Historic center of Salamanca
Salamanca can boast of many things, like the fact it houses the oldest university in Spain, created by Alfonso X in 1218 and without a doubt the most traditional of university buildings.
Within its walls are students of every ilk, locked in a constant rivalry with Alcalá de Henares. Teachers and visitors of great prestige, such as Friar Luis of León, Nebrija, San Juan de la Cruz, Cervantes, Gonzalo Torrente Ballester and Miguel de Unamuno who was rector of the University.
The university library is wonderful, with 483 incunabula, 2,774 manuscripts and 62,000 pamphlets printed before the nineteenth century. Anecdotally one must say that the spheres and terrestrial globes from the library had to be counted as "round books" to get the O.K for purchase from the accountants. Alfonso X appointed the first librarian in 1254, and the modern library contains one million copies. In addition to its glorious university history, and its current strength as a favourite spot for many foreign students to learn Spanish (I certainly would not recommend "Madrid" and much less "Barcelona"), Salamanca is also a Jacobean city of great importance, as for quite some time it was ascribed to the archbishopric of Santiago and is located right on the Via de la Plata (Silver Way), for the "traveller from the road to the South, traveller of light, of reflection, united in the way of the spirit, pilgrim in the Jacobean universe " .
Indeed, the archbishop Fonseca of Santiago, and once also of Salamanca, left in both cities splendid Renaissance buildings headquarters for Fonseca College. Intellectual, patron, a man ahead of his time, humanistic rather than clerical who became archbishop of Toledo the highest ecclesiastical authority in Spain, despite being the fruit of forbidden relations between Alonso de Fonseca, Archbishop of Santiago, and Galician noblewoman Maria de Ulloa.
The Jacobean character of the city is also reflected in the Roman bridge that crosses the Tormes to get to the church of Santiago, and especially in the House of Shells, mandated by the knight and Chancellor of the Santiago Order, which has its stone façade completely covered by the pilgrim symbol and exquisite Gothic grilles. As said in a poetic phrase, "in the skin of the city, its buildings, is everything: memory, the present and the future. The footprints they are, the echoes they’ve been and will be. "
Salamanca is a hospitable city and open to everyone, for 800 years it has continuously been university headquarters and one feels comfortable in this multicultural environment, as I found in a cyber café located in the Plaza Mayor, one of the most beautiful in Spain, where the attendant struggled speaking up to five languages with the foreigners (especially the foreign girls), which they all were except me.
Salamanca deserves leisurely walks through its historic streets, visits to libraries "of old" coffees with flavours (and smells) of the past, lively terraces in the main square (weather permitting), where one watches life pass, and certainly a visit to the River Tormes and the Roman bridge, where its joined by the Via de la Plata, as evidenced by the shells on the floor.
The cathedral deserves special praise for its gothic grandeur, the last of its kind built in Spain, in which through a secluded door gives way to the Romanesque cathedral of the twelfth century, much more discreet in its forms, but markedly more welcoming and spiritual, with works of great value like the Romanesque door of beautiful capitals, the room where aspiring doctors defended their thesis under the stern gaze of the judges in their tribune, and the contained banter of their peers.
