Holy Toledo!

We left Salamanca with Nancy and Tom on a Saturday morning train headed to Toledo.
The train station in Toledo is beautiful with intricate tile, woodworking and stained glass windows.

Toledo was the capital of Spain for years and is famous for it´s mix of Spanish, Moorish (Arabic from northern Africa), and Jewish cultures. They say that the expression ¨Holy Toledo¨ is a reference to this historically multicultural city. It is completely surrounded by a wall and protected by the Tagus River.

You have to go over a bridge to enter the city. Here´s the old bridge:
And here´s us going through the gate entering the city:

One of our favorite activities here in Spain has been wandering through the streets, which is actually it´s own verb in Spanish (callejear). A big part of our fun in Toledo was wandering through the old Medieval streets.

It was amazing to see the intricate detail and beauty in the old arquitecture. These pictures are of the ceiling and railing of the staircase of a museum we visited. I was impressed by all of the craftsmanship everywhere you look.

In the evening, we watched a beautiful sunset over the city walls.

Afterwards we happened upon a concert of Medieval Jewish music in the Synagogue, which was awesome, in the truest sense. Then, around 9 pm, we went to dinner and had a wonderful meal, complete with delicious wine. After dinner, we got to tour the owner´s wine cellar. The door to the cellar was just like any other door on the street, but this one lead down to this amazing cellar. It was really impressive and quite large. The oldest bottle of wine that we found was from the 1920s!

I think Nancy and Tom are excited to think about having a wine cellar this large of their own someday :).

The following day, we went to the Santo Tomé Church to see a painting by El Greco, a famous Spanish painter, who lived in Toledo from 1577 until his death in 1614. We visited one of his most famous and sometimes considered best works, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz.

In the past I´ve not been so interested in artwork of the medieval times, but that´s changed during this trip. We had an excellent art instructor in Salamanca who helped put some pieces together. It´s really interesting to see how art changed with Spain´s history.

We were in Toledo for less than 24 hours, and we sure made the most of it. We took the Avant fast train back to Madrid´s Atocha Train Station to catch a later AVE (even faster) train to Sevilla.

The Atocha train station is beautiful, complete with a garden in the center. Here´s a picture of us before our next adventure in Sevilla.