Ponte de Piedra
Palacio de la Aljaferia
Expo Site July 2015
[from FB post: July 19, 2015]
Safely in Zaragoza. The ride here on the high speed train is easy and comfortable but after you leave the coast the landscape is very nearly lunar. It looks like the farmers are barely able to grow anything. As we got closer to arrival time, I just thought to myself, who would put a city in the middle of all this nothingness? Then suddenly it greens up before you arrive. The new station for the fast trains is astoundingly huge. I got a taxi to the hotel and got ripped off (did not appreciate it) and the ride in through the modern edges of the city was also uninspiring. However, you cross the river and see the HUGE church in the center of town on the river and your jaw just drops. So I am waiting for things to cool down a bit and then out for a walk...
[from FB post: July 20, 2015]
Cool things about Zaragoza... lots and lots and LOTS of places to eat. Amazing food choices. The tram runs on battery power in the historic center so no overhead wires... SOOOO beautiful. The university is one of the oldest in Europe (1500s). And that is what I learned in my first half day here....
[later that day]
I walked to the Zaragoza Expo Site (2008) and thought how much expense to make a beautiful space that largely sits empty. And I think this is repeated in many other cities. Then I walked to the Aljaferia Palace which was my first Moorish palace in Spain. It is quite small, but the bits left over from the Moors were simply amazing. What was added on later by the Kings of Aragon was flat out.... boring. It really inspires me to see the south of Spain now. I came back to the town center and had a wonderful lunch where I basically had as much as I wanted to drink and a delicious 2 course meal for $10. Yeah...I love Spain.
Zaragoza retains a special place in my heart because it was my first real introduction to Spain on a solo tour. At the start of that trip, I had been in Barcelona, but Barcelona was in Catalonia and was very chic and cosmopolitan. A relative newcomer to "must see" European citie, it got to the point where before the pandemic, Barcelona was considering how to limit visitors who were straining the city's infrastructure in the hot summer months. Zaragoza, on the other hand, was in Aragon and was "Spanish". It was not high on anyone's "must see" list in Spain. Zaragoza was also where, during my Georgetown years, there was a popular summer language institute. The name had stuck in my head from my early 20's - "Zaragoza". What an odd and non-Spanish sounding name to my ears.
The journey was by high speed rail and as noted above, once out of Catalonia, the countryside started to resemble something akin to the Badlands of the Northern Plains in the USA. As we drew near the city, I seriously wondered how people were living in such a barren place. Suddenly, things flashed from brown to green all around me and the train passed into the Ebro River valley. We arrived in Zaragoza shortly after.
The new high speed rail station was far outside the city center and, surprisingly for Spain, there was not a good bus connection into the city. I ended up taking a taxi and as we drove into town my heart sank because we were passing through block after block of bland, prefab apartment flats. I felt like I was in the Singaporean "heartland" with its endless forests of HDB flats. Why would anyone want to visit that city let alone study there? Then, across the Ebro appeared the spires of the Basílica de Nuestra Señora del Pilar. The site of that church alone started to turn around my thinking. One of the largest churches in the world, it literally erupted out of low-rise Zaragoza when it came into view. I clearly needed to revise my impression of the place.
I stayed a few days and thoroughly enjoyed my time (although it was blistering hot). I had one of my best menu del dia experiences there [see: menu del dia] while exploring the small historical center on foot. It was easy to see all of Zaragoza in just a day. Besides the huge church, which was oversized for such a small city, Zaragoza sported the Palacio de la Aljafería, the northernmost example of Moorish architecture in Spain. The palace was small and unremarkable from the exterior, but deep inside it held a few Moorish rooms and a lovely courtyard that dated back 1,000 years! Granada, Cordoba, or Seville it was not, but this was in northern Spain and was a totally surprising find. It made me appreciate that I had to make my way south one day to see the best examples of that style of architecture [see: Alhambra].
One other amazing aspect of Zaragoza was its streetcars. The system was modern and used overhead wires as well as battery power on the cars. When the trams entered the old city, there was no need of overhead wires for those few blocks. I was amazed at the forethought of trying to preserve the historical city center and make it overhead-wire-free. Additionally, at the end of the streetcar line I saw the name of its opposite destination, Mago de Oz. Apparently Dorothy and Toto never realized that if they had searched just a little more, they could have traveled to the Emerald City in a sleek new tram.
Like many cities in Spain, Zaragoza's river had one Roman bridge that was still in use, Puente de Piedra. I had seen a Roman ruin in Spain on my first visit, but it was an historical artifact (the aqueduct in Segovia). The old bridge in Zaragoza was still in use (although only to pedestrians these days). I was amazed that something so old was still in use. The Romans also gave Zaragoza its unique name. The city they founded was "Caesar Augustus" and after occupation by the Goths, the Moors, and finally the Spanish, it took on its final, funny sounding (at least to me) pronunciation and spelling.
Finally, Zaragoza once had an "Expo". I am not sure if it was a World Expo or just a European Expo, but the theme was "water". The buildings were on the banks of the Ebro, so there was water nearby. Ironically, the surrounding landscape of Zaragoza was, as I mentioned in my post, mostly a moonscape outside of the river valley. Zaragoza seemed the least likely location for an Expo on water. The buildings were incredibly modern and impressive. They were also empty. Like almost all such sites, the promises of use after the event never came to pass - such a waste of resources in spite of their stark modern magnificence.
I think if I had visited Zaragoza after I had seen more of Spain, I might have given it lower marks. There are other cities that are far more interesting to be sure. However, because it was the first city I visited on my own in that country, it retains a special place in my heart. Zaragoza was the place I realized I was always going to love Spain.
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