Madrid

 We both slept terrible last night with me deciding to respond to an email at 3 AM from ATB regarding the ATM screwups in Morocco. Nothing yet but fingers still tightly crossed I will get money returned to me eventually. 

We did our final walk around the centre of town by the cathedral and major plazas where we picked up some pastries and coffee/hot chocolate for our breakfast. 

Back at the hotel we waited for check out at 11 and then spent time in the courtyard waiting around until time to leave for the train (12:30 PM)

The taxi arrived promptly after the hotel staff called and we arrived at the station in plenty of time. Upon boarding the train, security checked my luggage. Turns out some of the souvenirs Caro has purchased caught the attention of the guy at the machine. 

Toledo railway station. It is beautiful.

Thirty five minutes after leaving Toledo we arrived at Atocha station in Madrid and because I had looked on YouTube for information on obtaining  tickets for the metro everything we smoothly and we arrived at the hotel in only 20 minutes after getting off the train.

With check in completed we started our walk of the historic centre of the city. The Plaza Mayor was just crazy full of people and Plaza Sol was full of tents and people protesting about an 87 year old woman forced out of her lifelong apartment by new owners who raised her rent massively ( big news here in Spain).

Plaza Mayor

Plaza Sol

We stopped at a “must see “ market but it was really packed and just not fun so we carried on. 

Check out the guys in the photo. They are not allowed to sell their products here so they place all their goods on a large sheet and if the police show up they quickly draw up the strings attached, toss the bag over their shoulders, and the items can be easily moved (like the fellow on the left)

While having a break we decided to do a day trip on Sunday to Avila and  Segovia (old towns )

We went to the Royal Palace and confirmed we could buy tickets at the door on Monday

Next on our list, a visit to the cathedral. It is nothing special after seeing all the other fantastic churches on this trip. 

It was starting to get late in the afternoon so we started back towards the hotel. We were making good progress until we came upon a church where a wedding was about to occur.  I had no choice but to stop because Caro “always” has to see the bride. 

With the bride view completed 20 minutes later we decided to go to Plaza Mayor because of the large amount of restaurants. We ate a couple of tapas quickly and rushed back to the hotel as thunderstorms were coming. We made it just in time!

Last day in Toledo

We started off the day getting a light breakfast while we waited for the Monastery of San Juan to open. It is a gorgeous monastery with a beautiful church and lots of history. It was commissioned about 1477 by Isabel La Católica (of Columbus fame). In Spain she was incredibly important for starting MANY of the religious buildings. It is thought that she and her husband King Ferdinand were to be buried here but after the Spanish finally defeated the last of the Muslims in Spain in 1492 they preferred to be buried in Granada. 

Just down the hill from the monastery is the San Martin bridge. Built in the 14th century it has beautiful views of the city. 

Next stop was the Convent de Santo Domingo el Antiguo. Initially I was not impressed ( we have seen “so” many churches) however this place is the burial location of the famous painter El Greco. More importantly for me it had a collection of VERY old letters

From 1309!

From the King in 1254!

Same document in both photos. I just wanted the date to be included (1150 AD)

By now we needed a break (12:30 PM) so our next stop was right in front of our hotel ( the right hand side of the narrow street in previous days photos). It is a now a restored cultural museum that used to be a church /mosque etc. It has lots of things from the Visigoth era ( from about 507 to 711 AD). 

The cross and the coins are from about 620AD

After an hour of relaxing we went to the Church of Jesuits, which by itself is not much to look at after seeing all the tremendous churches here. The difference is that church has stairways up to the tower where you have nice views of the city. 

After a refreshment break we went to an ancient synagogue which later was a church, then a jail, then a couple of other things that I can’t remember. It had some nice ceilings.  

Caro was humming and hawing over some jewelry pieces that she couldn’t decide on. I solved the issue as her birthday is coming up next week!

Supper was really great. We walked about 10 minutes to nearby the first Monastery we went to first today. The dessert was very tasty!

Just before 8 PM we went out to see the lights and the night life, We were surprised to see there weren’t nearly as many people as we thought there would be. In the daytime some of the plazas are full of people so we assume these are day trippers from Madrid. Tonight there were always people around but no action anywhere.

Toledo

 Last night as we were eating some snacks and working on a bottle of wine Caro took a look at the rules of the hotel which stated “absolutely no food or drink in the room”. To our recollection we have never been in a hotel that had this rule, so we ‘broke” it and continued enjoying our wine and snacks! 

There appeared to be automatic room cleaning so we put the remaining food in our back packs to hide it and took our garbage out with us this morning!

Here is a photo of part of the hotel

Check out the beams 

This is the street where the taxi drove down to let us off at the hotel gate.

We walked for about an hour all over.

About 10:45 AM we went to the cathedral for our pre-purchased timed entry. Considered the finest gothic cathedral in Spain,it is smaller (but taller) than the one in Seville.

The following is a pano shot of the “Choir” section

The chairs in the above photo are amazing. Each of them is different and were made by master craftsman back in the 1300’s (I believe)

The cathedral also has MANY religious artifacts including paintings. The first photo is a master from the renaissance called Titian (1488-1576). A painting about this size sold in 2024 for about $C 33,000,000.

The next painting is by Caravaggio (1571-1610). His paintings almost never come up for sale as they are in museums or owned by the church. One estimate I read was that IF a Caravaggio came up for sale it would go for $C 160,000,000-241,000,000.

Anyway there were MANY master paintings in there.

After completing the cathedral we went to the Alcazar (fortress) and spent a bit of time looking at Spanish army and navy history

We had a 2PM walking tour. There were eleven tourists there (India,Columbia, Venezuelan United States and us). It was a nice tour with good stories and it gave us ideas for tomorrow (we really should have only stayed here two nights).

The building above still has the bullet holes from the Spanish civil war (1936-39)

We were pretty tired at the end of the tour so after stopping for something to drink we worked our way back towards our hotel, stopping for a delicious light supper at a place six or seven minutes away.

Back at the hotel we are relaxing and breaking hotel rules again by working our way through a bottle of wine and snacking.

Edit:  We knew there was a high point in the hotel but we couldn’t seem to access it so we found one of the workers who then let us in to an unrented room which had a stairway up to the top viewpoint