Spain Redux VI: Salamanca

You know, I realised that all these pictures are not redux. However, since I didn't go to Salamanca in 2007, this set definitely it.

The cathedral at Salamanca was my first ever real life Gothic cathedral. I swear to god I nearly died in ecstasy. My friend will be happy to testify that I went bonkers and didn't stop taking pictures. This is, of course, before I had been introduced to León, or for that matter, Burgos.

The rest of the ciudad dorada, as it is called, is made almost entirely from golden stone. One of the stops on St. James' Way, it is also adorned with scallop shells - there's even a very strange building with walls studded with them, called Casa de las conchas, or the house of the shells. Historically a great centre of learning, the University of Salamanca remains an academic leader - if a little full of itself ;) The picture on the right is the College of Philology, and you can see, it has scallop shells!


This one is a view of the cathedral from the outside, at the foot of the cross. Church buildings are supposed to be in the shape of a cross, if seen from above, with the altar the point where the vertical and horizontal meet (the nave? the apse?). The cathedral here houses inside itself an older roman style cathedral, which was quite cool too. The dome on top (first picture) seems to me to be a little Moorish, and from what I can tell is typical of the Spanish Gothic, which I also saw in Segovia. Inside, the arches just sweep you up to the ceiling, taking your breath away.

We wandered all over, of course, and went into the College of Theology, inside which there were these curious carvings on the bases of pillars, which represented souls in torment: sort of ghostly shapeless faces with holes for eyes and moaning mouths. Spooky. I only have a very fuzzy picture so I shan't reproduce. There was also a strange spiral staircase, apparently carved out of a single block of rock, with really shallow steps.

These two are the entrance to the college of theology, from the inside and the outside. The last one is from inside the colleges, in the Cloisters.