Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, Archbishop of Toledo and later a cardinal, founded a university at Alcalá de Henares in 1499. Its first real piece of scholarly work was a six-volume printed Bible, the Complutensian Polyglot, assembled inside the university between 1502 and 1517, at enormous cost, by scholars he installed there for that purpose. In […]
The Argument Built Into a Page: The Complutensian Polyglot Bible Read More »
In December 1850, the people of Alcalá de Henares pooled their money and bought the empty buildings of the university their town had lost fourteen years earlier. That university had been founded in 1499 by Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, then Archbishop of Toledo and later a cardinal, and for more than three centuries the town
A University Founded in 1499: The History of the University of Alcalá Read More »
At the very top of the university’s façade, past four separate tiers of carved saints, emperors, and myths, a stone cross stands against the sky, and beneath it four figures sit along the roofline holding garlands: an old man and a young man on one side, an old woman and a young woman on the
The University He Never Saw: Reading Alcalá’s Façade, Tomb, and Courtyards Read More »
Walk through the door and the first thing that actually stops you isn’t the façade you just spent ten minutes photographing from outside. It’s the courtyard opening up in front of you all at once: three tiers of stone arcades rising overhead, grand enough to hold a cathedral’s worth of ambition, all of it wrapped
A Practical Guide to Visiting the University of Alcalá Read More »
We already knew it would be closed. Research done well before the trip had made that much clear. And yet some irrational part of me had still hoped we’d get there and find it open anyway, the way you keep refreshing a canceled flight’s status hoping the app got it wrong. Knowing didn’t make standing
A Day Trip to Manzanares el Real: What Outlasts a Locked Door Read More »
My family and I went to Los Santos de la Humosa on August 12, 2026, for the total solar eclipse that swept across northern Spain that day, the first to touch the Iberian Peninsula in over a century. That day became the subject of a separate post, “A Total Eclipse Came to Los Santos de
Los Santos de la Humosa: Smoke, Saints, and a Village That Kept Moving Read More »
Every shutter on the street was down by early afternoon, and there was nothing curated about it, no picturesque hush staged for whoever might be passing through. Doors locked, blinds drawn, not a café chair set out anywhere, the whole place gone still under a heat with real weight to it, bearing down until you
A Total Eclipse Came to Los Santos de la Humosa. The Town Kept Its Own Time. Read More »
