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| The cross at El Valle de los Caídos |
When walking around Madrid, I noticed that the uniform pale grey and pink tones of the granite
are occasionally interrupted by the darker xenolith and, as we sped along
the autovía on the bus, I saw glimpses of gently folded unconsolidated gravel,
sandstone and mudstone, but my day out in the Sierra Guadarrama gave me my first real taste of geology in Spain.
My hosts - Juan and Aurora - who retired from their architectural practice after the economic crisis, took me on a tour of some of Spain's best known historic monuments and the mountains that surround them, which carried on long after the sun had gone down.
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| El Valle de los Caídos |
Passing under Madrid on the M-30, through the longest urban motorway tunnel in Europe, and heading north out of
the city, it wasn’t long before the Sierra Guadarrama loomed in the distance
and Juan pointed to an isolated spur of granite, where I could see a large
stone cross. Set at a height of over 900 metres and 150 metres tall, it is visible
from over 30 kilometres away and marks the site of El Valle de los Caídos.
Built between 1940 and 1958
under the orders of General Franco, to supposedly commemorate the casualties of
the Spanish Civil War, on both sides, it is also his burial place. The ties
with Fascism are still highly controversial, but there is no doubt that
this is one of the most impressive structures that I have seen.
The first thought that came
to mind when inside the Basilica - a great vault excavated into
the granite - was that it was like an underground St. Paul’s Cathedral. It is an
astonishing work of structural engineering but, unfortunately, no photographs
were allowed. We arrived too late to ascend to the cross or take a really good
look around, but the panoramic views of the surrounding mountains and forests
were stunning.
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| El Escorial |
Next on the agenda was El Escorial, a magnificent royal palace completed in 1584 and now a World Heritage Site
– one of many in Spain. With the sun sinking fast, we all agreed that there simply wasn’t enough time
to take a good look around the palace and decided to eat instead.
Having found El Casario about to close, Juan spun a yarn to the owner and we soon found myself enjoying one of the best meals of my life - a roast leg of lamb that was bigger than my plate.
By the time we had finished
our meal, the sun had long since set and I supposed that we would now go home.
Instead we took a long drive up into the mountains and, by the time we had
wound up through the forest to an altitude of nearly 1200 metres, the temperature had fallen to zero.
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| The Roman aqueduct in Segovia |
All day, we had enjoyed a cloudless
sky but, driving down the other side of the mountains into Segovia, we
were met by thick fog, out of which the Roman aqueduct - a vast structure built entirely without mortar - suddenly appeared.
We stayed for less than an hour, only enough time to enjoy churros with chocolate before we headed off again to another place, whose name I just can’t remember now.
Back in Madrid, the
conversation turned to the geotechnical problems of laying foundations for the large
apartment blocks and the problems of tunnelling, mainly due to the underlying
gypsum. How this was quite achieved - with my limited understanding of Spanish and Juan’s
lesser knowledge of English - is quite another matter but, when passion for a subject is shared, a language barrier can easily be overcome.
