El Escorial

El Escorial is the monastery, palace, crypt, library, and cathedral from the days of Felipe II. After all the insanity on Friday I went here last Sunday.
It's about a 40 minute bus ride outside of Madrid and a really cool trip.
We walked through the living courters, art museum, architecture museum, etc parts first. It was the first place I've seen that felt like someone actually lived there once upon a time. The furniture was worn and it looked so authentic which I really liked. Felipe II was a big supporter of art and so there are a lot of interesting and important paintings there. They also had lots of sketches for the plans of different parts of this gigantic building and models which I loved (that's my sort of thing)!

El Escorial has over 134 km of corridors, 1200 doors, 2000 windows, 86 staircases, etc. To say its big is an understatement.

We also walked through the royal crypts. This was interesting if not a tad creepy at times. There were 9 tomb rooms! Also, a lot of the tombs had intricate carvings on the granite and some even had life size statues of the person inside on top. There was also a room just for children of the royal family who did not make it to adulthood. There were 60 tombs in all with 47 full! They were stalked in three tiers and made out of white granite. As a result the spanish refer to the structure as the wedding cake. A bit morbid if you ask me but each to one's own I suppose.

We also went to the Catedral, always a necessary stop and walked through. As all European major cathedrals seem to be, it was extremely lavishly decorated with huge gold statues and was gorgeous on the inside. They also had a replica of the monument for Holy Thursday which is this structure that looks kind of like a Gazebo that was made out of over 400 pieces of wood but without any nails! It was really cool.

Last we went inside the palace library. The ceiling was decorated with one continuing fresco that showed all the great thinkers and areas of thought: math, science, philosophy, etc etc. There were also thousands of original manuscripts from back in the 16th century. They had some open so you could look at the covers or inside. The calligraphy was absolutely gorgeous as were all of the hand drawn sketches. It quite possibly was my favorite stop in the whole place.