Carmona
My trip the first day in December ( I believe)
Our program offered to take us to a small pueblo only 30 minutes outside of Sevilla and of course I convinced a group of friends to go with me. Let me just say this was really a cool trip. First we were dropped off practically in the middle of the town and then our teacher Pedro started the tour. We first walked by an ancient clock tower and it was then that we began to learn the story about Pedro the Cruel. Now Pedro the Cruel was a king of spain and what I got from Pedro´s story Pedro the Cruel wasn´t really cruel, only in love. The story says that he was in love with a common woman in Carmona (his castle is there). Problem was this woman was not in love wth him and she was married. Well as it so happens the husband of the woman dies and she is left single and available for Pedro. The woman still doesn´t like Pedro and now he is becoming even more agressive so she goes into a bar and grabs the hot olive oil and pours it onto her face. Half of her face was scarred for the rest of her life and from that day on Pedro the cruel stopped loving her. Her coffin is in Sevilla at a church near my school so I am hoping to see it tomorrow (Pedro said he would take us).
Anyways Pedro took us winding through the small streets to the top of the mountain and we walked through the big huge castel walls into a ........ hotel. This was the castle of Pedro the Cruel and now has been redone into a hotel. The 5 star hotel has made considerable efforts to make the castle look like it did with Pedro the Cruel but they are all replicas or what they imagine would have been there at that time period.
One of the hotel managers took us on a tour to see the fountain that sits in the open area in the middle of the building (which was actually there with Pedro the Cruel) this fountain was huge and really pretty and I guess there was a fight between two brothers over this fountain and Pedro the Cruel won it. Next we saw the view of the countryside from the balcony (it was amazing you could see everything!) Then a visit to the dinning room and a sitting room. Of course a peek at one of the hotel´s fine rooms available for our next visit to Carmona. It was actually really neat to see.
Then we moved to the town square where there is just an open square with all four sides surrounded by shops where we sat and had snacks and ordered drinks (Chris Grisby and I ate our bocadillos and fruit from our señoras).
Then we went to a fort kind of thing in the middle of the town that was pretty neat because of its view from 3 stories (I was not completely sure what it was but we had fun climbing the stairs and exploring it) there was a guy that was belaying down one of the walls, which looked like fun.
Then we took our last stop in Carmona and by far my favorite (Pedro wasn´t going to take us to it because he didn´t know how many would be interested and he had never been to it himself before). We went to the necropolis! Let me explain a necropolis, a necropolis is a burial site for the romans. In this particular necropolis they have discovered around 200 remains but it hard to say exact amounts because the bodies were cremated and then placed in pots. Next these pots were put in tombs (kind of like the pharoahs) where the father´s remains would be in the front of the tomb and his son´s on either side of this. The pictures I took explain this better then I am right now. We climbed down a ladder and saw one of these little rooms. Then as we walked down the hill we came upon a huge tomb that was as big as a probably our house in Green River that had been dug out. There were columns seperating rooms and in the middle a statue of an elephant. I explored what I could and found a hall connecting two of the rooms and in it there was the remains of a picture of a man being fanned by a servant but the rest of the picture had decayed away. Every one of these tombs we saw I took a lot of pictures (my camera ran out of pictures so I borrowed Pedro´s and then his ran out of pictures too!)
Needless to say I enjoyed this necropolis and my trip to Carmona!
Our program offered to take us to a small pueblo only 30 minutes outside of Sevilla and of course I convinced a group of friends to go with me. Let me just say this was really a cool trip. First we were dropped off practically in the middle of the town and then our teacher Pedro started the tour. We first walked by an ancient clock tower and it was then that we began to learn the story about Pedro the Cruel. Now Pedro the Cruel was a king of spain and what I got from Pedro´s story Pedro the Cruel wasn´t really cruel, only in love. The story says that he was in love with a common woman in Carmona (his castle is there). Problem was this woman was not in love wth him and she was married. Well as it so happens the husband of the woman dies and she is left single and available for Pedro. The woman still doesn´t like Pedro and now he is becoming even more agressive so she goes into a bar and grabs the hot olive oil and pours it onto her face. Half of her face was scarred for the rest of her life and from that day on Pedro the cruel stopped loving her. Her coffin is in Sevilla at a church near my school so I am hoping to see it tomorrow (Pedro said he would take us).
Anyways Pedro took us winding through the small streets to the top of the mountain and we walked through the big huge castel walls into a ........ hotel. This was the castle of Pedro the Cruel and now has been redone into a hotel. The 5 star hotel has made considerable efforts to make the castle look like it did with Pedro the Cruel but they are all replicas or what they imagine would have been there at that time period.
One of the hotel managers took us on a tour to see the fountain that sits in the open area in the middle of the building (which was actually there with Pedro the Cruel) this fountain was huge and really pretty and I guess there was a fight between two brothers over this fountain and Pedro the Cruel won it. Next we saw the view of the countryside from the balcony (it was amazing you could see everything!) Then a visit to the dinning room and a sitting room. Of course a peek at one of the hotel´s fine rooms available for our next visit to Carmona. It was actually really neat to see.
Then we moved to the town square where there is just an open square with all four sides surrounded by shops where we sat and had snacks and ordered drinks (Chris Grisby and I ate our bocadillos and fruit from our señoras).
Then we went to a fort kind of thing in the middle of the town that was pretty neat because of its view from 3 stories (I was not completely sure what it was but we had fun climbing the stairs and exploring it) there was a guy that was belaying down one of the walls, which looked like fun.
Then we took our last stop in Carmona and by far my favorite (Pedro wasn´t going to take us to it because he didn´t know how many would be interested and he had never been to it himself before). We went to the necropolis! Let me explain a necropolis, a necropolis is a burial site for the romans. In this particular necropolis they have discovered around 200 remains but it hard to say exact amounts because the bodies were cremated and then placed in pots. Next these pots were put in tombs (kind of like the pharoahs) where the father´s remains would be in the front of the tomb and his son´s on either side of this. The pictures I took explain this better then I am right now. We climbed down a ladder and saw one of these little rooms. Then as we walked down the hill we came upon a huge tomb that was as big as a probably our house in Green River that had been dug out. There were columns seperating rooms and in the middle a statue of an elephant. I explored what I could and found a hall connecting two of the rooms and in it there was the remains of a picture of a man being fanned by a servant but the rest of the picture had decayed away. Every one of these tombs we saw I took a lot of pictures (my camera ran out of pictures so I borrowed Pedro´s and then his ran out of pictures too!)
Needless to say I enjoyed this necropolis and my trip to Carmona!
posted by Lauren Westling @ 9:48 AM
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