A Morning in Aranjuez
I had a free morning in Madrid as my friends wanted to go to the Prado, which I visited last year. Instead of joining them, I made a quick trip to Aranjuez, a town just south Madrid known for its royal palace and gardens – and for inspiring the Concierto de Aranjuez by Joaquín Rodrigo. My journey to the small touristic town was relatively simple: after reaching Villaverde Bajo-Cruce by metro, I boarded bus 423, which had arrived just late enough for me to eat my second chocolate croissant of the day. I had eaten my first upon buying a bag of three at a bakery in Madrid and ate the third once I made it to Aranjuez. Fortunately I still had cash on me, as the bus driver told me his card reader was not working.
Perhaps the most famous room at the Palace
of Aranjuez is the Moorish Room, which is decorated from floor to ceiling with
interlocking geometric designs and floral motifs inspired by Arabic
architecture. It once served as a smoking room. Another famous room at the
palace is the porcelain cabinet, where the walls are made – perhaps
unsurprisingly – out of porcelain. Between the large mirrors of this room stand
figures in Asian dress supported by long, Chinese-inspired dragons, and
creeping upwards above them are the fully laden branches of various fruit
trees.
After walking around the interior for a
while, I toured the Island Garden just north of the palace and the Prince’s
Garden in the east. The first garden is surrounded on water by all sides thanks
to a split in the river Tagus, which separates it from the palace itself. Through
the tinkering of successive generations of emperors, the garden has become home
to a whole host of neoclassical sculptures of gods, goddesses, and heroes, and
the pathways follow a strict grid system. This is rather different from the
Prince’s Garden which, at least in its eastern portion, is wilder and more
spontaneous, and whose paths never quite lead to their destinations in the most
direct way. At the Island Garden, an elderly man pointed out a group of
peacocks to me and proceeded to tell me about the whole history of the palace
and city.
The Royal Palace of Aranjuez was built on an old hunting reserve that once belonged to the Order of Santiago. When the Catholic Monarchs took over the military orders at the close of the fifteenth century, the land and the old palace fell to the crown. The new palace was built in the same location by Felipe II, who had also ordered the construction of El Escorial. My interlocutor was convinced that building the Escorial cost so much money that barely any was left for Aranjuez, though it did not seem very neglected to me.
Comments
Post a Comment