Tuesday, November 17, 2009
5:54 PM | Posted by
Dan Ruemenapp
Hello all. This past weekend was a fairly chill weekend, seeing as we only did a single day trip with our class and the rest of the weekend I just stayed and enjoyed Madrid. Thursday and Friday were just fun weekends out with friends enjoying the nightlife of Madrid. We went to an Irish bar one night where everyone spoke English and they even had ESPN on the television. I was very excited to see American sports on TV again. Saturday, all of the BC kids went to El Escorial and Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen), which are both about an hour away from the city, but still located in the province of Madrid.
El Escorial is a multi-purpose palace built by King Philip II of Spain. It has one of the oldest libraries in the world. The architecture is kind of dull and gray, but I'm sure it was rockin' back in the day. Here is some basic information about El Escorial. I don't feel like re-typing all the notes I took during our field trip so all the credit here goes to Wikipedia. El Escorial is a historical residence of the king of Spain. It is one of the Spanish royal sites and functions as a monastery, royal palace, museum, and school. It is located about 45 kilometers northwest of the city of Madrid in the town of San Lorenzo de El Escorial. Philip II of Spain, reacting to the Protest Reformation of Europe in the 16th century, devoted much of his lengthy reign and much of his supply of gold from the Americas to stopping the Protestants. Philip asked the famous Spanish architect Juan Bautista de Toledo to design his palace. Together they designed El Escorial as the focal point making Spain the capital of the Christian world in the Iberian Peninsula.
After El Escorial and a quick picnic we took a quick visit to Valle de los Caídos ten minutes away (Valley of the Fallen). The monument built there is massive. It is built right into a mountain and a gargantuan cross situated on top of the mountain of the monument can be seen from miles away. The following information is also from Wikipedia. The Valle de los Caídos is a monumental memorial mausoleum erected at Cuelgamuros Valley in the Sierra de Guadarrama mountains near Madrid built by the order of the former Spanish dictator Francisco Franco who ruled Spain from April 1939 until his death in November of 1975. The monument was built to honor those who died during the Spanish Civil War. Only the names of José Antonio Primo de Rivera (the first leader of the Spanish fascism party) and Franco himself are honored individually. The rest of the fallen in the war are honored anonymously. Franco claimed the monument to be a "national act of atonement." As a surviving artifact of Franco's rule, the monument and its Catholic basilica remain controversial, especially due to the manner and circumstances of its construction (built by political prisoners).
El Escorial and Valle de los Caídos represent two periods of transition in Spain. The transition from the Catholic Kings of Spain to the Austrian Kings and the transition from dictatorship to democracy, respectively. I am currently going through a transition period myself here during my studies in Madrid. First, my classes are starting to get into intense mode as midterms are coming up and I have a lot of reading and studying to do the next few weeks. Second, tomorrow I register for classes for Boston College in the Spring 2010 semester. I have all of them picked out, and now I need to get some back up plans ready just in case they close before my registration time. In a few days after I finish registering I'll share my course schedule with ya'll.
I didn't take many pictures of El Escorial or Valle de los Caídos because I was taking notes the whole time, but of the pictures I did take you can visit soon at http://picasaweb.google.com/djruemenapp.
"Because these things will change, can you feel it now? / These walls that they put up to hold us back will fall down / It's a revolution, the time will come for us to finally win."
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