Sights in Spain
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Monestir de Sant Pere de Rodes
Combine all-encompassing views of a deep-blue Mediterranean and the (sometimes) snowy peaks of the nearby Pyrenees with a spectacular piece of Romanesque architecture and what you get is the Monestir de Sant Pere de Rodes, which sits 500m up in the hills southwest of El Port de la Selva. Founded in the 8th century, it later became the most powerful monastery between Figueres and Perpignan in France. The great triple-naved, barrel-vaulted basilica is flanked by the square Torre de Sant Miquel bell tower and a two-level cloister.
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Pavelló Mies van der Rohe
The Pavelló Mies van der Rohe is not only a work of breathtaking beauty and simplicity, it is a highly influential building emblematic of the modern movement. The structure has been the subject of many studies and interpretations, and it has inspired several generations of architects.
Designed in 1929 by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969) as the Pavelló Alemany (German Pavilion) for the World Exhibition, it was removed after the show and reconstructed only in 1980, after the building had been consistently referred to as one of the key works of modern architecture. The Pavelló was built using glass, steel and marble, reflecting Mies van der Rohe's originality in the…
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Parroquia del Divino Salvador
The Plaza Salvador, which has a few popular bars, was once the forum of Roman Hispalis. It's dominated by the Parroquia del Salvador, a big baroque church built between 1674 and 1712 on the site of Muslim Ishbiliya's main mosque. Before the mosque, early Christian churches stood here, and before them, a Roman temple.
At the time of writing the church was closed for restoration work and archaeological investigation, but on its northern side, the mosque's small patio remains open, with a few half-buried Roman columns.
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Cueva de Nerja
The Cueva de Nerja is the big tourist attraction in Nerja, just off the N340, 3km east of town on the slopes of the Sierra Almijara. The enormous 4km-long cave complex, hollowed out by water around five million years ago and once inhabited by Stone Age hunters, is a theatrical wonderland of extraordinary rock formations, subtle shifting colours and stalactites and stalagmites. Large-scale performances including ballet and flamenco are staged here throughout the summer. About 14 buses run daily from Málaga and Nerja, except Sunday. The whole site is very well organised for large-scale tourism and has a huge restaurant and car park. A full tour of the caves takes about 45…
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Plaza de España
Directly across the Puente Nuevo is the main square, Plaza de España , made famous by Hemingway in his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. Chapter 10 tells how early in the Civil War the 'fascists' of a small town were rounded up in the ayuntamiento (town hall), clubbed and made to walk the gauntlet between two lines of townspeople before being thrown off the cliff. The episode is based on events that took place here in Plaza de España. What was the ayuntamiento is now Ronda's parador.
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Necròpolis del Puig des Molins
The earliest tombs within this ancient burial ground date from the 7th century BC and Phoenician times. Follow the path around and peer into the burial caverns, oriented north to south, cut deep into the hill. You can descend into one interlocking series of these hypogea (burial caverns).
The site museum displays finds such as amulets and terracotta figurines discovered within the more than 3000 tombs that honeycomb the hillside. Both museum and site were closed for restoration works at the time of writing.
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Museo de Santa Cruz
The 16th-century Museo de Santa Cruz is a beguiling combination of Gothic and Plateresque styles. The cloisters and carved wooden ceilings are superb, as is the collection of Spanish ceramics. Also upstairs is an atmospheric cruciform gallery that contains an archaeological display, some fine Flemish religious art, a number of El Grecos, a crucifixion attributed to Goya, a flag from the battle of Lepanto, and the wonderful 15th-century Tapestry of the Astrolabes.
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Museo del Teatro de Caesaraugusta
Discovered during the excavation of a building site in 1972, the ruins of Zaragoza's Teatro Romano (Roman theatre) are the focus of this interesting museum. The theatre once seated 6000 spectators, and great efforts have been made to help visitors reconstruct the edifice's former splendour, including evening projections of a virtual performance on the stage; get there early to ensure a place. The exhibit culminates in a boardwalk tour through the theatre itself. The theatre is visible from the surrounding streets.
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Convento de la Encarnación
Founded by Empress Margarita de Austria, this 17th-century mansion built in the Madrid baroque style (a pleasing amalgam of brick, exposed stone and wrought iron) is still inhabited by nuns of the Augustine order. The large art collection dates mostly from the 17th century and among the many gold and silver reliquaries is one that contains the blood of San Pantaleón, which purportedly liquefies each year on 27 July. The convent also sits on a pretty plaza with lovely views down towards the Palacio Real.
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Cathedral
Cádiz's yellow-domed cathedral is an impressively proportioned baroque-cum-neoclassical construction but by Spanish standards very sober in its decoration. It fronts a broad, traffic-free plaza where the cathedral's ground-plan is picked out in the paving stones. The decision to build the cathedral was taken in 1716 but the project wasn't finished until 1838, by which time neoclassical elements, such as the dome, towers and main facade, had diluted Vicente Acero's original baroque plan.
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Iglesia de San Miguel de Escalada
Rising from Castilla's northern plains, this beautifully simple treasure was built in the 9th century by refugee monks from Córdoba on the remains of a Visigothic church dedicated to the Archangel Michael. Although little trace of the latter remains, the church is notable for its Islamic-inspired horseshoe arches, rarely seen so far north in Spain. The graceful exterior porch with its portico is balanced by the impressive marble columns within. The entrance dates from the 11th century.
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Museu del Modernisme Català
Housed in a Modernista building, the ground floor seems a like a big Modernista furniture showroom. Several items by Antoni Gaudí, including chairs from Casa Batlló and a mirror from Casa Calvet, are supplemented by a host of items by his lesser-known contemporaries, including some typically whimsical, mock medieval pieces by Puig i Cadafalch.
The basement, showing off Modernista traits like mosaic-coated pillars, bare brick vaults and metal columns, is lined with Modernista art, including paintings by Ramon Casas and Santiago Rusiñol, and statues by Josep Llimona and Eusebi Arnau.
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Aqüeducte Romà
Aqüeducte Romà sits, somewhat incongruously, in the leafy rough just off the AP7 freeway, which leads into Tarragona (near where it intersects with the N240). It is a fine stretch of two-tiered aqueduct (217m long and 27m high), along which you can totter to the other side. Bus 5 to Sant Salvador from Plaça Imperial de Tàrraco, running every 10 to 20 minutes, will take you to the vicinity, or park in one of the lay-bys marked on either side of the AP7, just outside the freeway toll gates.
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Ermita de San Antonio de la Florida
This small church ranks alongside Madrid’s finest art galleries. Also known as the Panteón de Goya, this chapel has frescoed ceilings as painted by Goya in 1798 on the request of Carlos IV. As such, it’s one of the few places to see Goya masterworks in their original setting.
Figures on the dome depict the miracle of St Anthony. The saint, who lived in Padua in Italy, heard word from his native Lisbon that his father had been unjustly accused of murder. The saint was whisked miraculously to his home town from northern Italy, where he tried in vain to convince the judges of his father’s innocence. He then demanded that the corpse of the murder victim be placed before…
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Museu d’Història de Catalunya
The Palau de Mar building facing the harbour once served as warehouses, but was transformed in the 1990s. Inside is the Museu d’Història de Catalunya, something of a local patriotic statement, but interesting nonetheless.
The permanent display covers the 2nd and 3rd floors, taking you from the Stone Age through to the early 1980s. It is a busy hotchpotch of dioramas, artefacts, videos, models, documents and interactive bits: all up, an entertaining exploration of 2000 years of Catalan history.
See how the Romans lived, listen to Arab poetry from the time of the Muslim occupation of the city, peer into the dwelling of a Dark Ages family in the Pyrenees, try to mount a…
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Real Fábrica de Tapices
If a wealthy Madrid nobleman wanted to impress, he came here to the Real Fábrica de Tapices (Royal Tapestry Workshop) where royalty commissioned the pieces that adorned their palaces and private residences. The Spanish government, Spanish royalty and the Vatican were the biggest patrons of the tapestry business: Spain alone is said to have collected four million tapestries. With such an exclusive clientele, it was a lucrative business and remains so, 300 years after the factory was founded. Goya began his career here, first as a cartoonist and later as a tapestry designer. Given such an illustrious history, it is, therefore, somewhat surprising that coming here today…
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Jardín Botánico La Concepción
Four kilometres north of the city centre is this large botanical garden. Dating from the mid-19th century, it is the brainchild of a local aristocratic couple, British-born Amalia Heredia Livermore and her Spanish husband, Jorge Loring Oyarzabal. They decided to recreate a tropical forest near the shores of the Mediterranean. It is famous for its purple wisteria blooms in spring.
By car, take the A45 Antequera road north from the Málaga ring road (A7) to Km166 and follow the signs for the ‘Jardín Botánico’.
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Museo al Aire Libre
This fascinating open-air collection of 17 abstract sculptures includes works by the renowned Basque artist Eduardo Chillida, the Catalan master Joan Miró, as well as Eusebio Sempere and Alberto Sánchez, one of Spain’s foremost sculptors of the 20th century. The sculptures are beneath the overpass where Paseo de Eduardo Dato crosses Paseo de la Castellana, but somehow the hint of traffic grime and pigeon shit only adds to the appeal. All but one are on the eastern side of Paseo de la Castellana.
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Mosteiro de Samos
Samos is a lovely village built around the very fine Benedictine Mosteiro de Samos, founded in the 6th century. The monastery has two lovely big cloisters (one Gothic, with distinctly unmonastic Greek nymphs adorning its fountain, the other neoclassical and filled with roses). Upstairs are four walls of murals detailing St Benedict’s life, painted in the 1950s after a horrendous fire that burned almost everything in the monastery except for the contents of the church and sacristy.
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Catedral
Ávila's 12th-century catedral is not just a house of worship, but also an ingenious fortress: its stout granite apse forms the central bulwark in the heavily fortified eastern wall of the town. Although the main facade hints at the cathedral's 12th-century, Romanesque origins, the church was finished 400 years later in a predominantly Gothic style, making it the first Gothic church in Spain. The sombre grey facade betrays some unhappy 18th-century meddling in the main portal.
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Iglesia de Santa María la Mayor
This 13th-century church has a mainly Gothic nave and a Romanesque tower that you can ascend for fabulous views. It also has tombs of leading Trujillo families from the Middle Ages, including that of Diego García de Paredes (1466–1530), a warrior of legendary strength who, according to Cervantes, could stop a mill wheel with one finger. The church's magnificent altarpiece includes 25 brilliantly coloured 15th-century paintings in the Flemish style, depicting scenes from the lives of Mary and Christ.
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MUHBA Refugi 307
Part of the Museu d'Història de Barcelona (MUHBA), this is a shelter that dates back to the days of the Spanish Civil War. Barcelona was the city most heavily bombed from the air during the Spanish Civil War and had more than 1300 air-raid shelters. Local citizens started digging this one under a fold of Montjuïc in March 1937.
In the course of the next two years, the web of tunnels was slowly extended to 200m, with a theoretical capacity for 2000 people. People were not allowed to sleep overnight in the shelter – when raids were not being carried out work continued on its extension. Vaulted to displace the weight above the shelter to the clay brick walls (clay is…
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Museo Taurino
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Capilla de San Antonio
The sheer size of the broad, five-naved cathedral is obscured by a welter of interior decoration typical of Spanish cathedrals. The chapels along the northern and southern sides are as rich in sculpture, stained glass and painting as any church chapels in Spain. Near the western end of the northern side is the Capilla de San Antonio, with Murillo's large 1666 canvas depicting the vision of St Anthony of Padua; thieves excised the kneeling saint in 1874 but he was found in New York and put back.
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