The Cathedral and the Castle

As if we haven’t had enough of cathedrals and churches after Italy, we headed to Toledo for the Catedral de Toledo. Toledo was a rather small town, something like San Gimigano which we stayed at in Tuscany. It was a rather nice town to walk but since we stayed at a hotel slightly out of the city centre, we had a fair bit of a hike up a small hill to enter the city, good workout after the morning breakfast :p

From Wikipedia, ‘Toledo is a UNESCO World Heritage Site due to its extensive cultural and monumental heritage as one of the former capitals of the Spanish Empire and place of coexistence of Christian, Jewish and Muslim cultures, as well as the place where harsh religious persecutions where held against the Jews. Many famous people and artists were born or lived in Toledo, including Al-Zarqali, Garcilaso de la Vega, Eleanor of Toledo, Alfonso X and El Greco.’

View from the medieval city

Other than the above, Toledo is also famous for sword making and there were quite a few souvenir shops which sold full sized and miniature swords like Excalibur etc, kitschy but cute. They didn’t have any of the swords used in Lord of the Rings though, lolz…

Toledo was quite an easy town to walk around in. One of the highlights was of course the Catedral, which was rather unassuming from the exterior, in fact it looked kind of small and ordinary, however when you enter, it’s a whole different story. It was quite large and rather grand. The cathedral used to be quite poorly lit so a sculptor cut a hole in the ceiling to let more light in, lol... It’s rather well done though so if you don’t know you would have thought that it was how they had planned the cathedral to be like. With the sunlight, this is what you get to see clearly now

Inside the Cathedral

The other highlight was Iglesia de Santo Tome, which is a chapel with El Greco’s masterpiece ‘The Burial of the Count of Orgaz”. It was a bit of ‘The Last Supper” moment cos you have to queue to see the painting and just like “The Last Supper” there is another painting opposite it which no one bothers with. There is no time limit though but I think you can’t take pictures. We have never heard of El Greco before this but his paintings are quite recognizable, his faces are usually elongated and the people usually look quite tortured :p

View from the medieval city

After Toledo, we headed to Granada where I was very hyped up over Alhambra and Generalife from (a) reading Frommers which advised reserving tickets in advance and (b) pictures on the internet which looked so grand, but next time I’ll know better. We booked a tour of Alhambra from the official site as I thought it would be good to have a guide who can talk us through rather than just listening to the audioguide. Our guide was knowledgeable but her thoughts were a bit scattered, so we will get dribs drabs of information which was not pieced together nicely. We did learn that potatoes, corn and chocolate were not originally from Europe, but Americas (“New World”) instead, who knew! I mean I knew chocolate was from America but potatoes?

Inside the Nazareth Palace Granada

Cherry Blossoms in Granada

Anyway back to the tour, it included access to certain restricted areas so we had a guard following us around as he was needed unlock restricted areas included in our tour, it was almost like he was our bodyguard, lol… The tickets sold had a time restriction of either morning or afternoon and if you try entering certain sites after the time stated on your ticket, you weren’t allowed in. Alhambra and Generalife is actually open to the public, but if you want to visit certain sites within them, you have to show your ticket, so if you want to maximize your ticket, you have to plan your route carefully. The Palace of the Nasrids can only be entered at the specific time stated on the ticket so that also requires a bit of planning. They also had some restoration works going on so we couldn’t see the Court of Lions. While it is undeniably quite an interesting piece of architecture, it didn’t exactly lived up to my expectations.

The Roman Forum in Alhambra

View from Alhambra

On the whole, Toledo was much more enjoyable than Granada though I think the food in Granada was just a little bit better. And now, to Valencia to burn, baby burn!