A comfortable two-hour train ride (are you listening, America?) took us south to Rouen, historic capitol of Normandy. Originally an important Roman city, it became prosperous (and therefore attractive to Viking raiders) from the wool trade with England, Flanders, and Burgundy, and remains prosperous today.

In one long afternoon, we covered some 600 years. We started with the glorious cathedral; built over four centuries, it combines Romanesque and Gothic features for an unusual asymmetric appearance, recognized world-wide as the subject of 30 Claude Monet paintings.

Inside we saw the tomb of William’s great-great-grandfather, Rollo the Viking, who established the colony of Normandy (Norse Men), and died in 933.

We saw the tomb of King Richard Lionheart, highly respected Crusader nemesis of Saladin, who died in 1199 (played in various films by Sean Connery, Richard Harris, Anthony Hopkins and George Sanders). On both tombs, the Roman dates of their deaths are easily read.

We saw the place that Joan of Arc—after helping the French capture the holy city of Reims, turning the tide of the Hundred Years’ War—was tormented by the English and burned at the stake in 1431. She was 19. This square is the Place de la Pucelle, named for Joan the Maiden.

Overlooking that very spot, now as then, is the glamorous 500-year-old Hotel de Bourgtheroulde. In 1520 its owner was privileged to attend the historic meeting at the Field of Cloth of Gold. When he returned, he commissioned a 40-foot long panel of friezes documenting the event for his hotel courtyard.

I stood transfixed in front of yet another gorgeous piece of contemporary medieval art on public display, just as Rouen’s townspeople must have gaped at it back then: “The tents! The jousts! Was Anne Boleyn really there?” In this photo you can easily see Kings Henry and Francis meeting on horseback.

The Field was a 17-day extravaganza (cloth of gold thread!) with England’s Henry VIII and France’s Francis I at nearby Calais. Convened to display the friendship of the dynamic young monarchs (think Bill Clinton & Tony Blair) and the dawning of a new epoch, it cost more than 10% of each country’s annual budget.

Nevertheless, by 1544 the historic enemies were at war again. It would be another 271 years before they fired their last shot at each other.

As the evening’s chill approached, a local car service loaded up our luggage and started the two-hour drive to Charles de Gaulle airport. We were headed back to an era of violence, fear, superstition, disease, and social breakdown.

It’s fragile enough to be made of yarn, yet strong enough to withstand French Revolution rage and WWII cluster bombing. Now it’s part of a diplomatic struggle between France and the UK. Meanwhile it’s on loving display for all the world to see.

And after half a century of world travel, I saw one of my heart’s desires–the thousand-year-old Bayeux Tapestry.

At 224 feet long (and 18 inches wide), it is glorious. The work of dozens of embroiderers, the colors are bright, the delicate shapes move gracefully, the narrative is clear. Feasting upon it (accompanied by a simple medieval troubador) is the closest I’ll ever come to living in my beloved 11^th century.

With a pre-modern, non-literal sense of perspective, the art is thrilling, the world-class of its day. And with a compelling audio interpretation for moderns, the contemporary visual idioms come alive. William the Bastard, (French) duke of Normandy, is promised the crown of England. King Edward the Confessor dies in his bed. Would-be usurper Harold Godwinson breaks his sacred vow.

The pace of events accelerates. William assembles a fleet—trees are chopped down to build ships, horses are purchased, food is collected. William’s fleet sails. The battle is joined. To show his weary troops he’s still alive, William courageously removes his helmet, showing his face. Harold is fatally wounded. The day is William’s. Climactically, he is crowned on Christmas Day, 1066 as England’s first Norman king. He will forever be known as William the Conqueror.

Anything would have been anti-climactic after that, but Caen did its best to stun us. The Gothic Cathedral was a miracle of graceful, powerful stone. And we made the day’s second pilgrimage, to the Romanesque Benedictine Abbey Aux Hommes—built by a confident Williambefore he left for England, and now his burial site. On his tomb are these words:

Here rests the invincible William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy and King of England, creator of this house, buried here in 1087.

Every king and queen of England since is a descendent of his.

We resume our intense touring of medieval sites tomorrow, so it’s time to say farewell to the days of leisure at our beach house & spa in Ouistreham.

And that means saying goodbye to the faces and stories that have accompanied us on our long daily walks on the beach promenade, steps from the sand leading up to the Channel.

I’ve already told you about the moving Arbor of Liberty, and the nearby sword monument atop the German bunker turret. I didn’t mention how the pictures of the young soldier boys decorate the little town here. Most beach towns are pretty much alike—ice cream shops, clothes shops, souvenir shops, and the unmistakable smell of the sea—but Ouistreham, like other beach towns around here, has one foot in the past. And that foot was proud to display the pictures of the heroes who liberated them 80 years ago—as boys and as old men.

Because to honor the British veterans who stormed this very beach 80 years ago, the local anniversary committee interviewed the remaining survivors of the invasion/liberation force, and posted their words along with their current photos up and down the promenade.

Lots of tourist experiences can be approximated by watching YouTube. But some you have to experience yourself—the smells of India, the walk across the Brooklyn Bridge past the Statue of Liberty, the street after street of bullet-ridden houses in post-civil war Yugoslavia, the airy spaciousness of yes, Amiens cathedral.

What I never expected from this trip was the experience of how the WWII Normandy landings are an intensely contemporary event here, not just history, and certainly not ancient history.

I’m really eager to see the birthplace and tomb of William the Conqueror tomorrow, and the Bayeux Tapestry that recorded his world-changing invasion of England a thousand years ago.

But for now, I’m content to stroll one more time with these modern-day conquerors—English descendants of the Norman warriors who returned ten centuries later to reclaim the land they left in 1066.

It looks just like a beach, one of those wide, flat beaches that families with small kids love.

But to get to it you have to go through a metal detector, past an enormous cemetery, a dozen memorials, and a very, very tall American flag overlooking it all. This is U.S. soil, and hallowed at that.

Omaha Beach is part of the western section of the 50-mile beachhead of the Normandy invasion. The wide sandy flats and the steep bluffs–covered with German bunkers and deadly weapons–also made it the most dangerous.

And yet tens of thousands of seasick, frightened, wet young men landed off the coast, waded through the water to the beach, ran across the killing zone, and attempted to climb the bluffs and knock out the German army. Some of them actually succeeded.

Inside the exhibit hall, a minute-by-minute display showed just how extraordinarily complicated the operation was–and how well it was executed. As we’ve learned more about the multi-national sea-air-land invasion this week, our respect for General Dwight Eisenhower has grown daily.

The cemetery itself contains the graves of nearly 10,000 U.S. servicemen who died storming this beach to liberate France and begin the end of World War II. It includes headstones for each of 304 unknown soldiers, and dozens of those Missing in Action.

We happened to be there on September 11, and so the enormous American flag was at half-staff. We hadn’t thought to inquire in advance about any special program here that day.

We saw a granite time capsule, to be opened 100 years after D-Day. Its inscription read: “In memory of General Dwight D. Eisenhower and the forces under his command. This sealed capsule containing news reports of the June 6, 1944 Normandy landings is placed here by the newsmen who were there, June 6, 1969.” We had already learned about journalists risking their lives to cover the war, including parachuting behind German lines with U.S. troops.

And while there surely were skeptics about the Americans everywhere, many French people totally understood their sacrifice. Remember The Little Prince? Its author Antoine de Saint-Exupery, delivered airmail before the war. A few months before his Allied reconnaissance plane disappeared in 1944, he wrote this in gratitude:

Today was the first of two days focused on June 6, 1944—D-Day.

I woke up in Ouistreham (see map), in a house 25 yards from the English Channel. On June 6 the German military occupying this property would have awoken to the terrifying sight of hundreds of English ships invading.

And as I saw with my own eyes, that moment, that day, is commemorated everywhere around here. Houses fly English and American flags. Museums and cemeteries dot the countryside. Streets and whole towns are renamed after liberators.

Unsurprisingly, D-Day started a year before D-Day, with extraordinary planning, recruiting, and rehearsal. After Germany conquered most of Europe, it was defeated in North Africa, Italy, and its Eastern Front. With American industrial and military might fully geared up 18 months after Pearl Harbor, it was clear that there would be an invasion of France. The only question was where.

The surprise answer was Normandy—the biggest amphibious invasion in the history of the world. Involving 6,000 ships and hundreds of thousands of soldiers, sailors, and airmen, it stretched across 50 miles of beach: five simultaneous landings of Americans, Brits, and Canadians.

We started the day at the museum of the British landings. We saw lots of military equipment—tanks, uniforms, airplanes. It would have been rather mundane except for one thing—these were used right here, on that very day. The whole thing wasn’t just a movie. It really happened. Actual people did it. Other actual people died trying.

The extraordinary planning included capturing Pegasus Bridge (just 2 miles from here) to prevent Germany from attacking the British landing. How? At midnight, 181 men loaded into gliders and parachuted down before dawn, totally surprising the Germans. That bridge is now a beloved icon in the war museum I visited today.

The museum overlooks the beach, on territory held by Germany at the time of the invasion. We went inside a German bunker, which had been fitted with reproductions of the soldiers and equipment, featuring an immersive reenactment of their experience battling the British landing. The explosions, noise, blinding light, limited vision, and German screams actually frightened me. I felt sheepish imagining how terrifying it all would have been on June 6.

We finally arrived back at our Ouistreham house and despite the drizzle, went for a long walk along Sword Beach, the invasion ever-present in our minds. Large photos of elderly veterans reminded us to “Remember what they gave to preserve what you have.” I don’t think I shall soon forget.

We came upon several rows of young trees, which turned out to be the Arbor of Liberty—one tree planted for each of the 177 French commandoes who landed with the British. Each tree bore the name of a soldier and of his children who had planted it. Fifty years, a hundred years from now, people will walk among these trees.

And they will know exactly what happened here, and why.

I feel a little apologetic.

On this trip I had planned to present my usual historical narrative: “This happened here, and then that happened there…,” focussed on the Hundred Years War (1331-1453).

But Normandy is incredibly rich with medieval and WWI and WWII history, and this trip keeps bumping into all three. To keep from continually doubling back and forth by car, we keep alternating historical periods. So I ask your patience as I stretch my own mind bouncing back and forth between different eras.

I want to tell you about Amiens cathedral. Started in 1220, it is the largest Gothic cathedral in France—big enough to enclose two Notre Dames. I honestly don’t know if anything I write about it will satisfy me. I’ve been enthralled by Gothic cathedrals in at least eight countries—including Notre Dame—but I have never seen a monument this beautiful, this ingenious, this pleasurable before.

In 1206 Amiens received the alleged head of John the Baptist, bought in Constantinople (and destroyed during the French Revolution). The relic made Amiens a major pilgrimage destination, which provided both the motivation and the cash to build on a magnificent scale.

The cathedral is a perfect balance of stone and space. Its hundreds of columns are graceful and powerful, its windows enormous but not ostentatious. Everywhere you look you see multiple planes of vaulting, tracery, and arches. The roof soars 140 feet above the floor, made possible by the innovative use of flying buttresses.
Although made of massive amounts of rock, the roof seems to float above the intricate stone work and impossibly tall, narrow windows.

The outside is decorated with tens of thousands of elaborately carved statues, preparing those entering with Old and New Testament scenes of heaven and damnation, bucolic countryside and power politics. Even in a light drizzle they seemed animated, almost lit from within.

I stood looking at something built before the Crusades ended, before the Plague killed half of Europe, two centuries before the printing press was invented. It was begun when the Sun still revolved around the Earth, and the number zero was a newfangled idea that few people understood.

Filled with light, Amiens Cathedral is simply a tangible manifestation of the human desire for transcendence.

Yes, I know that’s peculiar. No, I haven’t lost my sense of geography.

Once again, my guide—an English military historian who’s a WWI and WWII consultant to the UK government—took us to someplace both unexpected and thrilling.

Just like the Vimy Ridge memorial (see my September 7 blog) sits on Canadian soil, the Villers Bretonneux memorial sits on Australian soil—and this story is every bit as extraordinary as the Canadian tale.

Forget that the town has been occupied over the millennia by the Romans, Franks, Normans, Burgundians, and Spanish. Why? Location, location, location. Today I learned that the village was the WWI gateway to Amiens, an important railhead and supply center for the Allies just 20 minutes from. the 500-mile Western Front.

It was also spectacularly effective in helping captured Resistance fighters escape imprisonment and torture.

As the British and French ran out of men to resist the desperate German advance in 1918, tens of thousands of Australians volunteered. Travelling half a world away, they landed in the alien winter world of France, and immediately set out to stop the Germans–only 75 miles from Paris.

Apparently, everyone agrees that their enormous—and highly effective—sacrifice was the beginning of the end of WWI. The Imax-style immersive video of these heroic boys smoking, laughing, shivering, shooting, and dying was the most emotionally powerful war footage I have ever seen. It also brought home the humiliation and shame of the Germans, who lost a war that they themselves had started, with huge losses in every domain of life and absolutely nothing to show for it.

On a mournfully gray, drizzly day, we saw the Australian cemetery next to the neo-classical memorial, and on our long drive through the Somme countryside passed a dozen roadside French, British, and American cemeteries. It’s fascinating that the local French–and the governments of Britain, America, Canada, and Australia–are committed to keeping alive the heroism and sacrifice of a century ago.

The Somme–synonymous with mud, disease, and suffering, pointless suffering. It’s so real here, you can touch it. Literally.

Fast-forward 69 years from Crecy, and the great-grandsons of those kings are now kings themselves, again/still battling over northern France. In 1415 it’s Henry V vs. Charles VI. And mud is going to win.

On a gray, damp day, we drove northwest toward La Manche (“the Sleeve”—that’s what the French call the English Channel). About halfway to the sea is a flat plain.

Henry had been marching and looting with an increasingly desperate army of 5,000 men. He wanted a showdown with Charles to demonstrate God’s approval of his controversial reign, to press his claim to the throne of France, and to secure the important commercial port of Calais. In medieval northern France, the English cloth trade drives everything else.

Charles has a huge army of 30,000 men nearby. His generals tell him not to engage—that disease and hunger will destroy Henry’s army more effectively than French weapons. But prideful Charles won’t back down. He sets up on the plain opposite Henry, but he has too many men for the space, made even narrower by a line of trees.

Henry won’t attack. Impatient, Charles orders his soldiers to move in and overwhelm the English. But now they’re in range of Edward’s experienced longbowmen, who turn the sky black with thousands of high-speed arrows. Worst of all, it’s late October—the rain has turned the ground to mud. The chalky soil makes especially sticky mud, and when the armored French soldiers or horses fall, they can’t get up; if they do, they can barely move.

The French lose 10,000 men—more casualties than the entire English army. Edward names the battle Agincourt, after the nearest village.

We walked around the simple plain, imagining the mud. We visited the excellent museum, with examples of the very weapons and armor used on the plain. Suddenly, they don’t look like Hollywood props. They look like life-and-death equipment.

Some two centuries after the battle, Shakespeare wrote about it, emphasizing the legitimacy of Henry’s reign—and, not coincidentally, the then-reigning monarch, Henry’s great-great-granddaughter Elizabeth I.

The night before the battle (St. Crispin’s Day), when the English soldiers are nervous about being so badly outnumbered, Shakespeare has King Henry V inspire his men with the most beautiful speech ever written—with a prediction true to this very day:

He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian:’

Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words:
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d.

This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d;

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition.

And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

I spent the entire day in 1346 today. Despite wind, drizzle, and the occasional tractor slowing travel on the country roads, it was glorious.

The Hundred Years’ War had begun in 1337 with two basic disagreements: whether England would keep its large possessions in France; and who would succeed to the French throne. England’s King Edward III’s legal right was every bit as sound (and as shaky) as any French rival.

On July 12, 1346, Edward crossed the English Channel with an army and travelled east toward Paris, pillaging as he went. The French gathered for a great confrontation, which happened in Crecy, south of Calais, on August 25.

The field is still there, with a gentle ridge running northeast-southwest for several miles. Edward himself directed the battle from atop a windmill, which has since been replaced by a wooden tower, which we climbed. Our guide walked us through the battle hour by hour, referencing the logistics and tactics of the day, all connected with the location our very eyes witnessed.

We imagined the English archers with their longbows, advanced weapons that could shoot further than the French crossbows. In addition, the professionals of the English army were better trained, disciplined, and experienced than the conscripts of the French, and so could actually use advanced weapons and tactics. And so they routed a much larger French army.

An excellent museum in the town showed examples of relatively graceful chain mail, slow and clumsy plate armor, and the impressively lethal arrows that were shot by the tens of thousands. We also saw a monument to the blind John of Luxemburg, king of Bohemia, who valiantly led one of the French armies.

And because nothing occurs in a vacuum, we even saw a fountain built by Eleanor of Aquitaine 150 years BEFORE the Battle of Crecy, built to refresh and remind the locals of her extraordinary wealth and power. She was the only woman to be married to both a king of France (Louis VII, 1137-1152) and a king of England (Henry II, 1154-1189)—a complication which helped drive the subsequent Hundred Years’ War.

Awakening to church bells in Arras, I was all ready to spend my first day in medieval Normandy. But my guide had other ideas.

It turns out that during WWI, Arras was less than two miles from the Western Front. In fact, it was a key northern anchor of the trench line that stretched over 500 miles from the English Channel to Switzerland. The town was demolished by artillery from both sides.

But how to cross No Man’s Land and attack? The British idea was to tunnel UNDER the Front and the German lines. And then the Brits discovered that there already was a network of tunnels under the Arras area—miles of mines from medieval quarries.

So the British ultimately sent a total of 24,000 soldiers to live underground for six months to widen the mine shafts, stock it with supplies, and to dig tunnels to connect the network of mines.

After two years of stalemated trench warfare which no one had anticipated, the Allies developed a plan: the British would distract the Germans with a surprise assault in Arras, while a vastly bigger French force would attack the German trench lines some 40 miles to the south.

Today I walked underground, tracing the steps of those 24,000, admiring first the ancient chalk and limestone mines, and then the soldiers from across the Empire—especially miners from Canada and New Zealand.

And on April 9, 1917 they finally emerged, seeing daylight for the first time in months and attacking the stunned Germans. They fell to the same machine-gun fire as millions of other soldiers in WWI. They accomplished the diversion, but ultimately held only a single ridge, Vimy, for their heroic efforts.

After the war, a grateful France actually gave this area to the Canadian government, which created a national park on it. Still treeless and pockmarked with bomb craters, it features a stunning memorial, visible for miles in every direction. Pure white stone stabs the sky atop Vimy ridge. The statue’s allegory shows a devastated Canada weeping over its dead son.

In 1920, the center of Arras was rebuilt to resemble its medieval self. Today it thrives—in the shadow of all those dead sons.

I’m going to Normandy (northern France) on September 4 for two weeks. With world-class historians, I’ll visit Gothic towns, castles, & battlefields of the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453), including:

Agincourt (recall Shakespeare’s Henry V: “We band of brothers…”); the 1072 Bayeux Tapestry, documentingWilliam the Conqueror’s recent conquest of England; the tomb of crusaderRichard Lionheart; and the spot whereJoan of Arc was burned at the stake.

Some background:In the late 800s, the Vikings repeatedly and destructively raided Paris. In 911 the Frankish King Charles offered Viking chieftan Rollo the strip of French land that faced England if he would stop the raids. These “Norsemen” settled there, calling it “Normandy.” A century later, the duke of Normandy successfully invaded England, and is now known as William the Conqueror.

Over the centuries, the Norman-English gained control of 1/3 of what we now call France (see map on the nav bar above), building magnificent Gothic castles and cathedrals—which I will thrillingly tour every day.

So when King Charles the Bald of France died without any sons or brothers, the game was on—who would control the throne of France, the French or English?

Years of intense negotiation ultimately failed. So when the French seized English lands in Gascony in 1337, England’s King Edward III responded with soldiers. A century of intermittent warfare began, which reshaped every aspect of European life.

And that’s what I’m going to see, hear, and smell, as I step on the very soil of these Viking-Norman-English-French-Burgundian-Acquitaine warriors, statesmen, and builders. Fantastique!
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On this trip I’ll be blogging and taking pictures daily, and I’d love to have you along. To subscribe, enter your email address beneath my photo in the right sidebar on the top of this website (on a mobile phone, a ‘subscribe’ box will appear when hovering in the lower right corner of the browser). I look forward to travelling with you!

Toledo is dramatically sited on a hill overlooking a gorge in a bend of the broad Rio Tajo.

It was important to the Romans, capital of the Visigoths, a glory of both Jewish and Muslim civilizations, the capital of Catholic Monarchs for over a century, and the spiritual center of Spain for the last thousand years.

Alejandro was the perfect guide for today–a professional archaeologist, former staff at Toledo’s Department of Antiquities, and currently pursuing a PhD in art history. “I hear you don’t want the usual tour,” he smiled when meeting me at the train station. “I’ll show you a few things you’ll like, I think.”

Alejandro had the keys–literally–to some amazing archeological sites that are not open to the public. We spent time underground at two different medieval sites, where, to his delight, I gasped in amazed appreciation. I saw a mikvah (Jewish ritual bath) carved out of exposed bedrock, and, at the bottom of a steep spiral staircase, a large cistern system. We had all the time in the world for each–in complete privacy. It was a traveler’s dream.

Back above ground, we saw the Monastery of St. John of the Kings. It was commissioned by Queen Isabel and King Ferdinand II to commemorate their victory over Alfonso V of Portugal in 1476.

Originally intended as their pantheon, they were instead buried in Granada Cathedral after conquering that city in 1492. I was moved seeing their tomb there last week. The north side of the enormous building features hundreds of sets of chains, a triumphant symbol of freeing Christian prisoners during the long Granada campaign.

I ended the day at a pair of unusual religious houses. “Santa Maria Synagogue” isn’t a phrase you hear often. The 12th-century Moorish-style building was the center of Toledo’s thriving Jewish community, until pogroms in 1391 and its appropriation by the Catholic Church, who now run it as a museum.

For our last stop, Alejandro took me to a Dominican convent of cloistered nuns. He’d been to preschool there as a child, and the nuns recognized him and greeting us warmly. The place was an island of serenity amid the chattering tourists and visual representations of war and Catholic martyrs. Their bakery smelled good, and looking at us like favored children, they gave us some sweet treats.

After 14 straight days of vacation it was the last bit of stimulation I could handle, and saying goodbye to Alejandro, I headed for the Madrid Airport Hilton.

Thanks for coming along.

I started the day with another longing look at the outside of the cathedral, which was honey-colored in the soft morning light.

Compared to the earlier Romanesque style, Gothic style is known for its verticality. I admired the spires, the columns that seemed to hold up the balconies, and the bollard-like, candle-like pointy things (I’m sure there’s a technical name for them) that seemed an extension of the columns. The gently pointed arched windows couldn’t possibly have been more perfect.

Continuing the day’s tour of Seville’s past, I walked a few minutes to the Plaza de Toros, one of Spain’s most famous bullfighting arenas. I didn’t want to watch a bullfight–they’re not in season right now, and I watched a few on YouTube to prepare for this trip–but I did want to soak in the culture a bit.

In front of the stadium was a lovely statue of the Babe Ruth of bullfighting, and the museum inside was really charming.

Along with documents, tools of the trade, old photos, and so on, it had the costumes of some famous toreadors–featuring exquisite brocades, beadwork, and linings. My guide said that they’re fitted so tightly that they actually restrict the toreadors’ movements “about 20%, so the fighters have to be thin and quick.”

Then it was time to enter the arena, which looked very much like they do in the movies. I tried to imagine 2,000 people jammed in, cheering and screaming and building lifetime memories with their families the way other peoples do at their own favorite sporting event. As I surveyed the scene from stone seat 14 in row B, I realized the place was a perfect replica of the various Roman and Greek coliseums I’d seen around the world.

It was hot and I was tired, but it was only early afternoon, and my very enthusiastic guide had been talking about “seeing the mushrooms” since the minute I met her two days ago, so we bundled into a taxi to see something or other. It turned out to be unique and quite pleasant.

It looks like a large sculpture with a few thousand metal panels, but it’s apparently the largest wooden sculpture in Europe. It undulates in unexpected ways above Seville’s busiest downtown neighborhood, sort of like New York’s Highline if it were designed by Barcelona’s Gaudi. We walked along its meandering, gently sloping paths, and at each turn were rewarded with a different view of Seville, which stretched for miles into the distance.

From street level it does look like a half-dozen of the world’s largest mushrooms tangled up with each other. It was quite controversial when built eight years ago–people complained that it was too expensive, disrupted the neighborhood, and didn’t fit into Seville’s traditional architecture or skyline.

“Just like people once said about the the Eiffel Tower,” I mused out loud. While I’m not a fan of modern architecture (give me Gothic or neo-Classical any day), I suppose that any innovative building anywhere will at first be damned as not fitting in. The good ones, I guess, do fit in to the future–we just don’t know it at the time.

Silver, copper, iron, lead…for a complete change of pace, today I drove about 90 minutes into the mountains west of Seville and spent a wonderful day at the Rio Tinto mines.

Worked by the Phoenicians, Romans, and others as far back as 3000BCE, these are the world’s oldest mines that are still operating. Its scale is almost unimaginable–I still can’t really believe what I saw.

A world-class museum explained the evolution of the mines over time, and displayed actual mining equipment from 1,000 and 2,000 years ago. As usual, the Romans used simple geometric principles to create civil engineering projects of enormous complexity and usefulness (remember the 10-mile-long Roman aqueduct that brought water into Segovia?).

The development of modern tools such as steam power, the Bessemer furnace, and chemical isotopes all built upon the original Roman designs, expanding the size, depth, and output of the mines.

The gigantic pit is big enough to hold all of San Francisco, and miles deep. It features beautiful rock formations of every imaginable color. And of course various outcroppings are tilted at stark angles due to tectonic shifts millions of years ago.

I saw both shaft mines and open pit mines, and actually entered one of the shorter shaft mines, hard hat, damp walls, and all.

During Victorian times, the mines were the site of worker-owner-state violence, much as happened in America at about the same time.

Now owned by an international consortium, the latest find here is cobalt–a key ingredient in lithium-ion batteries, up to now found mainly in the dreadfully unstable Democratic Republic of Congo. This latest iteration of the ancient mines will not be the last, as the company has already filed plans to expand the site, adding new roads connecting it to a new city for the expected additional workers.

The tomb of Christopher Columbus, carried aloft by four full-size bronze knights. The cape worn by King Charles when he was crowned Holy Roman Emperor. The 50-foot high gilded altarpiece so beautiful it made Pope John Paul II weep when he visited. Just a few of the highlights I saw in Seville’s massive medieval Cathedral.

It’s the largest gothic cathedral in the world, of monumental scale and delicately balanced architecture. The marble floor, the vaulted ceilings, the dozens of gigantic, rounded octagonal columns connecting the two all work together to create a building that feels unshakably permanent–and yet also accessible, available on which to project whatever feelings a visitor might have.

This vibrant building contains some of the world’s greatest paintings. I’m afraid a lot of its beauty is simply lost on me, as Renaissance painting is simply not my vocabulary. But everyone understands theft, and I enjoyed seeing the 12-foot tall Vision de San Antonio, a 1656 Murillo which was cut up and stolen from the cathedral in 1874. It was later recovered, restored, and here it is.

I hugged a column one more time, shook my head at Columbus’ ultimate rehabilitation in the Spanish historiography, and moved on.

The last stop of the day was the Archives of the Exploration of the Indies. The documents I saw include the first crude dictionary of Spanish-Indian language, and the actual 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, dividing the New World’s soon-to-be colonial possessions between Spain and Portugal along a meridian off the west coast of Africa.

And that, children, is why Brazilians speaks Portuguese, not Spanish, to this very day.

Grenada was conquered in 1942, and the victorious northern kingdoms wasted no time in Christianizing the world-famous city. Fortunately they didn’t simply blow everything up.

As usual in Spain, the story starts earlier. To see it for myself, I spent the day at the Alhambra, with the same spectacular guide I had yesterday: an international museum consultant, fluent in 5 languages, a lover of both Jewish and Muslim culture.

The Alhambra was built as a fort and royal residence in 1237. Over one-and-a-half centuries, successive Islamic rulers added increasingly lavish rooms, gardens, and decorations. The result is an enormous, magnificent example of medieval architecture.

And then, conquest.

Christian royalty wanted to spend time there, so they built their own enormous palace, an early-Hapsburg behemoth that would look right at home in today’s Vienna, Prague, Budapest, or Zagreb.

But it sure doesn’t fit here, among medieval Islamic gems. Whereas the graceful medieval Muslim buildings seem to rise organically from the earth, the huge 16th-century neo-classical blocks of stone look so heavy I imagined they might just sink into the ground.

The contrast made my head spin. The antidote was one of the kids I saw dressed in flamenco’s finest. She felt shy about having her photo taken, but once she agreed, she posed like a pro.

1492 is the year that changed the world, and it happened right here in Granada. We could start with this 50-foot high statue of Columbus asking Isabella yet again to sponsor his ridiculous adventure. It’s right downtown, cars whizzing about while pedestrians talk on their i-phones.

But Columbus’s voyage didn’t happen in the simple vacuum that most Americans learn about. Before that, Isabella and Ferdinand, married and in control of much of Christian northern Spain, conquered Granada, the last Muslim holdout. And rather than see his beloved city destroyed after an 8-month siege, the Emir handed the city keys to the Christian army.

He negotiated for tolerance for Muslims, but the Christians soon broke their promise, and the expulsion of Muslims began, along with the Jews.

With their power base secured, political problem resolved, and an end to the military drain on the royal finances, Spain could now imagine and fund the equivalent of NASA’s moon-landing. A trip to the Indies, Chris? Sure! Christianize the unique patrimony of Grenada’s Moorish architecture? Sure! Here’s one of those Christianized buildings, with the F and Y shields above the columns, and portrayal of Mary with Isabella’s face. The message: religion and politics are now one.

In the Chapel of the Catholic Monarchs, I saw the couple’s enormous sarcophagus, powerfully yet delicately carved in marble portraying dozens of Christendom’s greatest hits. Downstairs were their actual tombs, as simple as a peasant’s.

The conquest of Granada ended Moorish political power in Iberia. The New World conquests of the Americas sent mountains of gold and silver to Spain. Together, these positioned Spain to be a key player in resisting the Reformation–sometimes brutally, as with the Inquisition, and sometimes creatively, as in developing institutions like the Rosary and the Jesuits, which allowed Catholics a more participatory role in their own would-be salvation.

As the day wound down, I chanced into the church of a cloistered convent, where i watched nuns, faceless and swathed in white, chant (a bit off-key, I thought). They claim to be “slaves of God” (their words, not mine). According to Romans 1:1, everyone is a slave to some spiritual power–to sin or to God. Take your pick.

I’ll take this world, thanks.

The day started with a lavish breakfast (“the most important meal of the day!”) at my lavish hotel, a medieval convent refashioned as the home of a rich medieval Cordoban.

I spent the morning walking the old Jewish quarter, a dense warren of narrow cobblestone lanes featuring artisan shops, cafes, and overhead wrought-iron balconies ablaze with flowers. I passed statues of medieval notables, both Jewish and Muslim.

Of great interest was the Jewish Interpretive Center, which featured an exhibit on the Inquisition, complete with original documents summoning various accuseds. By happenstance I caught a short vocal performance of songs in Ladino, the language of Spanish Jewish exiles that they carried to North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, Italy, and elsewhere. The haunting melodies and rhythms were somehow both familiar and exotic.

The highlight of the morning was time in the small synagogue built in 1315–testament to a Jewish community here as Christians from northern Spain were colonizing (“re-conquering”) southern Muslim cities. Muslim craftsmen had executed a Jewish building with the best of Islamic design–delicate stucco latticework, scalloped arches, hypnotic geometric patterns, and calligraphy around the perimeter.

After lunch I spent the afternoon touring the Alcazar, palace of medieval Emirs and Caliphs. In addition to the buildings and gardens, the complex displayed recent excavations of enormous amounts of Roman mosaics. I also saw the room in which Isabel & Ferdinand first received that wild-eyed sailor, Christopher Columbus.

In less than a day I had seen artifacts from four civilizations, all of whom had thrived in this special city at various times–three of them simultaneously.

I ended the evening at a performance of flamenco–music and dance developed by Gypsy/Roma communities. The singers, dancers, and guitarist created romantic works of great precision and passion. The unexpected burst of rain that soaked me as I walked back to my hotel turned the usually-bustling city into a quiet sentry of melancholy gray.

Three days at the sea is enough for me, so it was a car ride to Valencia, then two trains to Cordoba in southern Spain–medieval Andalusia (Al Andalus in Arabic).

How ancient is Cordoba? I started the day looking at the spectacular bridge the Romans built over the Guadalquiver River. It carried cars as recently as a few decades ago, when the city wisely restricted it to pedestrians only.

After the Romans left (“Brutus, get back to Rome ASAP, we have serious problems on the northern frontier”), the Visigoths moved in, establishing a Christian kingdom. After a few centuries internal divisions left them vulnerable to a fierce new group, as Muslims from North Africa swiftly captured the area in the late 7th century.

By the 8th and 9th centuries Cordoba was so wealthy, so central in the world’s consciousness, that the Rahman dynasty began to build (and continually enlarge) the largest mosque on the continent. How large? St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome is the world’s largest cathedral. You could fit it inside Cordoba’s Mezquita (mosque)–twice.

I spent a spectacular morning there with a doctoral student in art history. Laura read the building to me like a 1200-year-old book. I saw innovative engineering feats, expressed in visually ravishing architecture. A thousand stone and marble columns.

Alternating red and white symmetrical stone arches as far as the eye could see, creating a hypnotic effect. Thousands of delicate stone details, and a ravishing mihrab made of gold mosaics imported from Byzantium–along with artisans to install the three thousand pounds of gold tile.

This building is one of the highlights of my life’s travel experiences.

It being a Muslim sanctuary, not an animal or human is depicted anywhere. Just perfect symmetry and harmony of space and geometry.

And then the Christians conquered the city in 1236.

And they built a huge gothic churchinsidethe mosque. And suddenly, there were humans depicted everywhere. Suffering images of dying Jesus and tortured saints.

The Christian conquerors didn’t destroy the magnificent mosque, which they could have. In a bizarre irony, once they put a church inside, the building became a sacred place, protected from destruction forever. So we still have the glorious medieval Mezquita.

We just have to pay for it by tolerating Jesus’ suffering.

My dear departed friend Jack Morin used to say that my vacations sounded exhausting to him. So for the next three days I’ll be at the beach relaxing.

I’m in Denia, south of Valencia. And although everything here is all palm trees andcerveza and miles of sandy shoreline, it’s gray and a bit chilly. Nevertheless, I’m in a lovely house a 3-minute walk from the sea. There are a few restaurants and a market a half-mile away, so I’m all set for meals.

Alternating with articles about Spanish culture, I’m reading a wonderful history book called The Hungarians: A Thousand Years of Victory in Defeat (I lecture in Budapest next month). To keep the kings and conquests and various popes straight, this isn’t a book to read a few pages here and there, so I’m glad to have plenty of time to hunker down with it.

But most of all, I have the sea. The eternal Mediterranean, arguably the most important body of water in human history. Because of its relatively weak currents and the lack of trade winds, it was (and is) just as easy to sail east or west on it. But the Mediterranean has more volatile weather than an ocean, so the wind and waves can be treacherous. So since antiquity, sailors have gone on short trips in the winter, saving long trips for May through October. That has shaped human commerce, immigration, and warfare, and thus human history itself.

Three days without touring also gives me a chance to reflect on the glorious times I’ve had this past week in Avila, Segovia, and neighboring towns. Here one simply can’t avoid the constantly acknowledged ebb and flow of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish cultures (along with Roma, South American, and Middle Eastern).

Spain is a true melting pot. The bizarreau courant American critique of “cultural appropriation” would be laughed at here. Every Spaniard now knows such heretofore exotica as flamenco, courtyard fountains, merino wool, tomatoes, Holy Week processions, painted Cordovan leather, and the guitar–not to mention the crucial Arabic imports of olive trees and the number zero. No one cares about their origin, the original cultures feel no ownership or jealousy about them, and there are no “progressive” scolds trying to make others feel guilty about enjoying them.

Spain is no paradise. But you can listen to a passionate Roma (“gypsy”) guitar and eat the sheep’s cheese invented a thousand years ago without wondering whose feelings are being hurt.