El Escorial, Valle de los Caidos and Avila

Last Friday, the whole group boarded a bus bright and early, bound for the Royal Palace of El Escorial and the medieval walled city of Avila.
El Escorial is always a huge hit, particularly Philip II's library and the whispering room - an alcove designed so that the merest whisper is carried from one corner of the space to the other along the elliptical ceiling.

And then we bagged some luck. Our guides, the ever-cheerful Maria los Angeles and Fernando, informed us that it wasn't actually that hard to get into the Valle de los Caidos... The site has been officially closed for a few years now, but our guides assured us that we could charm our way in... So we did!

It was perhaps the most popular part of the day. It is an undeniably dark and brooding site, a cemetery and monument to 40,000 of those of both sides who fell in the Civil War between 1936 and 1939, but nevertheless impressive.

Having had the chance to see the Basilica, an enormous church that is actually larger than St Peter's in Rome, but hewn out of the living mountain, we moved on to Avila, where the students had an hour or so to wander the 500-year old walls and look out over the views of surrounding Castilla y Leon.

We were extraordinarily lucky with the weather, as you can see from the photo, and it was a great chance for the students to get out of Salamanca for a day and experience some mountain air!