The San Isidro Festival in Madrid is like a combination of Christmas, New Year’s Eve and July Fourth.
During the annual celebration on May 15, women attach red carnations to their hair, people dress in traditional outfits, concerts are held throughout the city and the day is capped with a spectacular fireworks display.
The festival, which honors the patron saint of Madrid, is a holiday so the streets are packed with families and students enjoying a day off from school.
Pat and I walked to Plaza Mayor, where a giant stage was set up in one of the city’s main squares for a performance by a music and dance troupe that acted out Goya paintings. We started talking to a young couple and the boyfriend told us that two of his aunts were members of the troupe and his sister danced in a similar group.
Later in the day we took two bus tours around the city, one through the historical section and the other through the modern area. The architecture in the older neighborhoods, with its elaborate facades and sculptures, was much more impressive than the bland, purely functional newer buildings, including the particularly ugly U.S. embassy and the monstrous home stadium for the Real Madrid soccer team.
That night we ate dinner and watched a flamingo show at Corral de la Moreria, a legendary nightclub/restaurant with a wall of photos featuring visiting celebrities like Muhammad Ali, Rock Hudson, Michael Douglas, Harrison Ford, Liza Minnelli and Pele. The singers and guitar player were great, but the highlight was the dancers, whose balletic movement and rhythmic foot stomping elicited loud ovations. I’m easily distracted, so I occasionally focused on their hard black shoes and wondered how they avoid painful blisters.
Madrid is filled with wonderful museums and the most famous one is Prado, which houses one of the best collections of classic European art, featuring works by Goya, Bosch, Rubens, El Greco and Velazquez. If you’re more interested in 20th century art, including Spanish modern masters Picasso and Dali, the place to go is the Reina Sofia museum.
There is only one Picasso currently on display at Prado — a 1943 cubist painting of a distorted woman’s head — and it’s sandwiched between two more traditional Velazquez paintings, a jarring juxtaposition that’s like listening to a rapper in an opera house.
Another noteworthy display is a copy of the Mona Lisa, believed to have been painted by one of da Vinci’s assistants at the same time as the original. It was virtually ignored until a 2012 restoration revealed it to be the earliest known copy of Leonardo’s masterpiece.
One day we drove about an hour north of Madrid to Guadarrama National Park, where we rode e-bikes for 16 miles through the scenic countryside where the only sounds were clanging cowbells. We passed cows lying on the side of the road and horses grazing in the fields, but didn’t see a single person until we reached a royal palace near Segovia, an ancient town noted for its towering, well-preserved Roman aqueduct with 167 arches.
The royal palace, known as La Granja, was modeled on Versailles and has its own version of those famous gardens that includes two towering sequoia trees appropriately nicknamed King and Queen.
We walked through Segovia’s cobblestone streets, filled with shops and restaurants, and passed by a Gothic cathedral built over a 160-period from 1525 to 1685. After walking under the soaring arches of the 2,000-year-old aqueduct, we entered a traffic circle surrounded by modern international icons like McDonald’s and Burger King. It felt like I had just exited a time machine.
From Madrid we took a high-speed train south to Seville, whose inland port through the Guadalquivir River once made it the largest trading center with the New World. The city’s old town section contains three buildings that make up a World Heritage Site: the Alcazar royal palace, the Seville Cathedral and the Archive of the Indies.
The much-traveled remains of Christopher Columbus are in a raised casket above an ornate catafalque at the 11,500-square meter cathedral, one of the largest churches in the world. His remains have been moved at least five times since his initial 1506 burial at the Convent of St. Francis in Valladolid, Spain, which is one more time than he sailed to the New World.
One of his previous resting places was Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, which still claims to have part of his remains. That can’t be proven because Dominican authorities won’t allow the remains to be tested. However, DNA testing has proven that the current casket in Seville does contain Columbus’ ashes — or whatever you call what’s left of him.
The Alcazar palace is a fascinating fusion of Moorish, Gothic and Renaissance architectural styles. Originally built in the 10th century as an Islamic citadel, it was transformed many times by the city’s changing rulers before it became a royal residence. The palace and other photogenic sites in and around Seville were used in the filming “Lawrence of Arabia” and the fifth season of “Game of Thrones.”
The Archive of the Indies houses 43,000 volumes documenting the Spanish exploration and conquest of the New World, including letters written by Columbus, a 1493 papal declaration dividing the world between Spain and Portugal, and papers signed by Magellan, Cortes and Pizarro.
Our hotel in Seville was hidden in an alley behind the Alcazar palace. To get there, you had to navigate a maze of narrow stone streets that were barely wide enough to accommodate one car. Rather than risk damaging their vehicles trying to squeeze down the streets, some taxi drivers would ask to pick you up in front of the palace.
Pat and I always like to explore nature areas outside cities, so we took a day-trip to Donana National Park about an hour’s drive from Seville. The 210 square-mile park is a wetland area of marshes, shallow streams and sand dunes near the point where the Guadalquivir River flows into the Atlantic Ocean.
Among the animals living in Donana are the Iberian lynx, wild boar, red deer and Retuertas horses, one of the oldest breeds in Europe. But the park is best known as the home to more than 300 bird species, including the colorfully named white stork, grey heron, black kite, pink flamingo, blue tit and red-rumped swallow.
Thanks to our knowledgable guide Maria and her powerful telescope, we spotted 32 species, including a white stork couple and their three chicks in a large nest built on top of a power line. (We saw a lot of similar power-line nests along a highway in Portugal on our ride from Seville to Lisbon. Apparently storks have no fear of electrocution.)
Maria is a passionate conservationist and bird whisperer who can identify almost any avian species by its sound, whether it’s a chirp, warble, squawk, hoot, whistle, caw or trill. Personally, I have trouble identifying songs that I’ve heard a thousand times.
After visiting the park, we stopped by the nearby village of El Rocio, which looks like a set from a Western cowboy movie with its hitching posts, dusty roads and horse-drawn carriages. I half-expected to see John Wayne or Clint Eastwood sauntering down the street with a six-shooter strapped to his side, though the town is actually best known as the site of an annual pilgrimage whose origins date to the 13th century when a local shepherd supposedly found an image of the Virgin Mary carved into a tree.
The most memorable image I ever saw carved into a tree involved a sex act that I didn’t think was possible.
