toledo

Vangelis – El Greco, and get ready to travel in time and space!

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Yes, I enjoy listening to music beyond classical. I have written here about Gospel music and jazz, even pop. Every summer, I create a playlist of pop hits for my nephew and nieces, and I used to record a Jazz playlist for my dad every Christmas.

Occasionally, rarely, I will also listen to contemporary composers like Arvo Pärt. Thrifting the other day —one of my hobbies in this desolate suburbia— I found this CD by Vangelis. I had to give it a listen. While there are many electronic music composers, a few of them had their heyday in the 80s, like Jean Michelle Jarre, Kitaro, or Jean Luc Ponty, Vangelis is probably considered the most serious, possibly because he wrote the music for great films like Blade Runner, and of course, his most famous piece, the theme for Chariots of Fire.

In this record, Vangelis explores his fellow countryman, Domenikos Theotokopoulos, El Greco. Vangelis takes you back to Toledo during the transition from the Renaissance to the Baroque. With heavy, byzantine sounds, bells, and apparently simple layering, Vangelis manages to transport the listener to another city and another era, amazing!

The beauty of this album lies precisely in the journey, the long notes, the reminiscence of old instruments and melodies. When paired with the paintings of El Greco or the ancient narrow streets of Toledo, you become transfixed. You might be in bleak South Florida, but your soul and your senses are in 16th-century Toledo.

A morning in Toledo.

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Since we had gone to the Puy de Fou night show the evening before, and the theme park does not open until noon, Celia and I recently found ourselves with time to kill in Toledo on a Saturday morning.

Our first stop was the Santa Fe Roberto Polo collection, which hosts the Centro de Arte Moderno y Contemporáneo de Castilla-La Mancha. This is a huge ancient church complex featuring Roman ruins, gorgeous, intricate ceiling paneling, and a beautifully delicate chapel, which is mixed with ridiculous modern art pieces that only add to the beauty of the old pieces and underscore the stupidity of the modern ones.

From there, we turned the corner to the Santa Cruz Museum, an astonishing Renaissance structure that once housed the late medieval Children’s Hospital. To our surprise, there was a phenomenal exhibit of fairly random pieces, including a feared pre-Roman falcata sword. But the real star of that exhibit was an El Greco painting of St. Peter, where I had a bit of a Stendhal moment —amazing!

From there, we had time to walk across Zocodover Square, almost down to the Cathedral, before turning up on Trinidad Street to the Capilla de la Inmaculada Concepción for a moment of quiet contemplation and meditation (did you know that you should be meditating?). This chapel has perpetual adoration, which means that it is open 24/7 for people to pray. It is a quiet oasis in the tourist frenzy that is Toledo.

After that, we had to get back to the car to head out to Puy de Fou for a hot, blistering day of fun. You can read about that here.

The amount of mind-blowing, beautiful, culturally enriching things you can do in Toledo is almost limitless. That Saturday, that is what we came up with.

Puy du Fou (Warning Spoilers)

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The gang in front of the night show stage

Puy du Fou is a theme park on the hills near Toledo. The original is in France, but the Spanish one seems to be the better one. It is a huge place where they perform historical recreations, but accented with dance numbers (fortunately, no singing). A group of friends and I went recently. The high point is the “Sueño de Toledo” night show. They have recreated the city of Toledo with the Tajo river (a copy of it, anyway) serving as a proscenium.

The show begins with an old man walking along the vast, open-air stage with his donkey. He meets a shepherd girl on the other side and starts telling the story of Toledo, only he skips the early history of the Carpetanians, and more importantly, the Romans! So they start the history of Toledo with the Christians and the Goths, that is when you realize that you are seeing a show and not a factually historic recreation. From there, they move to the Moorish invasion, which is when a group of Moorish girls walk into the ankle-deep “river” and perform a suggestive belly dance. I must admit, I was impressed when they walked into the water to do their dance number! And so they move through the history of Toledo. At another time, representing the building of the cathedral, two massive (make-believe) organs rise from the “river,” and then, paradoxically, flames start spewing from the organ pipes! I’m sure Bach would have been jealous. At another time, Christopher Columbus’s Santa María rises from the “river,” which is impressive, I must admit. There were plenty of horses, geese, goats and sheep, even pigs! Anyway, enough spoilers.

The next day, we enjoyed a series of performances. The first one was Cetrería de Reyes, which is an awesome falconry show. Unfortunately, midday in the Toledo sun in July made it, how can I say, blistering hot. But the show was cool, they brought out owls, hawks, falcons, vultures, even a Secretarybird stomping on a (fake) snake! At the end of the show, they released all the birds, and it was a grand finale!

A pluma y espada is a swashbuckling dramatized show of Lope de Vega, our most famous playwright of the Siglo de Oro (1600s Spain). Again they did the water thing where they danced and splashed about, and again they brought in the horses, which, given the indoor space, was surprising.

Allende la mar oceana recreates one of Columbus’s ships. You walk in and it looks and feels like you are in one of the galleons! You come out to a recreation of Hispaniola island!

Then we stopped for lunch, which is the weak spot of the park, but it was to be expected. After all, one is not there for a culinary experience. You can bring in your picnic, but the idea of carrying around lunch all day is not the most appetizing.

We finished the day with El último cantar, a show about El Cid. In this one, you get the horses and the dancing in a huge indoor space where the seats rotate to different parts of the fixed circular stage, impressive indeed.

There are many other shows, and they add about a show a year, but we were knackered, so we called it a day.

My recommendation? If it is not too hot, go enjoy the day. If it is hot, go to the night show. If you have the time, do the night show and then the next day go for the day. You are welcome.

Once a tour guide, always a tour guide; a Tonxo Tours update

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Although nowadays I am terribly busy teaching, I still enjoy giving tours on my spare time, and I even gave a couple of tours of my school!

Now that I investigate it, I have not given a Tonxo Tours update in a long time (check out the last one here).

Since that update, I have given tours of the Everglades, which I love, and I have gained a lot of depth and confidence as I learn more about South Florida and Miami in general. This is normal for every destination; each tour is better than the previous one (usually…) as one learns more and more.

This Summer I had a few tours of Madrid, and I had a lovely multi day tour with a fantastic couple that included my happy place: El Escorial, as well as Toledo and Segovia, where we started by visiting the last Hieronymite monastery of Santa María del Parral led by my old friend Hermano Martín.

At some point the Development office at school connected the dots when they needed to show the school to a visiting high school and to a group of visitors, and they contacted me to do it! I was in between classes, and after some reviewing of history and other tidbits, I did it. It is not Toledo, with its labyrinth of narrow streets, or Madrid with its overwhelming history, or Miami, where your main concern is that your customers do not get run over, but it was a lot of fun and I really enjoyed it!

So, if you need a tour in South Florida, Spain, or even St. Vincent de Paul Regional Seminary, give me a holler!

El Greco, a proto-Impressionist and the new exhibit at the Norton Museum of Art.

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Confession time: I like the Impressionists, but as a collective, it is not my favorite artistic movement. I like and appreciate the Impressionists individually, but I am not crazy about them as a whole. I can explain.

I am privileged in that I am a supporter of the Prado Museum through their Amigos del Museo del Prado program which is (mostly) fantastic. The main advantage of this “membership” is free access to the museum, which I do take advantage of frequently, plus I love showing the museum to friends and in Tonxo Tours.

So, I often get to see El Greco’s work. Domenico Theotocopulos (1541–1614) was born in Crete, moved to Venice, Rome, Madrid and eventually Toledo, where he would flourish. One of the many interesting things about El Greco was how much nineteenth-century collectors and artists loved his work. Why? Because he was an Impressionist avant la lettre!

Picasso and Renoir were blown away by El Greco, here was someone painting how he wanted to paint more than what he “saw”, a very unreal, conceptual art, and around three hundred years before them!

Why am I pontificating thus? you ask. Well, I recently had the opportunity to visit one of my favorite places in South Florida, the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach. They have just opened a new exhibition titled Artists in Motion: Impressionist and Modern Masterpieces from the Pearlman Collection. It is a smaller exhibit with some niece pieces: a Gaugin wood carving, a van Gogh, some Cezanne, a couple of Modigliani, etc. My favorite was a Modigliani portrait of Jean Cocteau -yes, you could say it is very Grecoish.

When I am at the Norton, I always enjoy walking around and checking out the permanent collection, the gift shop, the sculpture garden, it is all a very rewarding and enriching, my blood pressure goes down. As I have said before many times, an oasis of culture and beauty in South Florida.

A very special visit to Toledo

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One of my dearest childhood friends is a top art and antiquities restorer (I have mentioned him before here). This year he invited me to spend the day with him in Toledo where he had to supervise the restoration of a bridge his company is working on. Little did I know that the bridge was just the opening act of the day:

Our first stop was the bridge Tracer is restoring. The Puente de Alcántara started life as a Roman bridge before going through different modifications and updates. The medieval Order of Alcántara fortified it and protected it, giving it its current name -which is ironic since alcántara is bridge in ancient Arabic, so the bridge of bridge! Jaime’s company is working on the medieval tower, their work is impressive, but what really struck me was the formidable views from the top of the towers.

From there Jaime showed me a couple of churches -side by side- he worked on years ago: Santa Fé and Santa Cruz. In them we saw intricate Moorish arches, a beautiful, coffered ceiling, gorgeous renaissance entryways and staircases, a vaulted medieval ceiling, on and on, oh and some silly modern art that really showcases ancient workmanship!

But Jaime’s ace up his sleeve, his piece the resistance was taking me to the Cathedral where his old friend Jesús, the head of maintenance, gave us a very private and incredibly special tour.

Now, I have been to the Cathedral of Toledo a bunch of times, I have shown it to student groups, visiting friends, I even took some photos there for my dear professor Dominguez a few years ago. But this was beyond my wildest expectations, we barely stopped at the “regular” stuff other than for Jesús to point out some unique feature of whatever it was we were looking at.

We started by taking the elevator (the first one installed in Toledo) to the second floor of the Cathedral’s cloister, there we saw queen Isabella’s apartments, some excellent views, and we learned about the two falcons they have just adopted to deal with the pigeon issue.

Then we walked around the cathedral with Jesús pointing out this and that, until we went into a “secret” room hidden behind an iron gate and a velvet curtain, then another iron gate to the Cathedral’s reliquary! I must confess this moment was really moving for me, mainly because I was not expecting such a room, with such a treasure inside, it was beautiful and amazing, my hands were trembling!

We ambled a bit more, checking out the image of “Lust” which I had photographed years ago for Prof. Dominguez, and the 18th C. “Transparente”.

After our visit, we walked around town a bit and we had lunch where Jaime used to eat when he was working there, but after the Cathedral, it was all a blur for me.