Today we moved apartment, in fact we moved up the street 500m to our new digs for the start of the tour of Spain.  A word of caution for the new traveler; get on line to Google Earth and check out the neighborhood where you are staying and check the translator for different uses of the words in other languages.  Sauna has other meanings in Spanish.  Let me just say that there were a lot of male callers to the establishment at the back of our apartment and they were very loud, possibly drunk and looking for satisfaction.  It was a long night.

After we booked in we went for lunch at La Fontan where Lou had bean stew and I had pork cheeks and an amazing cheese cake.  We also had Sangria.

We then set out for the Royal Palace.  Unfortunately no photos were allowed inside the building.  It has 2800 rooms and is now only used for official functions. They owned a tapestry making factory in Belgium because they ruled it at the time and hence most of the walls didn’t need to be painted as they were covered by tapestries or beautiful silk wall coverings.  The tapestries here, we believe, were better than the collection in the Vatican. There was a tremendous amount of gold leaf on the walls  and the frescoes were amazing.  There was a lot of Italian influence because Spain ruled Italy at the time and could send the best painters and designers over to decorate the palace. The other thing that was striking was the amount and different types of marble used in the rooms.  Sometimes it was four or five colours in one room. We also saw four Stradivarius; two cellos and two violins.

The royal church over the road

The square inside the palace

The entrance ceiling

View over the hunting gardens