¡Viva España! (And Portugal)

Ordinarily I try to space out my trips so that I get over the jet-lag in between them, but when the door of opportunity opens, you run through it even if your laundry from the first trip is still drying. Less than a week after getting back from my family holiday in the Southwest, I flew to Europe with a friend to tour Spain and Portugal!

The Telefónica Building in Madrid. Because
isn't telecommunications the first think you'd
assume would be housed in this building?

It was a bit of a whirlwind tour, and anybody who has been to either country is going to be horrified at the places we had to skip over (Grenada, Valencia, Porto…). But we did manage to pack a lot into eight days, so forgive me if this post ends up being nothing more than a laundry list of “cool stuff we saw in Spain.”

Montserrat, which, the day we visited, was mobbed
with locals participating in a folk dance competition

We started in Barcelona, a city turned into a fairyland by art nouveau even before Gaudí made it a fever dream of curves and stalactites.

One of Wagner's Valkyries in the
concert hall of the Palau de Música

I’m going to offend every Catalan in the world by admitting that the Sagrada Família is not my favorite cathedral. I liked it better when I first saw it more than twenty years ago. Back then, it only had the four iconic towers that are still on all the magnets and postcards. 

A postcard I got on my first trip
to Barcelona in 2003

With all the additions since then, it’s starting to feel…overwrought.

The guide said they're planning on something
like 18 towers by the end, if they ever finish.

I remain a Gaudí fan, though. Casa Batlló, with its underwater theme, was one of the highlights of our trip.

You have to love that Gaudí made even the gables
and chimneys look like they're part of a sea monster.

After Barcelona, it was on to Madrid, where we arrived the same day as President Zelenskyy. He met with the king; we weren’t invited. But we did see the palace the next day, which is as close as we were ever going to get.

The royal palace, in which we did not meet
anyone famous

When we looked up “things to do in Madrid,” the first ads were always for day trips outside of Madrid. It’s a nice city, but aside from the Prado, which we did visit, about the most exciting thing we experienced there was seeing a random young woman practicing her falconry at the Puerta de Alcalá.

It's where I'd fly my falcon if I had one.

So what did we do? We took at day trip outside of Madrid! Toledo was probably my favorite city among all the places we visited, despite the fact that I had such a sore throat I could barely swallow. However, the sore throat gave me an excuse to practice my Spanish on a local pharmacist!

Toledo, a dream of tile roofs and winding streets

They were decorating for the upcoming
Feast of Corpus Christi.

As we left the capital, we passed through la Mancha, the region known for Manchego cheese, windmills, and the mad old knight who fought them. 

Three far-off windmills, easily mistaken for giants
by knights of a certain persuasion.

 I love Don Quixote, so I was delighted to see him popping up everywhere.

The man of la Mancha himself!

We drove through fields of wheat, sunflowers, and olive trees…

This is what sunflowers look like when you
photograph them from the window of a bus
going 65 mph on a Spanish highway.

 

…to Córdoba, with its mind-boggling mosque-cathedral. It’s almost impossible to imagine that in the middle of this enormous eighth-century mosque...

...there’s an ornate Renaissance church!

My favorite spot in Seville, our next city, was the Plaza de España, built in 1928 for the Ibero-American Expo (which, as far as I can tell, was a World’s Fair in which only the US, Portugal, Spain, and its colonies participated).

Beware influencers on bridges: they never move.

Aside from the ubiquitous Instagrammers, who would blithely monopolize the most beautiful spots for five minutes at a time while they posed for the perfect Insta shot, it was a delightful celebration of Spain’s architectural history.

Each province had a decorated tile bench
depicting an episode from its history.

While the rest of the group visited Columbus’s tomb in the cathedral, my friend and I opted to explore the Real Alcázar, a royal residence begun by the Muslim rulers of Al-Andalus and expanded and added onto after the Reconquista.

The Real Alcázar gardens, seen from
the second-story promenade

What we loved about this place was how it went on and on and on, room after room, garden after garden, each more ornate than the last. You could spend years wandering from room to room and notice new details every time.

The inside of a decorated door arch

A trip to Seville wouldn’t be complete without an evening of Flamenco. Sadly, something I ate at lunch decidedly did not agree with me, and I had to send away the lovely dinner they served at the show, but I still managed to enjoy the drama of the dance!

Flamenco at the Tablao. I had to go black
and white because the spotlight was
glaringly bright red.

We spent our last two days in Lisbon, but on the way, we stopped at a little town called Azeitão, where we had a tour of a tile workshop. Of course we saw tons of decorative tile on the walls of buildings and in the souvenir shops, but this was the only place where we saw it handmade by Portuguese craftsmen and -women, and I loved seeing the process. The results were much nicer than the machine-made versions in the shops.

Tiles have to air dry for months before being fired,
glazed, and fired again. It's worth the wait.

And then Lisbon! This was the only city where our hotel wasn’t walking distance to the historic district, so I felt the loss of the opportunity to explore on foot, which we’d done everywhere else (sometimes racking up 8 or 9 miles in a day). But we did get to visit some of the most famous monuments…

The Tower of Belém, guarding the mouth
of the Tagus River where it meets the sea

…as well as Jerónimos Monastery, with its beautiful soaring arches and peaceful cloister.

On our last day, we saw Queluz Palace, which, aside from being an immoderately fancy house...

 

...is also interesting because it has so much original furniture and decoration from the 18^th century.

 

The Ambassador's Room, complete
with an audience on the ceiling

Then a quick stop in the resort town of Cascais to see the Atlantic up close…

 

…and another in Cabo da Roca to see it from a little farther away.

 

Cabo da Roca is the westernmost point in
continental Europe. Naturally, the lighthouse
was under scaffolding. Our usual luck.

And the next day, it was back off home. We shall pass over the interminable flight delays in silence. There is so much still to see in Spain and Portugal, and the history is so fascinating, I would genuinely love to visit again soon. And I my Portuguese may be limited to “good morning” and “thank you,” but at least in Spain I can ask, “¿Donde están los aseos?” And I might even understand the answer!

I occupied this spot for approximately
five seconds. I'm not an influencer.