Spain, Day Twelve

Today, we went on another one of our exciting classroom excursions to the locations that are nearby Madrid. Our trip today was only a short ride of forty minutes to El Escorial. El Escorial is a giant monastery that is located on the northwest outskirts of Madrid. It was quite the sight to see! This huge building was made solely out of granite, which came from the mountains that are surrounding the area. But seriously! All of the walls, ceilings, and almost all of the floors (the ones in the bedroom for this monastery had terra cotta floors, don't know that I spelled that right...) were made from a beautiful, pure grey, sparkling granite. The layout of the place is pretty cool too. The symbol for this part of the area is a parilla (this is today's palabra del dia pronounced "par-ee-yah") which means grill in Spanish. This is because it is located in the suburb of El Escorial de San Lorenzo, who was a saint who was martyred by being grilled to death. There was actually a really impressive and disturbing painting depicting this scene towards the end of our tour. Pretty gruesome stuff. The whole monastery is devoted to San Lorenzo though and is done by arranging all of the rooms in a criss-cross grill layout. The whole place is one giant grill. Pretty cool. Also all of the hand rails and gates have little black grills on the tops of them. Seriously, that symbol is everywhere in that town.

I obviously didn't take this picture but I just wanted to show you how crazy big it is

The monastery is actually still in use today though which is pretty cool. Only about sixty or so monks live there, but still, it is neat that they kept the tradition alive after nearly five hundred years. It actually has many purposes though, other than just being a Catholic monastery. It was also built to be a summer vacation home for King Felipe the second of Spain. We were able to view his chambers, which overlook the giant basilica worship area. The basilica was definitely my favorite to see, considering how beautiful it was, but unfortunately, I was unable to take pictures of it so I hope my descriptions will suffice. The ceiling in the basilica was crazy tall. Like at least six stories tall. And the main alter was just gorgeous. There were huge hollow golden statues that represented many saints, apostles, and of course Jesus was at the top, hanging from the cross. There was an immense amount of velvet and carefully crafted paintings lined the back wall, which was a stark contrast to the grey granite that surrounded it. Overall, just a beautiful place. It is too bad that I'm not Catholic because they said you could get married there if you were for just 2,500 Euros if you were! To all my Catholic friends though, remember this and then be sure to invite me so that I have a reason to come visit!

The roomie and I standing in front of the entrance to the basilica

Also, in the monastery, a vast majority of Spain's monarchs are buried in the royal crypts here. Again, no pictures were allowed, but I will just say it was a very eerie room to be standing in. It a circle shape, with the coffins (which very fancy and expensive looking) encircling the entire room on the edges of the walls. They were stacked about four high and total surrounding you when you walked into the room. It almost felt as if they might rise from the dead and trap you in there. It's just better not to stay in that room for too long if you ask me.

After our tour of the monastery, we ate our picnic lunches and then walked around the cute little town for a while. I grabbed a snack of tea and a chocolate pastry before heading back to the bus to go home. Once we got home, our host mom had dinner waiting for us, and then we spent the rest of the night planning our trip to Sevilla for the weekend!