I chose the day trip to Toledo primarily because I wanted to use madrid as a home base and this tour, amongst only a handful of others, departed from there. Serendipity ended up giving me my second favorite guided tour (a near tie with the World War I battlefields tour) and took me to my second favorite city of the trip, tied with Budapest.
My walk from the flat, my least favorite of all the places I stayed, took me longer than my walk in Brussels but I still managed to make it there with plenty of time. Some of the “sidewalks” narrowed to tightrope proportions along with the streets themselves, wide enough for a single car if any pedestrians present pressed themselves against the wall, a sign of a city designed prior to the advent of the automobile.
If I had not activated the travel pass, I would likely have gotten lost. I do not remember the specific prompt form the previous evening that made me attempt the use. Thankfully though, using travel pass in Spain gave me actual, although limited, access unlike my previous attempt in Austria. I plugged in the tour office address and made my way there, the temperature already rising. This office, twice the size of the Brussels City Tours office, had air conditioning so I waited inside with my color coded ticket until my guide called for that color.
As soon as I saw our guide, I knew we had a good one. The whole time she took to gather us together and ensure that every tour member knew where to go, she kept a genuine smile on her face. She maintained that smile even when some people started complaining in the underground parking deck where we stood to wait on the correct bus. Once on the bus, we waited for the other group, the group taking the tour in Spanish, to arrive. Thankfully, the two groups did not fill the bus so we had enough room for me to have an empty seat next to me.
Soon the bus departed, headed out from the current Spanish capital towards Toledo, twice capital during the long Reconquista and height of the Spanish Empire. Shortly after we started, we made an unexpected stop at a large rest stop with a store of significant size. I do not remember the reason our guide gave for the stop but it might have had to do with some behind the scenes agreement between the tour companies and the proprietors of the shop since every tour headed north from our tour company stopped there. I saw two other busses that had arrived before us. Although I did not purchase anything, I took the time to survey the offerings to glean ideas.
Once we arrived in Toledo and disembarked, we received bluetooth earpieces with which to hear our guide. (I wish I had thought of the Doctor Who reference at the time.) She then started the walking tour, tied for best of all my guided tours, with a stop at a mosque.
This first stop began the motif of religious mixture. For centuries, the Iberian peninsula hosted all sorts of invasions and counter-invasions of people such as the Romans, to various Germanic tribes to the Moors and the Catholic conquistadors which all brought their culture, traditions and religions. To get to the Mosque, we walked over Roman ruins covered with plexiglass, discovered only ten years ago. History in action!
The mosque itself testified to the North African Moorish influence but the inside revealed the Catholic overtones as the front of the mosque had undergone transformation into a choir with some of the faded murals still visible high up on the wall. The chills started running up and down my arms and I smiled as I walked around soaking it all in.
Our guide next lead us through the beautiful cobblestone streets. Be still my heart! She talked while she led us through the streets at the perfect pace sharing incredible information that I wish I could have recorded immediately. Even in my journal entry written mere days after the tour, much of the details had fallen prey to my fickle memory. All I remember is loving every moment that I spent on those streets savoring every footstep.
We stopped next at La Primada Catedral, the common nomenclature used rather than the official name, the Primate Cathedral of Saint Mary of Toledo. It derives the common name from the shortened form of the original as well as the cathedral’s primary place of importance in the city and Spanish history. This cathedral dwarfs in size all the others I visited on this trip, save the Córdoba Catedral which I will describe in a few days, and holds enormous historical significance because of the city’s role as imperial capital under the Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, Spain’s most famous monarchs.
Once inside the grand lady, our guide continued to lead us through the different parts of the cathedral, weaving together architectural details with the history that happened within its walls. When you walk inside La Primada you look upon a tall imposing wall which forms one of three sides of the choir, the fourth on the opposite side remains open. This choir placement gives rise to the phrase “going to hear mass” because only the wealthy and politically important could walk past the choir and sit in view of the alater. The poor stood in the entrance chamber and had to content themselves with the slightly diminished scale of the cathedral’s design displayed on the rear wall of the choir. I stood there for a moment and contemplated what the common citizen of Toledo might have experienced as they stood in a chamber designed with its opulence, obfuscation of the altar, and Latin language mass to put me in my lowly place, to remind me of my supposed lack of worth. Contemplating history in context thrills my soul.
These thrills continued as we walked around the choir, now able to see the magnificent dual altars, one within the choir and one at the front of the church. The guide pointed out her favorite statue, a white marble sculpture of the Virgin Mary and described another incredible work of art designed to reach the peak of its glory when the sun shone through the window high on the wall onto the art.
We headed to another church but not to visit the church. Instead we headed to a small area on the side, the burial site of the Count of Orgaz. Many people come just to see this chamber, not the church, or more specifically the massive painting that takes up the whole wall on the far side of the burial site. I have no pictures of the painting thanks to a prohibition of photography. (Our guide did have to tell one member of our group multiple times to put his camera away.) Instead, I soaked in every detail I possibly could of the most famous work of Toledo’s transplanted son, El Greco. I marvelled at the incredible artistry as well as the fact that I had mistakenly assumed that El Greco painted around the same time as Picasso or Dali. Think late Renaissance instead.
As the group moved towards the Jewish quarter, our guide stopped us to point out small ceramic tiles that if one did not look for them, one would not notice. Three distinct designs marked the Jewish territory. I do not remember one but I remember the others. One, a menorah, most people would recognize the provenance. The other had two Hebrew letters specifically designed to represent the Iberian peninsula. These two letters represent the word Sefarad meaning Spain. These Sephardic Jews descend from the Jews who migrated to the peninsula during the latter part of the Roman Empire and lived there until the mass expulsion under the Catholic monarchs. These small tiles form the largest remnant of these people so unjustly treated.
The trend of small remnants continued in our one stop in the Jewish quarter, once the largest synagogue in the city. After the expulsion of the Jews, the Catholic monarchs completely renovated the building to transform it into a Catholic church.
Interestingly enough, one ornamental relief high on the wall escaped the renovation or was placed afterwards by someone who wanted to make a statement. Amongst the row of star-like shapes hides the six pointed Star of David. One little star shouts in defiance of those who tried to obliviate the memory of an entire group of people.
A short distance away, still in the Jewish quarter, we visited the Monastery of San Juan de los Reyes, built by the Catholic Monarchs in the heart of the Jewish quarter to make a definitive statement. The Catholic Monarchs originally intended this church to serve as their mausoleum endowing the building with all the requisite ornamentation. However, once the Reconquista reached Granada, the Monarchs changed their minds and built another grand mausoleum there. I fell in love as soon as we entered since we walked into the cloister first with walkways that instantly increase the heart rate of any Harry Potter fan.
The other aspect of the church that caught my attention we saw as we walked towards the last site on the tour. On the front of the monastery hang a large number of manacles ordered placed there by Queen Isabella to represent formerly imprisoned Christians under Moorish rule.
Lastly, we walked across the San Martin bridge. Be still my heart! This bridge, built in the thirteenth century, crosses the Rio Tajo, the river that provides a natural defensive border on three sides for the city. I love bridges anyway but when you add Spanish medieval ornamentation and architecture, you create my favorite bridge. The steep banks of the river that we gazed upon and the hardy vegetation that adorned them formed the perfect backdrop for the quintessential Spanish countryside in the summer.
Our bus awaited us on the other side of the bridge to take us to the cigarral, a country home set up on the mountainside just outside the city where the wealthy would go to escape the cicadas from which they derive their name. Many cigarrales have been transformed into restaurants like the one we visited for lunch. Once we arrived, we took our seats at the specifically designated tables differentiating between those who selected authentic meals, like myself, and those who selected the “tourist” option. I found myself at a table with an Indian couple, a Mexican American family – two adult daughters and their mother – and a Colombian couple with their son. I thoroughly enjoyed the meal, a meal far too large for one person to consume every morsel, as well as the highly stimulating conversation. The Colombian couple did not participate much but everyone else made up for their relative silence.
At the meal I learned that Madrid had just hosted the international convention for Jehovah’s witnesses. The Mexican-American ladies traveled to Spain just for this purpose and took this tour once the conference ended. I also engaged in a fairly deep theological and political discussion with the Indian gentleman who sat on my right with topics ranging from my opinion of Donald Trump and his recent offer, at the time, to Narendra Modi to single handedly solve the “Pakistan problem” to what religion I claim and how those beliefs guide my life. Absolutely incredible and one of the reasons I loved this tour so much.
Once we had all had more than our fill, we rolled ourselves (figuratively of course) out to the bus and then on to the Damascene factory. We had a short tour of the factory where we saw the initial forging of the sword blade, the original object of this intricate metalwork art, to watching an artisan painstakingly melding the gold thread into the metal of a piece of jewelry. This technique made its way to Spain through Muslim artisans; the name suggests a Damascan origin although the technique can be found in ancient Japanese works as well. Toledo serves as a hub of the technique which provides additional allure for these beautiful pieces of jewelry, the more popular objects to work upon now. I knew immediately that I wanted to buy some earrings for Mom, the handcrafted kind, not the cheaper machine stamped pieces. Thankfully, Mom prefers small earrings because the ones I found, half the radius of a dime, cost over half my daily budget if I had taken the price from my travel budget instead of my gift budget.
The tour ended after this visit, around three in the afternoon which meant that even with the return drive, I had plenty of time to relax while catching up on journaling and photo uploading before the next day’s adventure, a tour to Avila and Segovia, a trip guaranteed to bring up the earworm of Princess Diaries’ Genovian National Anthem.