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At Segovia, those of the tour people who would be provided with lunch broke off to the designated restaurant, while the rest of us were given a generous hour and a quarter to find lunch ourselves as we please and then meet in the shade by the aqueduct. My brother's and my tour package not including the lunch option, we had the foresight to pack sandwiches.
The aqueduct:
The aqueduct seems to be Segovia's most famous landmark. A stunningly well-preserved artifact of Roman times, it was built mortarless (except for at the top where there is new construction with mortar) and t rises gracefully over the eighteenth-nineteenth-century buildings of that area of Segovia. Looking at it through the alleys, a series of arches framing empty space, obviously alien...
"It's a stargate!" I burst out.
My brother later admitted that the alienness of the thing made him feel annoyed at the Romans for plonking it down in the middle of the city where it doesn't belong. I grinned and told him of the Viennese palace, that I had brought up in conversation a couple of weeks before, that has Roman excavations going on in its courtyard, and how my first thought was, "Dumb Romans, to go and build stuff right in the courtyard of a Viennese palace."
Note that my reference was primarily based on literary science fiction pre-TV series; I have never seen any of the TV series and had seen only the first movie when I was eleven, I think. At the time, I thought the movie was cool; about twelve years later, I came across scathing but well-justified criticism of it.
There is a statue near the aqueduct, of Romulus and Remus suckling the she-wolf, that was given by the people of Rome to the people of Segovia for the 2000-year anniversary of the aqueduct.
We found a quiet shady place on the city walls by a fountain, where we ate our sandwiches and refilled our water bottles. Then we went back to the aqueduct and, on my advice, ascended the stairs to a viewing platform near the top of the aqueduct where it enters the old city proper. It was a very nice spot there, and I took a bunch of photos of the aqueduct from different angles, and we watched the swallows dive around it, and a lizard scurry down its stones to snag a cricket. There is a small but interesting ecosystem of plants and animals flourishing between those mortarless rocks over 2000 years.
We did come up to the viewpoint of the very top of the aqueduct; access to it is covered by a very businesslike and pointy grate looking like something out of a medieval prison: "Do NOT climb on the aqueduct! We mean it! Srsly!" However, there were a bunch of other tourists there (American college students, judging by their ages and English accents) and I took a few pictures and then we left.
We considered getting ice cream, but neither of us felt like it when we actually looked at the ice cream, so after a little while, we rejoined our group and walked to the last Gothic church in Spain, the Cathedral of Segovia.
It is awe-inspiring.
Seeing the San Vicente church in Avila that morning, where they were Romanesque and just beginning to experiment with, "well, maybe we'll vault the ceiling in this newfangled Gothic way, let's see what happens..." --- and then seeing what the full-blown capabilities of the Gothic arch and vaulting can achieve.... We were dwarfed by the columns, by those tremendous ceilings, even by the baroque altarpieces that were more baroque than baroque itself and ideally do not work as well with what the Gothic is trying to achieve, but are historical and so are left there.
There are many epic fantasies that try to convey, through description, or set design, or cinematography, the awe of what it is like to be in a Gothic cathedral. Peter Jackson may have done it best, but...no. The cathedral of Segovia carries history with it, and devotion.
From the cathedral we went to the Alcazar, the castle of Segovia.
I have to admit, from many works of history and fantasy, and having visited only one castle before, the one in Salzburg, I have somehow grown to twenty-five years of age underestimating castle moats. Somehow the books always mention fishing in them, or the heroes swimming them, and somehow I got the impression that yeah, a moat may have caused trouble in the days when men were men under 5'3" and the ability to swim was witchcraft, but these days, it's child's play.
I am sorry.
The moat around part of the Alcazar is serious business, folks, really serious business. It doesn't actually have any water in it, these days, but it is deep, and it is precipitous, and I see no easy way of getting across it without some good technology or, of course, the goodwill of the castle denizens. Having it filled with water may actually have been easier; I'm no Britta Steffen, but last I checked, I knew how to functionally swim that distance; I do not know how to climb these walls.
Inside the Alcazar: one thing I have to give the Spaniards, they believe in restoration, and restoring things well. The Alcazar in Segovia had been badly damaged in a fire in 1862; they restored and rebuilt most of it so that it looked magnificent. "You can take whatever pictures you want, with flash, without flash, it doesn't matter," our guide quipped. "This castle has served as a military academy; it has seen worse."
We were supposed to take ten minutes on the tour, but I think took longer, looking at the relics of the life of Ferdinand and Isabella, and learning of the sad story of Joanna (Juana la Loca) of Castile. Finally our guide urged us to get going, "We have to get back before they close Madrid!"
My legs were aching on the descent down to the bus, and there ends my summary, without pictures that, even with my meager photography skills, can tell a thousand words, of our visits to Avila and Segovia.
The aqueduct:
The aqueduct seems to be Segovia's most famous landmark. A stunningly well-preserved artifact of Roman times, it was built mortarless (except for at the top where there is new construction with mortar) and t rises gracefully over the eighteenth-nineteenth-century buildings of that area of Segovia. Looking at it through the alleys, a series of arches framing empty space, obviously alien...
"It's a stargate!" I burst out.
My brother later admitted that the alienness of the thing made him feel annoyed at the Romans for plonking it down in the middle of the city where it doesn't belong. I grinned and told him of the Viennese palace, that I had brought up in conversation a couple of weeks before, that has Roman excavations going on in its courtyard, and how my first thought was, "Dumb Romans, to go and build stuff right in the courtyard of a Viennese palace."
Note that my reference was primarily based on literary science fiction pre-TV series; I have never seen any of the TV series and had seen only the first movie when I was eleven, I think. At the time, I thought the movie was cool; about twelve years later, I came across scathing but well-justified criticism of it.
There is a statue near the aqueduct, of Romulus and Remus suckling the she-wolf, that was given by the people of Rome to the people of Segovia for the 2000-year anniversary of the aqueduct.
We found a quiet shady place on the city walls by a fountain, where we ate our sandwiches and refilled our water bottles. Then we went back to the aqueduct and, on my advice, ascended the stairs to a viewing platform near the top of the aqueduct where it enters the old city proper. It was a very nice spot there, and I took a bunch of photos of the aqueduct from different angles, and we watched the swallows dive around it, and a lizard scurry down its stones to snag a cricket. There is a small but interesting ecosystem of plants and animals flourishing between those mortarless rocks over 2000 years.
We did come up to the viewpoint of the very top of the aqueduct; access to it is covered by a very businesslike and pointy grate looking like something out of a medieval prison: "Do NOT climb on the aqueduct! We mean it! Srsly!" However, there were a bunch of other tourists there (American college students, judging by their ages and English accents) and I took a few pictures and then we left.
We considered getting ice cream, but neither of us felt like it when we actually looked at the ice cream, so after a little while, we rejoined our group and walked to the last Gothic church in Spain, the Cathedral of Segovia.
It is awe-inspiring.
Seeing the San Vicente church in Avila that morning, where they were Romanesque and just beginning to experiment with, "well, maybe we'll vault the ceiling in this newfangled Gothic way, let's see what happens..." --- and then seeing what the full-blown capabilities of the Gothic arch and vaulting can achieve.... We were dwarfed by the columns, by those tremendous ceilings, even by the baroque altarpieces that were more baroque than baroque itself and ideally do not work as well with what the Gothic is trying to achieve, but are historical and so are left there.
There are many epic fantasies that try to convey, through description, or set design, or cinematography, the awe of what it is like to be in a Gothic cathedral. Peter Jackson may have done it best, but...no. The cathedral of Segovia carries history with it, and devotion.
From the cathedral we went to the Alcazar, the castle of Segovia.
I have to admit, from many works of history and fantasy, and having visited only one castle before, the one in Salzburg, I have somehow grown to twenty-five years of age underestimating castle moats. Somehow the books always mention fishing in them, or the heroes swimming them, and somehow I got the impression that yeah, a moat may have caused trouble in the days when men were men under 5'3" and the ability to swim was witchcraft, but these days, it's child's play.
I am sorry.
The moat around part of the Alcazar is serious business, folks, really serious business. It doesn't actually have any water in it, these days, but it is deep, and it is precipitous, and I see no easy way of getting across it without some good technology or, of course, the goodwill of the castle denizens. Having it filled with water may actually have been easier; I'm no Britta Steffen, but last I checked, I knew how to functionally swim that distance; I do not know how to climb these walls.
Inside the Alcazar: one thing I have to give the Spaniards, they believe in restoration, and restoring things well. The Alcazar in Segovia had been badly damaged in a fire in 1862; they restored and rebuilt most of it so that it looked magnificent. "You can take whatever pictures you want, with flash, without flash, it doesn't matter," our guide quipped. "This castle has served as a military academy; it has seen worse."
We were supposed to take ten minutes on the tour, but I think took longer, looking at the relics of the life of Ferdinand and Isabella, and learning of the sad story of Joanna (Juana la Loca) of Castile. Finally our guide urged us to get going, "We have to get back before they close Madrid!"
My legs were aching on the descent down to the bus, and there ends my summary, without pictures that, even with my meager photography skills, can tell a thousand words, of our visits to Avila and Segovia.
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