Toledo!

disclaimer part three: same as the last two

Saturday was the day I fell in love with Toledo. We went on a walking tour of the city in the morning, and it’s full of little twisty streets and ancient cobblestones and well-built churches and houses several hundred years old. I said earlier how Madrid was nice because of its history—but in Toledo you can actually see the history all around you! It’s the kind of city where you can get lost as soon as you turn around, but once you know how to get around it’s truly your city. One of the coolest places we went on the tour was a church called San Juan de los Reyes. This is a church built by Queen Isabella to commemorate her victory over the possibly illegitimate daughter of her brother in a war of succession, and it is a lovely crusty Gothic church. I don’t know if some of you will understand, but it was so cool to actually be in a real Gothic church, having admired them from pictures for so long. The ceilings were soaringly high and groin vaulted, and the walls were covered in carvings and sculptures of Isabella’s coat of arms and various symbols of her reign and so on. Along with all that, there was a fair amount of Moorish architecture, what with the carved wooden ceilings of the upstairs passageway, the decorations over some doors, and some of the arches being horseshoe-shaped.

We also went to Santo Tomé, a small church that is the home of El Greco’s masterpiece, “El Entierro del Señor de Orgaz,” or the Burial of the Lord of Orgaz. The señor in question was the mayor of Toledo for a while, and it is said that at his death, two saints came down to take his spirit to heaven. That is the scene depicted in the painting, and surrounding the central trio are the portraits of many of the nobles of El Greco’s time, although the legend took place about 200 years earlier. There were some other sites to be seen, although not from the inside, such as the Catedral de Toledo, some quaint old buildings, and a mosque that has been converted into a church (like most were around oh, say, 1492). An interesting bit of trivia we learned: Toledo is a steel-working center, and many of the weapons seen in movies are made there and later replicated and sold at high prices. One window alone had swords from Pirates of the Caribbean, 300, the Matrix, Kill Bill, Conan the Barbarian, the Lord of the Rings, and several others that I hadn’t seen. Toledo also has lots of shops that sell various sweets formerly made by monks, especially marzipan in any shape or color you could desire. There was even a model of the cathedral made of marzipan, complete with crusty carvings around the portals. In short, Toledo rocks and I want to live there someday.