First stop today was the Palacio Real or Royal Palace where we had got lucky again. The Changing of the Guard with full pomp and ceremony is only held on nine occasions throughout the year and today was one of those. Arriving early we secured a spot at the fence which gave us a perfect view to the courtyard of the palace and a rear view from the approach between the cathedral and the palace. Great uniforms and a variety of horse breeds, a huge marching band which did formation work, soldiers who marched in formation patterns and also performed manoeuvres with their rifles and bayonets, and some solid work horses pulling military carts. As the commentary was in Spanish I cannot do more than present some photos for you to look at.
Having stood in the sun for more than two hours, we headed for the cool of the Cathedral of the Almudena next door. This church is celebrating its 25th anniversary which is a strange thing for Europe where everything is many hundreds of years old. Of course, it does have older foundations.
This was one case of reviews being not always to be believed. I had read ' attractive on the outside but nothing to see inside.' What a good thing I decided to see for myself! It is certainly different but in keeping with its age we felt that it gave a contemporary view of Christianity, and also gave modern religious artists an opportunity to present their work. Surprisingly, we found it most satisfying.
The next church where we hoped to see frescoes by Goya was closed so we headed back to a shady spot we'd seen and tried a local favourite - calamari in a roll.
Rested, fed and watered, we went back to the a Royal Palace to tour the treasures on show. This palace has well over 1000 rooms and is only used on special occasions now. The king lives elsewhere. The decoration of the rooms is stunning but the thing that won us was the amazing collection of huge chandeliers. Photos were not permitted in most areas but I did get two chandeliers to include in this post.
Back to our apartment for a short rest before we went out for a tapas tour. That is the subject of the next blog post.
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