Trevor Huxham

It’s hard to believe but it’s already been almost four years since I first left the States to teach English in Spain. After a sleepless trans-Atlantic flight , I caught my first glimpse of España  over the western coast of Galicia, in the northwest. Cities along the densely-populated Rías Baixas  glittered in the soft baby blueness of dawn—beneath thick clouds;  this is  Galicia we’re talking about, now—and it wasn’t long before the plane had passed over rolling hills and entered the meseta central , the high plains of central Spain. The entrance Ávila was next, still neatly enclosed by its medieval walls, but what caught my attention the most as we crossed over the Guadarrama mountain range was a striking monumental cross that seemed to emerge from a heap of granite boulders. This fleeting image would soon be replaced by the sprawl of metropolitan Madrid and the runways of the Barajas airport, but it was unmistakably the lightning rod of modern Spanish so...

As far as monuments go,  Madrid  doesn’t have much to offer. Yes, the Spanish capital’s got a Baroque royal palace, a cathedral that was finished in 1993, and the opulent San Francisco el Grande domed basilica. But compared with other Spanish cities like Sevilla or Toledo , there’s not much for history nerds with a checklist to see in Madrid. That’s where daytrips to nearby World Heritage Sites come in, places like Alcalá de Henares, Aranjuez, and El Escorial. Exterior view To get your history fix, you’ve got to head northwest out of Madrid toward the Guadarrama mountain range to reach the  Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial.  Conceived primarily as a royal mausoleum by King Felipe II, it was constructed between 1563 and 1584 and is one of the purest (and largest) examples of Renaissance architecture in Europe. But El Escorial isn’t merely the burial place of all Spanish monarchs since the 1500s; it also contains a still-active monastery, a soarin...