We had just visited Zaragoza two weeks ago but we had been focused on the area around the Cathedral due to the Palm Sunday celebration that was going on. Today we wanted to explore a different part of Zaragoza’s history.
The Aljaferia Palace was started around 1045 AD by the Moorish rulers of Zaragoza and completed around 1080. It is one of the best examples remaining of Spanish-Moslem architecture. After the reconquest of Zaragoza in 1118 the palace was taken over by the Christian kings of Aragon.
While the palace has been substantially altered over the last 900 years there was no concerted effort to remove the Islamic style carvings and art in the palace. What was lost was nearly always due to repurposing and redesign of areas of the palace.
As a result a lot of the details of the building remain from the original Islamic artists and workers who built the building. Also as the building has evolved some of the original construction is hidden behind later construction and being rediscovered today.
Many of the doorways remain from the original construction and have the traditional Arabic arches. They are quite elaborate with remarkably skilled stone carving built into them.
We were lucky because the Goya museum is being renovated so two floors of the palace had collections from the Goya museum on temporary display. Goya is one of the most famous Spanish artists and a native of Zaragoza.
The displays included everything from pen and ink drawings, political cartoons, and of course loads of religious paintings and portraits of rich people and royalty. There were also some paintings from other famous Zaragoza artists.
After finishing with the Aljaferia palace we headed to the old town. Our first priority was lunch, but on the way to the old town we came across the bull ring. They are always interesting buildings though we cannot imagine attending a bull fight.
We found an street lined with Tapas shops and found our way into one. It took us a while to figure out the system (to be honest I was never 100% certain what was going on), but in the end we had an interesting meal of 7 different tapas, and a very interesting regional potato dish, plus 4 drinks for about $7 each.
After lunch we returned to the immense main square which is one of the largest in Europe. They were setting up for the Goya festival which begins tonight. So the square was kind of blocked off into sections which took away the effect its large size gives it.
We popped into the Cathedral which is much larger than it looks from the square. Ton really likes this Cathedral and wanted to revisit some of the parts of it from our last visit.
Our last stop in town was the Ebro river which was wider than I expected and flowing fast with spring runoff from the mountains. By this time we had been moving around Zaragoza for seven hours, so the vote was 4-0 to make our way to the bus stop and head back to camp.
After everyone got a little rest in, we all re-gathered for a glass of wine, and another delicious meal by Kit. The weather has been good this trip, but we had quite a change in temperature in 24 hours. Yesterday when we were sitting around at 8pm it was 80 degrees and we were watching thunderclouds build. Today it 62 degrees and the wind was howling. Around sunset everyone was cold and we turned in for the evening.
