Golden Salamanca: square, university and two cathedrals: a self-guided walk
By Alleytale
Plaza Mayor, the oldest university in the Hispanic world, and two cathedrals
Salamanca grew around its university, founded in 1218, and the walk follows what that left in the stone: a professor's house covered in shells, a Jesuit college, colleges, convents and two cathedrals that share a wall.
The stops
Philip V ordered this square built for bullfights, and the Churriguera family designed it in golden sandstone between 1729 and 1755. It has 88 arches and 247 balconies, and none of its facades is the same height as another. The warm Villamayor stone is why Salamanca is called La Dorada, the Golden City.
Photo: xiquinhosilva from Cacau — CC BY 2.0 More than 300 shells cover the facade, the symbol of the Order of Santiago and of the pilgrims who walk the Way of St. James. Rodrigo Arias de Maldonado, a knight of that order and a professor at the university, built the house between 1493 and 1517, and the front mixes late Gothic and Plateresque, with the coat of arms of the Catholic Monarchs and four Gothic windows, each a different shape. Today the house holds a public library.
Photo: SergioPT 15:01, 26 December 2007 (UTC) — CC BY 3.0 La Clerecía began in 1617 as the Jesuits' Royal College of the Holy Spirit, under the protection of Margaret of Austria, and was finished in 1754. It was apparently an act of reparation to the order for the Inquisition's imprisonment of its founder, Ignatius of Loyola, in the Torre Mocha of the Old Cathedral, which is on this walk. Its towers follow the model first drawn for the city hall in the Plaza Mayor, and the courtyard carries 28 paintings of the life of Ignatius.
Photo: Javier Carro — CC BY-SA 3.0 King Alfonso IX founded the university in 1218, which makes it the oldest in the Hispanic world and the fourth oldest in the world in continuous operation. A royal charter of 1254 set its rules and funding, and a papal bull in 1255 gave its degrees universal recognition. In the little square in front of the Plateresque facade stands a statue of Fray Luis de León, put up in 1869 by public subscription, and the walls around it still carry the red Vítor paintings that celebrated students' doctorates.
Photo: Matthias Bethke — CC BY-SA 4.0 Work on the Old Cathedral began in the first third of the 12th century and ended in the 14th, and the change from Romanesque to Gothic shows in its vaults. The dome over the crossing, dated to around 1150 and scaled on the outside, is known as the Torre del Gallo, the Rooster Tower, after the weathervane on top, and the unfinished tower beside the facade is the Torre Mocha. In the Chapel of Santa Barbara, off the cloister, students of the university once sat their degree examinations.
Photo: Fedoce1 — CC BY-SA 4.0 Builders began the New Cathedral in the 16th century beside the Old Cathedral, whose north wall carries the new one's south wall, and finished it in 1733. It is one of the last Gothic cathedrals built in Spain, and after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 its dome was rebuilt and its leaning bell tower was strapped with chains and lined with stone. On the Puerta de Ramos a stonemason carved an astronaut during the 1992 restoration, keeping up a tradition of adding something from the present day.
Photo: Coralma* — CC0 Diego de Anaya founded this college in 1401 for students of the university, and it became the model for the other classical colleges in Spain and Spanish America. The 1755 Lisbon earthquake badly damaged the original building, and the neoclassical palace begun in 1760 replaced it. Inside are an imperial staircase and a bust of Miguel de Unamuno made by Victorio Macho in 1930, and the building is now the university's Faculty of Philology.
Photo: Tamorlan — CC BY 3.0 Juana Rodríguez de Monroy founded this Dominican convent in 1419 in the houses where she lived, with the idea of a retreat for noble ladies, and the people of Salamanca nicknamed it the Dueñas, the ladies. The church and cloister were built in 1533. The cloister has an irregular five-sided plan shaped by the older buildings, with capitals of endless invention and carved monsters and grotesques in the spandrels.
Photo: Zarateman — CC0 The Dominicans settled in Salamanca in the 1250s, and the present convent was begun in 1524 and finished in 1610. The church front is one of the most beautiful examples of Plateresque, built like a giant altarpiece around the martyrdom of Saint Stephen, and inside, the Soto staircase of 1553 to 1556 rests only on the walls, with no other support. According to tradition, Christopher Columbus stayed in the earlier convent on this site when he came to defend his plan to sail west before the university's geographers.
Photo: José Luis Filpo Cabana — CC BY-SA 4.0 This garden of 2,500 square meters takes its name from the famous garden in Fernando de Rojas's tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea, first published in 1499. It lies on the slope of the old city wall, down toward the Tormes, and is a romantic spot because of the lovers' story. It opened on 12 June 1981, the year Salamanca was twinned with Coimbra, as a plaque on the garden wall records.
Photo: Ensalman — CC BY-SA 4.0 Miguel de Lis, who ran a tannery he had inherited from his father, had this town palace built on the old city wall. The architect Joaquín de Vargas, who came from Jerez, gave its south side a facade of iron and glass in the manner of industrial architecture. The north facade, rebuilt in 1905, is one of the few Art Nouveau fronts in Salamanca, and the house was inaugurated in 1906; today it is the museum of Art Nouveau and Art Deco.
Photo: Jl FilpoC — CC BY-SA 4.0 This stone bull is an Iron Age sculpture made by the Vettones, a pre-Roman people, and it is the oldest statue in the city. In 1834 a provincial governor had it thrown into the Tormes, wrongly believing Charles I had put it there, and it broke into three pieces; it came back to the bridge in 1954. This is the bull in the 1554 novel Lazarillo de Tormes, where a blind man tells his young guide to put an ear to it and then slams the boy's head against the stone.
Photo: Hovallef — CC BY-SA 4.0 The Roman bridge carries the Vía de la Plata, the road between Mérida and Astorga, over the Tormes. Roughly fifteen of its 26 arches are Roman. It was the main way into the city until the early 20th century, and since 1973 it has been closed to everything but pedestrians. It appears on the city's coat of arms, along with the stone bull you have just met.
Photo: Hovallef — CC BY-SA 4.0
Hear the full story as you walk, or create your own walk, in the Alleytale app.