El Escorial is a palace, monastery and a basilica. We entered first at the palace and I was one of the few people who got an audio guide for extra information (in Spanish of course). The tour started out with two different museums, one of architecture and another of paintings that had been in the castle at some point. The architecture part didn’t really interest me that much because it was showing the progression of designs to get to the final idea, and a display of the 20 different types of nails used to hold the building together just isn’t my idea of what I go to a museum to see. There was a model of the whole building though, and I liked being able to see what the whole building looked like in a cross with four courtyards.
The paintings were all very good though. A lot of them, especially at the beginning had very religious themes, and I liked looking at them trying to find parts that I wouldn’t have noticed at first glance or the different ways of painting. I’m getting more excited for my art history class the more I see here.
After that was a walk through for the rooms the king and royalty used when the palace was the residential area for them. At this point there weren’t many informational signs, and we had hit the large tour groups, so I was glad to have the audio guide to find out what the rooms actually were.
The most surprising part came after this. I was just following the route through the castle and then it separated for people with audio guides and tours with a different path for the other people. I went down some stairs and entered the Pantheon of Kings. It was a small very gilded and decorated room with the bodies of all the kings and queens from a certain time period in their little boxes stacked up on the walls. It was extremely surprising to me that they would keep their dead bodies quite close to where they were living.
One of my favorite parts was the library. I wasn’t expecting that much, but it was grand. A long hallway with extremely old and valuable books lining the walls, and then the ceiling was painted beautifully in bright colors filling every single available space.
The basilica was next, and didn’t seem that impressive to me at first, but then we all just sat down in the pews for a while and took it all in. After sitting there I was really impressed. It was huge, with very ornate decorations in the front and some along the walls. Everything seemed so precise and perfect that it was nice just to sit there and think and enjoy our time there.
On the train ride back we ran the last little bit in order to make the train and everyone got through the turnstile except for 3 of us because for some reason our tickets didn’t work. No one was around in the information or for security to help us, so we ducked under without having any other options. (We had paid for the tickets after all) We got up to the platform where the rest of our group was still waiting, and the doors of the train were still open, but they said it wasn’t our train because the name was different and about 15 seconds later the doors closed. Almost no one else was on the platform so someone asked a guy there if that was the train to Madrid- and it was, so we got to wait on the platform and play games for an hour until the next one came.
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