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Salamanca, Not Just Another Hill Town

March 16, 2002

Dear Friends and Families,

Salamanca, where to begin? It's a university town. It's a hill town. It's old. There are medieval churches and convents and walls and squares and even a Roman bridge. After six months of wandering around Europe, we've seen each of these, but in Salamanca, the combination was truly special.

Our guidebook listed 43 specific places that required a visit, but we didn't see half during our two-day stay. For our diary, we'll just take you on one of our walks. I don't think it's possible to show even the half of Salamanca we saw in a single diary and, unfortunately, our writing time is running out.

Driving into Salamanca, we had seen the cathedrals spring up out of the rolling Spanish farmlands. One minute there were just farms and the next minute there were the church spires. Our hotel was across the river from the old town and each 15 or 20 minute walk started with the 2000-year-old Roman bridge and was guided by the cathedral landmark.

On our first walk, we stopped at "Casa Lis"and its wonderful Art Deco and Art Nuveau Museum. Interior photos were forbidden so I can't properly share what we saw but it was a most elegant collection of applied arts from early in the 20th century. In California, we call this period "old" but in Salamanca this was the youngest landmark in town by a couple hundred years.

For example, the "New Cathedral" dates from the 16th century, four centuries after it's connected neighbor, the 12th century "Old Cathedral". Details of both cathedrals were grand, whether it was the newer neighbor's doors or the altarpiece from the older church next door. The cloisters of the Old Cathedral were filled with elaborate tombs, altarpieces, and religious art. We've seen a lot of this lately, but this was an excellent collection of 500-year-old art that seemed more human than seen in our other visits.

One of my favorites was a choir book whose two feet high (60 cm) pages had just a few lines of song. Now I understand how an entire choir could stay together: they literally were singing from the same page on the massive stand in front of the entire group. These weren't books; they were the predecessors to audio-video technology.

Of course, the university was the real center of "new" learning. Here, my favorite classroom was furnished by several rows of rough beams that have been subjected to hundreds of years of student doodles. It looked most uncomfortable but also gave a good sense of just how long students have been in these halls trying to learn.

When we walked out of the university doors, we saw a crowd pointing back at the doorway and taking pictures. They were looking for an unusual carving of a frog on a skeleton's skull and seeing it was supposed to be good luck. Can you see it?

Speaking of crowds, everywhere we went there were bunches of noisy students. Salamanca has maintained it's reputation as a center of education and a number of the voices we heard belonged to American and other foreign students. I was struck by the contrast between the thoroughly modern youths, most armed with mobile phones, carrying on among 500-year-old buildings. It was easy to imagine the situation having stayed essentially unchanged for all those years - other than the cell phones, of course.

At the end of every walk back to the hotel, we'd cross the river and look back at the old city. Each time we felt we'd seen just a small part and there was still much more to experience. Next time we'll come back as students. Not serious students perhaps, but then again, now that our kids are almost done with their own university careers, we can say that sometimes the education comes from the environment more than the classes. Salamanca has a wonderful learning environment, serious student or not.

Take care and learn from the enviroment around you.

John and Marianne

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