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