A Long Awaited Trip to Segovia

I’ve been wanting to go to Segovia for five years now, and last Friday I finally made it! The main reason I wanted to go was to see the Aqueduct of Segovia, which is one of the largest preserved sections of aqueduct in the world. For a Spanish class last year, we needed to watch a certain number of shows in Spanish, and I chose to watch a series called “Ingeniería Romana” (Roman Engineering), which featured the aqueducts. Seeing the stone in person was an entirely different experience. The slope of the aqueduct is so slight that you can’t even tell which end is higher. I was completely awestruck by the idea of how necessary water is to build a city, the weight of the importance of the aqueduct in supporting civilization, and the precision necessary to build an aqueduct with such a slight slope. If anything went just slightly wrong in the planning or construction of the aqueduct, the human and economic toll would be tremendous. Yet, they pulled it off.

I was surprised by how much else there was in the city to discover and love. The buildings themselves were architecturally complex, with influences from Catholic, Roman, and Arabic art, since the area was inhabited by all groups at one point or another. The castle-palace, Alcázar de Segovia, was a particularly beautiful product of this mixture of cultures. The name itself, like all other Spanish words beginning in "al", comes from Arabic, and its ceilings' bright geometrical designs are characteristic of Arabic art. Yet, its Catholic inhabitants covered walls and stained glass windows with biblical scenes and Catholic symbolism.

I could go on and on, but I think for this trip the pictures really do the best job of capturing Segovia. I did my best to caption them with what I remember from the tour! To see the captions, hover your cursor over the photo.