Salamanca - old traditions, and young people, in sun washed gold

The Fulbright mid-year meeting gave me a chance to get to know this charming town

"Salamanca" has been "the University" for a long time now.  So it's a glimpse of what a nice little places like Williamstown or Amherst may be like in 600 years if they're lucky.  (Adjusted for architecture, of course.)

Salamanca rises above the banks of the Río Tormes, just before a snowstorm

As mentioned earlier, I am just back from the Fulbright program's "mid year meeting" in Salamanca, which ran from Wednesday afternoon to Friday evening.  The commission put us all up in (two) hotels and kindly gave us all the option of staying Friday night if we wanted, so we had Saturday free to explore the city further, which I did.  (There are 155 Fulbright grantees this year, in addition to the families of the some of the researchers, so we're a big group.  Hence the two hotels worth.)  The mid-year meeting itself was interesting, and involved a few small group sessions about how our research or teaching is going, and how we're adjusting to life in Spain (during which I sat and felt stupid while other people complained about the difficulties of cultural adjustment, because I'm completely happy and contented and haven't missed buying peanut butter or eating dinner before 8:00 PM at all - partly because I seldom do either of those things at home).  There were also a much larger number of presentations by various Fulbrighters about either their research or their experiences in Spain mostly as English teachers, since the English Teaching Auxiliaries are the bulk of the program.  (Everyone calls them the E.T.A.s which I think is funny.  TA is a standard abbreviation for Teaching Assistant, but E.T.A. with the three letters pronounced stands for Estimated Time of Arrival for me.  And it's just lucky for them that the members of the Basque separatist group ETA pronounced as a word here are called "etarras.")  The presentations were generally interesting, and deserve their own entry, as does the socializing with 100+ young Americans (one of whom in a breakout session described his vision of cultural ambassadorship as "a kind of passive ambassadorship, just by being a decent human being so people know there are Americans who are").  My brief conclusion (to be expanded on at more length): the United States is incredibly less uniform in culture than I usually think of it being, and certainly less uniform than most Europeans believe.  But for now, I think Salamanca itself deserves an entry on its own, especially since we were brought there to get to know a new place, and it really is a pretty place, for a lot of reasons.  (See pretty pictures after the jump.)

Our one cultural activity as a group was a guided walking tour of Salamanca, for which we were all warned to bring warm clothing.  Having learned from my walking tour of Bruges in December that even if it is several degrees above freezing, being forced to stand still outside when severely sleep deprived can be very uncomfortable, I brought my big puffy jacket that I have not worn at all in Spain, and that I was regretting taking up space in the suitcase, as well as a pashmina-type scarf and gloves.  I was perfectly happy, and watched everyone else dance around in the cold being miserable and trying to figure out why a temperature that wouldn't bother them at all at home under normal circumstances was making them shiver uncontrollably.  ("We could cuddle together for warmth," one of the boys who is an ETA suggested to a friend as we all left the cathedral.  "Thanks, but I'm particular about who I cuddle with," replied the other boy.)

I believe I went on a similar tour of Salamanca nearly twenty five years ago, when I was a high school student in Spain, and it was July and incredibly hot, but also incredibly crowded.  (Salamanca really is better seen in the winter, when the hordes of summer language students and tourists are not around.)  It was interesting to compare what I remember of that tour with this one, as the basic sites and stops have not changed at all, though my knowledge of Spain and of the medieval European university in general has certainly deepened in the meantime.  Oddly, I remembered where to find the frog on the face of the Cathedral, because I wrote a composition about the frog when I was first there as a teenager.  (My composition involved a frog named Yorick who wanted to be a scholar and a university student suffering from premature baldness, and how they came to an accommodation.  If you know about where the frog is to be found on the multiple itsy plateresque carvings of the facade, this makes sense.  If not - SPOILER - it's on a skull.)  I did not remember being shown the astronaut among the carvings on the entrance to the new cathedral where people actually go in nowadays. 

Yes, that's an astronaut among the grotesques on the left.  Very reminiscent of the carvings in The Sherwood Ring.

Either that facade was under restoration when I was there, and the astronaut was actually in the process of being added, or else it was considered too embarrassing to point out to impressionable high school students.  I actually suspect the former, because (like the frog) the astronaut is a perfect example of a place that is marinated in being a university city -- which means that it has had centuries worth of time to become sophomoric in its humor.

The Fulbright Commission explained that we were holding the mid-year meeting in Salamanca as part of joint anniversary celebrations, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Fulbright Program, and the 800th anniversary of the University of Salamanca.  In fact, according to the excellent tour guide, the first document referring to the "universitas" as opposed to the "escuela catedralicio" (Cathedral school) as an independent entity dates from 1254, not 1218, which means that Fulbright could just as well celebrate its 80th anniversary in twenty years and the close to approximately 800th birthday of the university, but the university itself has little signs all over saying "1218-2018" and congratulating themselves.  (I assume there was some educational institution named in some document dated to 1218 - though hard to tell what calendar they were using at the time, so it might not be technically 800 years anyway, since some months have jumped around and gotten lost since then.)  I suspect they're pushing their oldness to try to get as close as possible to their sister institution in Bologna, since the guide proudly explained that Salamanca is one of the four oldest universities in Europe: Bologna, Paris, Oxford, and Salamanca.  (In general, this depends a lot how you're counting.  Oxford is more meticulous, and simply says on their website that "There is no clear date of foundation, but teaching existed at Oxford in some form in 1096 and developed rapidly from 1167, when Henry II banned English students from attending the University of Paris."  It also depends on what you consider "Europe" since the University of Granada was either founded in 1541 or 1349, depending on whether you think the Catholic Church is an indispensable part of a university or not, and if you don't, the university of Córdoba pre-dates Bologna by about one hundred years.)  In any case, Salamanca has been a university town for a long time, and it kind of shows.  Even the ten minute walk from the historic city center to the modern part of town where the bus station is takes you past a ton of (completely modern) university dorms, various university buildings, and the Castilla-León provincial school of art preservation and restoration, as well as lots of small food providing businesses aimed at students.  Within the historic city center, most buildings are related to either the church or the university, but as there was never a hard and fast line between these two institutions, and the university definitely had the upper hand much of the time, the university has literally marked the walls of the town, with a distinctive red font, once upon a time (according to our guide) used by happy students who had passed their exams to tag the word "victor!" on the walls with a mixture of oil and calf's blood.  (The calf got slaughtered as part of a baby corrida de toros which the students also did to celebrate passing exams.  Knowing university students everywhere, I'm assuming the calf also got eaten because there is always and only one answer to the stupid question "are you hungry?" when asked to a late adolescent.)

All these centuries of nerdy testosterone and strange rituals which totally made sense at the time (or at three in the morning after a few pitchers of sangría) have left Salamanca with an impressive set of monumental buildings, but also considerably more of a sense of fun and unpretentiousness than say, Toledo, which is also made of massive gold sandstone.  (Our guide explained that the buildings in Salamanca are built with a local stone which is young, and oxidizes yellow instead of gray or white, therefore turning the city into a city of gold.  Toledo also has that yellowish look.)  Salamanca has great institutional buildings, made of golden stone...but they tend to have little architectural jokes like frogs or astronauts.  The Plaza Mayor - which has the reputation of being the prettiest in Spain - is all golden stone as well (and when I emerged in front of the Ayuntamiento, pictured below, on Saturday, the square was strewn with colored confetti, and people in fancy clothes were talking pictures on the square, because I had obviously just missed a wedding there).

The Ayuntamiento of Salamanca, in the Plaza Mayor, gleaming gold in the sunlight.

Two sides of the Plaza Mayor (including the Ayuntamiento's, I believe) have medallions between the porticoes with relief busts of the kings of Spain (and the odd queen).  A third side (opposite the ayuntamiento) has conquistadores (including Cortés, Pizarro, etc.).  The remaining side are the notables of the university.  About half of those remain blank because, as the guide said, "estamos esperando."

The medallions of the university notables in the Plaza Mayor....with a blank space and ? for the last one, in case the university has a new hero come along who needs to be portrayed.

The portraits already carved into the Plaza Mayor obviously include the twin heroes of the walking tour and the university, Fray Luis de León, and Miguel de Unamuno, both of whom illustrate the strange paradox of Salamanca, and of many if not most institutions of higher learning, perhaps best illustrated by Terry Pratchett's wizards of Unseen University: as institutions universities are inherently conservative bastions of power and privilege.  Their wizards (or professors) tend to be inherently conservative as well, and can frequently be no more than fat old men who viciously defend their own privilege, squabble and back bite with their colleagues, and loftily ignore the outside world.  95% of the time, wizards are simply greedy, self-absorbed, and lazy.

But the other 5% of the time, when demons from the dungeon dimensions threaten the fabric of reality (or do something else which might interfere with the wizards' mealtimes), these very easily mocked professorial figures stand against the forces of darkness with a reckless defiance that looks like a suspiciously good imitation of heroism.

Unamuno's inability to not make helpful comments (hence the cruelly accurate "parece una pescadería" at the opening of the stunningly ugly Complutense, from a man accustomed to golden Salamanca) has of course granted him immortality as the man author of "vencerá pero no convencerá."  Unamuno himself would have certainly been happy to be considered the spiritual heir of Fray Luis de León, the sixteenth century Augustinian friar, poet, and academic, who like Unamuno spent most of his career at the university, barring a brief five year stint in prison after a small disagreement with the Inquisition.  (They thought he shouldn't translate the "Song of Songs" from Greek into Castilian, because people would think it was about sex.  He thought he should translate it.  They were not receptive to his argument that he was doing it only for educational purposes.)  If Unamuno's tag line is "vencerá pero no convencerá," Fray Luis de León has become immortal in Salamanca for returning to the university after his five year imprisonment, walking back into the lecture hall he had previously occupied, opening the book to the chapter he had left off at, and beginning his lecture to his curious students, "como decíamos ayer...."  ("As we were saying yesterday..." with a strong implication of "before we were so rudely interrupted.")  I rather like the plural "decíamos" here, because it is absolutely what every teacher (myself included) says when summarizing the previous lesson ("So last week we talked about....") not out of desire to use an arrogant royal "we" but rather out of a desperate hope that the students will feel included in a conversation, rather than just the suspicion that you've been talking to the walls.  The guide said that during his imprisonment Fray Luis was supposed to have prayed continually, though I suspect that the continual prayers were less of repentance and more in the nature of requests for painful things to happen to the people who had locked him up and taken him away from the university.  She also mentioned that although they were contemporaneous he never met Sta Teresa de Avila, but commented (either in writing or publicly so that it was recorded) that he felt that he knew her through her work.  This also strikes me as a completely reasonable comment for an academic ("I've read your book" is a nice way of saying "I feel like we're already acquainted"), but an extraordinarily generous one for a male academic to say about a woman in the sixteenth century, since it afforded her almost the courtesy of a fellow wizard.

The thing about both Unamuno and Fray Luis is that the university now celebrates them for precisely the things that made them lose their jobs at the university when they were alive, and that is completely typical of universities.  The strange alchemy of wizards is that their absolute conservatism is built on the celebration of those who threatened that conservatism.  Not that either Fray Luis or Unamuno were anybody's radicals, or even anybody's liberals.  Given their institutional position, how could they have been?  Rather, they were stubborn old curmudgeons, who combined righteous indignation with an attack on their own privileges with a little of the wild, drunken, students whom they taught (and who they had been) who thought scribbling on walls was a totally valid way to celebrate passing exams.  But I find it hard to not admire them a little, certainly far more than moronic military heroes who won plaudits by not questioning why when questioning would have been a damn good idea.

In general, Salamanca is the city of the people who sit in the back of the class and offer witty commentary not quite sotto voce.  After all, it sits on the Río Tormes, famous for Lazarillo de Tormes, considered the first picaresque novel, and Lazarillo is indeed the voice of the pícaro, the class clown of the School of Hard Knocks, who (like many class clowns) graduates summa cum laude.  While there are no longer women washing clothing along the banks of the river (thank goodness), the Tormes does still have a fair amount of traffic along its banks on sunny Saturdays, as I discovered, partly because (perhaps partly in deference to the sporting preferences of modern students, who have a strange aversion to killing calves and writing with their blood for fun) the ayuntamiento has put very nice and well marked running trails and bicycle paths along the river, as well as sporting fields along the far bank.  (For football and basketball.  NOT for corridas de toros with little baby toros.  Seriously, medieval students were weird.)  I did notice the following happy remnant of medievalism, when walking over the Roman bridge (declared "patrimonio de la humanidad" and restored with EU money since the last time I was there, as well as being pedestrianized, unlike the other bridges, which do have nice sidewalks if you don't mind walking next to buses and other traffic).

At first I thought the students in the video were doing an old-fashioned mélee, a kind of team tournament sport.  Closer observation convinced me that they were doing a variant on "Capture the Flag" with shields and sticks standing in for swords.  The video is taken standing on the "Puente Mayor" better known as the Roman bridge into Salamanca, which makes a brief but important appearance in the novel Law of Return (which in its Italian translation has the much better title I Professori di Salamanca.  I wish I'd thought of that title, in light of the reflections above.)  I took the following photo from the ground level, which shows the nice bicycle path as well:

Quasi-medieval sport, by the banks of the Río Tormes.  Note bike path in foreground, Roman bridge to the left, and really big cathedral in background.  Universities like their monuments to be monumental.

Salamanca is also a magnet for foreign students (aside from those of us deposited there por fuerza by the Fulbright Commission), so even in winter when it's not overrun by hordes of tourists, there are plenty of people taking pictures of each other on the Roman bridge.

I haven't a clue who the people in the photo are.  But they thought the Roman Bridge was a nice place to take a picture and so did I.

As a whole, the park along the river is ridiculously picturesque, and also has a sense of nature that is frequently lacking in Spanish parks, as the photos below hopefully show.  (Sorry for anyone with a slow internet connection where the images load slowly.  I took a long walk Saturday with my good - non phone - camera, and I thought the results were pretty.)

The Roman Bridge leading out of Salamanca, with a jogging path under it.  (Several Fulbrighters happily mentioned the jogging path after our first free evening, when some of them went running to get some exercise and solitary thought time.)

The small dam just upstream narrows the Tormes below the Roman bridge, but it's quite wide (incredibly wide, by Spanish standards) before that, though I don't think it's probably very deep.

There were some people sitting on the banks of the river, though I didn't invade their privacy by taking pictures.  It was chilly Saturday (it snowed later in the day), but it's a pretty place to sit.

The Roman bridge, looking away from the river, up toward the town, with the gothic towers of cathedral and "clerecía" looming above the houses.

I realize I've written quite a bit about the feel of Salamanca as a university town, but haven't really given much of a sense of the look, aside from saying that it's all golden-yellow.  So here is a sort of picture album, without much text, mostly taken on the walking tour on Friday, or during my long walk on my own on Saturday morning, to give a sense of this exceptionally beautiful place.  These are from the monumental city center (almost completely pedestrianized):

 According to our guide, the famous "Casa de las Conchas" (pictured at left) is not related to the Camino de Santiago, but rather is the family crest of the noble Pimentel family...whom the owner of the house had just married into when the house was built.  So he was just proclaiming his in-laws.

 One of the charming things about the historic center of Salamanca is that it is still more or less in use.  Among all the "colegio mayores" for university students, there is the odd little "colegio público" for the little ones.  As the Fulbright program started at 9:00 AM, I happened to be on my way to the Colegio Arzobispo Fonseca for the activities, and saw a bunch of little ones headed in to school just before 9:00.

The Rua Mayor leading from the plaza to the cathedral is tourist central, and lined with cafés, but it is pretty.

Iglesia de San Blas (by the Rua Mayor)

According to our guide, "cuando llega febrero tres, la cigueña en San Blas ves."  (When February 3 comes, you'll see the stork on San Blas.)  It was only 2 February when I took the picture, but if you look closely you can see the little cigueña making a nest.

The view from the Colegio Arzobispo Fonseca, part of the old university where several Fulbright events took place.

The two towers of the "Clerecía" which according to the guide was built in the seventeenth century and involved knocking down two churches and eliminating several city streets and untold private homes because Margarita de Austria (the then queen of Spain) wanted to give the Jesuits a place to call home.  So basically, it was the Manhattanville Campus of its day.

Actually, the Clerecía stopped short of the original plans due to lack of money.  So it's only a few city blocks, instead of more.

Modern Salamanca is quite nice too, in the unpretentiously pretty way of provincial Spanish cities, that aren't historic, but see no reason to be ungraceful.

Salamanca also has the clearest and most extensive recycling program I've seen here, in addition to glass, plastic, paper, and textiles, they also have something which I haven't seen before, namely a special program for cooking oil:

Note instructions on how to recycle your cooking oil.  Please do not put empty bottles, or full bottles without the top screwed on, in the container.

I don't know exactly what used cooking oil gets recycled into (motor oil?), but it's a nice initiative.

All in all, though I regret catching a cold while there, I liked Salamanca quite a bit, considerably more than my last visit some fifteen years ago, as a day trip in summer, when it was super hot and over run by tourists, or as a day trip with a group ten years before that.  I am happy that my bus made it home through the beginnings of snow in the mountains to my cozy apartment in Madrid though.