Views out our hotel window (the name of the hotel escapes me at the
moment, but will be posted shortly), which looked out onto the Plaza de
España.
In the Plaza de España is a monument to the author Miguel de
Cervantes. It contains statues of characters from his stories, including
Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, shown here. The large reddish-brown building
behind the monument is our hotel.
We ran into this by accident while trying to find a subway station. Spain
is like that; everywhere you turn you smack headfirst into something historical.
One of Europe's renowned art museums. We went to see works by Velázquez, Goya, and Hieronymus Bosch (the Spanish call him El Bosco).
Unfortunately, Velázquez's Las Meninas, Goya's Majas, and
the two side panels from Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights were
all off exhibit for restoration, but we still got to see plenty of neat stuff.
No flash photography was allowed in the museum, so that's why these pictures
are dark.
The outside of El Prado, with some obnoxious American next to the statue of
Velázquez.
Goya's Saturn Devouring His Children, from his black paintings. We had
to help a group of American ladies decipher which painting was which in order
to preserve a sliver of our national dignity.
Megan (on the left) examining the center panel of Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights.
We don't remember the name or artist on this one, but Guy and his family did a
jigsaw puzzle of it once.
What is this rodent thing? We don't know either, but someone went to a lot of
trouble to make it a detail on a large inlaid table.
This was a private park for the royal family from 1632 - 1869. It contains
a lake and several gardens.
A monument to Alfonso XII, built in 1901. It faces the park's boating lake.
The architecture garden contained many small
buildings in different styles. We liked the duck house the most.
A mysterious bird that attracted our attention while roaming the park. We
haven't yet found an ID guide for European birds to track down what it was.