October 9^th – La Latina

Today we walked in an area called La Latina which is south and west of Plaza Mayor. This is one of the working class neighborhoods of Madrid but like most of the old sections of the city has many charms to display. We started out with the intent of taking the bus, which is our usual way into downtown, with the intent to transfer where the routes cross. Each bus on a given line shows the next stop along with which lines correspond with it. On the route map of Madrid it shows our line crossing one of the other lines to our destination, sort of. We could never find the other line, except to see it going the other way so we walked to our starting point. Not a long walk anyway and it gave us a chance to cut through the less travelled areas without main streets. Our walk began at a church with the largest dome in Madrid and ended at the Temple of Debod, an Egyptian temple that was carted lock stock and barrel to Madrid in 1846. Along the way we saw a 9th century Moorish wall from the very first Madrid settlement,

passed the Royal Palace and a couple of buildings that are significant to the Franco period. One was for a period of time the tallest concrete structure in the world. It was built entirely of Spanish concrete as Spain was under a world embargo at the time.

It’s still very hot here so we basically scuttle from shade to shade and stay out of the sun as much as possible. This Thursday, the day after tomorrow, we are going to take our first excursion out of town to Toledo. We’re going on Thursday to avoid the crowds on the weekends, so hopefully it will turn out to be a good strategy for the other trips as well.

This is me with Cervantes, Quixote, and Panza, I´m in red.