paintings line every wall (which is actually a trick to keep the palace warmer), and there were the most beautiful chandeliers I have ever seen.

 The ceiling here is actually a new addition.

 Many of the tapestries are related to hunting

A few other interesting facts I learned on my tour of the palacio del pardo:

1. They used to dress boys and girls in very feminine dresses until the boy reached the age of about 7. In paintings of the children, a red or a blue rose would signify the sex of the child.
2. Franco had one of the first televisions in Spain, quite a few years later than they were introduced in the U.S.
3. Franco and his wife slept on two twin beds separated from each other by a couple of inches.