One of the things I love about Europe is the cathedrals. Granted I’m not catholic and I sometimes wonder while I’m in one what God thinks of all the extravagance and icons of Mary, but I still always find solitude inside. My friend Ashley and I signed up together to take a tour of the Cathedral in Granada. She’s my friend here who appreciates art and architecture more than just looking at it and saying “that’s cool.” We learned that it took 212 years to build and so it has both Baroque and Renaissance influences. On the façade there are engravings of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John with their respective animals. The archangels Michelangelo and Rafael are on far sides and there are two girl angels (one holding the Ten Commandments to depict the Old Testament and the other depicting the New Testament). I pass by this cathedral everyday, but I had never seen the inside of it. It was bigger and more beautiful than I had expected. It was also a lot different than a lot of the cathedrals I’ve seen here. There were a lot of windows to let in natural light (representative of the Spiritual Awakening during the Renaissance) and the marble was painted white to refract it.
We also got to see the Capilla Real which is kind of attached externally to chapel. Quite honestly I didn’t know that this even existed. It was built to house King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella’s bodies, but it also contains their daughter Juana’s body and her husbands’. One of the coolest facts I’ve learned since being in Spain was that King Ferdinand actually denied Christopher Columbus’ request to finance his voyage. Queen Isabella, however, approved it and financed it by giving him her jewelry to sell in order to buy the ships. Isn’t that crazy? She didn’t have access to actual money or gold so she financed the whole thing with her jewelry!
<3 Ashton
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