An Afternoon in Alcalá de Henares

As soon as I arrived in Madrid on Thursday afternoon, I made a rookie mistake. I turned up at the airport bus station some five minutes after the bus for Alcalá de Henares was scheduled to depart and, after hanging around a little hoping that it was merely late, I went back into the airport to buy a sandwich. The next bus was supposed to arrive forty minutes after the first, but as I waited and waited, and as the forty minutes turned into an hour, it slowly dawned on me that pretty much every bus leaving the airport in that direction was departing with a delay of at least a quarter of an hour. In other words, the bus I thought I had missed left while I was buying an overpriced airport meal.

I arrived in Alcalá at three o’clock in the afternoon with Bizet’s “Dragons d’Alcalá” stuck in my head. Having come from the west, I passed by the medieval wall with its square towers and walked through the neoclassical Puerta de Madrid. Much of the area around the walls was fenced off for renovations, but once I was inside the old city, I could enter the field behind the walls to see the towers pricked up one after another all the way to the Archbishop’s Palace. I walked to the Archbishop’s Palace along the road and then south to the Cathedral of Saints Justus and Pastor.

Founded in 1497, the Cathedral of Saints Justus and Pastor takes its unusual name from two local Christian children martyred by the Emperor Diocletian. One of the building’s main claims to fame is that it serves as the final resting place of Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros (1436-1517) – Spanish Regent, Cardinal, and Grand Inquisitor. Cisneros was the architect of Spain’s forcible conversion of its Muslim population following the Reconquista, ordering the population of Granada to accept the Christian faith under pain of torture and imprisonment. This policy violated an earlier treaty and the Muslims revolted, which Spain used as justification for revoking their protected status. However, while Cisneros persecuted Muslims and burned Muslim texts, he also funded the publication of the Complutensian Polyglot Bible and founded the University of Alcalá.

Another famous citizen of Alcalá was Miguel de Cervantes, born in the city in 1547. Cervantes’ childhood home and museum is just a short walk from the cathedral, standing behind a statue of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Farther down the same road also lies Cervantes Square, flanked by the town hall, a chapel, and several university buildings. Alcalá is particularly known for its university, which was one of the leading institutions of Spain’s Golden Age and still awards the annual Cervantes Prize. In the past, it was sometimes referred to as Universidad Complutense, referring to Complutum, the name of the old Roman settlement in Alcalá. In 1836, the university moved to Madrid, which is how the Complutense University of Madrid got its name.

I walked a little farther east before turning back around and taking the bus to Madrid. I was no longer consternated when it arrived ten minutes late, though it meant that I would not arrive at my destination as early as I had expected. After taking the metro from one end of Madrid to the other, I got on a city hopper bus to San Lorenzo de El Escorial, where I had booked a room at a little historical hotel.