Three days in Salamanca: the oldest university in Spain, and it still runs the town

Two nights in Castile: a golden sandstone old town, two cathedrals joined at the hip, a plateresque university facade with a frog on it, and thirty thousand students out until four.

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Length
3 days, 2 nights
Where you stay
Salamanca
Places
8 across 3 days
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Salamanca is made of one material, a sandstone quarried at Villamayor up the road that starts the day pale and ends it the colour of honey. The whole old town is built of it: two cathedrals, a dozen convents, palaces, colleges and the finest square in Spain, all the same warm stone, all inside twenty minutes' walk.

The university was chartered in 1218 and is the oldest in the country. It is not a museum piece either; something like thirty thousand students live here in a city of 143,000, which means the bars are cheap, dinner happens late and the streets are busy on a wet Tuesday in February. Columbus came here to argue his case for sailing west, and the Spanish that language schools teach the world is the version spoken in these streets.

Two nights is enough to do it properly and one is not. The sights are dense, the walking is flat, and the part that takes time is the part you cannot schedule: sitting in the Plaza Mayor while the stone changes colour.

Highlights

  • A frog carved on a skull on a university doorway, and a whole square of people trying to find it
  • An astronaut and an imp eating an ice cream, cut into a cathedral portal in 1992
  • Two cathedrals built four hundred years apart and joined by a single door
  • A late gothic house with a few hundred stone scallop shells on the front of it
  • Red painted graduation scrawls on the old college walls, in a tradition that involved bull's blood

Where to stay

Salamanca, two nights

Stay inside the old town, which means anywhere between the Plaza Mayor and the cathedrals. It is small enough that the choice is about noise rather than distance: the square itself is loud until late, and two streets back it is not.

Two nights gives you a first evening for the square, a full day for the university and the cathedrals, and a last morning for the river.

Day by day

Day 1 in Salamanca

The Plaza Mayor, the House of Shells and Monterrey

Arrive, drop the bag and walk to the square, which is the reason people fall for this city. It was built between 1729 and 1755 as a baroque enclosure with arcades on all four sides, and the medallions above the arches carry the faces of kings, writers and generals. One roundel was scrubbed blank when Franco's portrait was taken off it, and finding the gap is a small local sport.

Then a loop west through the palaces. The Casa de las Conchas is five minutes away, a late fifteenth century house whose front is studded with hundreds of carved scallop shells, the badge of the Order of Santiago; it is a public library now and the courtyard is free to walk into.

The Palacio de Monterrey opposite is the grandest sixteenth century palace in the city and still belongs to the Alba family. The outside is the best of it, so look and walk on unless the interior tour appeals.

  1. 17:00

    Plaza Mayor

    Historic

    Eighty eight arches of golden sandstone, cafes under all of them, and a floor that fills up every evening with the entire city walking in circles. Sit on the north side at sunset.

  2. 18:15

    The House of Shells

    Other

    A merchant's house covered in stone shells, with a gothic courtyard, a well and a reading room upstairs. Free, quick and the nicest place in town to sit down out of the sun.

  3. 19:00

    Palacio de Monterey

    Visit

    Renaissance, ornate and unfinished, with two towers and a run of pierced stone cresting along the roof. Worth five minutes from the street and a decision about whether the audio guide inside is for you.

With more time: Dinner is a matter of standing at a bar and ordering ham. If you want a sit down instead, the streets between Plaza Mayor and the market have a dozen places doing a menu for around fifteen euros, and none of them fill before half past nine.

Day 2 in Salamanca

The university, the two cathedrals and San Esteban

Everything today is inside three hundred metres. Start at the university, whose facade is a wall of carved stone from the 1520s crowded with medallions, coats of arms and, somewhere in it, a frog sitting on a skull. Students who spot it unaided are said to pass their exams. Inside, see the old lecture hall with its rough benches and the library above the staircase, which is shown from the doorway.

The cathedrals are two buildings and one visit. The old one is twelfth century, Romanesque, low and dim, with a painted altarpiece of fifty three panels and a scaled dome outside known as the Torre del Gallo. The new one was begun in the sixteenth century and finished in the eighteenth, which is why its portals are late gothic and its ceilings are baroque. On the Puerta de Ramos, a mason restoring the stone in 1992 added an astronaut and a creature eating an ice cream, and half the people in the square are looking for them.

Finish at San Esteban, five minutes downhill: a Dominican monastery begun in 1524 with a facade carved like a retable and a church you will probably have to yourself. The friars here were the ones who took Columbus's argument seriously when the university committee did not.

  1. 09:30

    University

    Historic

    The old core of the university: the plateresque doorway, the classroom where Fray Luis de León is said to have resumed his lectures after five years in prison with the words we were saying yesterday, and the reading room above.

  2. 11:30

    New & Old Cathedrals

    Religious

    One ticket, two cathedrals: Romanesque and dark on one side of a door, baroque and enormous on the other. The tower climb goes up inside the walls and out onto the roofs.

  3. 16:00

    Convento de San Esteban

    Religious

    A Dominican monastery with an ornate carved front, a cloister you can walk, and an exhibition about the friars who followed the ships to the Americas. Quiet, even in August.

With more time: The Convento de las Dueñas is directly opposite San Esteban and has a two storey cloister carved with a riot of grotesques, which several people will tell you is their favourite thing in Salamanca. It closes at lunchtime and again in the early evening.

Day 3 in Salamanca

The Roman bridge and Santa Clara

Walk down to the Tormes for the last morning. The bridge is Roman at the town end, rebuilt after floods at the other, and the point of crossing it is the view back: the two cathedrals and the whole gold coloured skyline rising off the water. A pre Roman stone bull stands at the near end, the one the blind man smashed the boy's head against in Lazarillo de Tormes.

Back up in the town, the Convento de Santa Clara is the quiet surprise: a plain church whose later ceiling was removed to reveal the medieval painted one above it, plus a museum of gothic art and a walkway at roof level.

Then a coffee in the square, a slab of hornazo for the train, and out.

  1. 09:30

    Roman Bridge

    Architecture

    Fifteen Roman arches and as many later ones, closed to traffic. Cross it, turn round, and take the photograph everybody comes for from the far bank.

  2. 11:00

    Convento de Santa Clara

    Historic

    A working convent with a museum inside it: gothic frescoes, a medieval painted ceiling found above a later false one, and a walk along the top of the church wall.

With more time: With a later train, the art nouveau house museum on the river bluff, Casa Lis, has stained glass, dolls and a cafe with the best window in the city. It is on the way back up from the bridge.

Before you go

Getting in

Trains from Madrid Chamartín take about an hour and forty minutes and run every couple of hours; the slower service through Ávila and El Escorial takes up to three. The station is a kilometre north east of the centre, city bus 1 runs in to beside the Plaza Mayor, and it is a walkable twenty minutes with a small bag.

Buses are the way from Porto and the Portuguese border, and there are frequent coaches from Madrid too. The local airport has almost no scheduled flights, so for practical purposes the airport is Madrid, two hundred kilometres east.

Ávila, Segovia and Ciudad Rodrigo all sit within an easy day of here by train or bus, which makes Salamanca a reasonable second stop on a Castile trip rather than an out and back from the capital.

Getting around

Everything is walkable and most of it is pedestrianised. The furthest point is the far end of the Roman bridge, and that is fifteen minutes from the square.

City buses cost about a euro and you pay the driver, which is worth knowing when it rains, because Castile in winter is genuinely cold and the wind comes across the plateau with nothing in its way.

When to go

Spring and autumn are ideal. Summer on the meseta is hot and dry and the students have gone home, which takes something out of the place; winter is cold and clear and the stone looks best of all under a low sun.

Term time is when the city is itself. Come in October or March and the bars around Plaza Mayor and Calle Van Dyck are full every night of the week.

Eating

This is inland Castile, so it is a pork and pulses city rather than a fish one. The local speciality is jamón from Guijuelo, forty minutes south, and the standard order at any bar is a plate of it with a glass of Ribera.

Free tapas with a drink is still normal in student bars, which is why nobody here books a table before ten. Hornazo, a heavy pie of pork and chorizo, is the local pastry and is eaten by the slab.

Salamanca is a small city that behaves like a capital, because for a few centuries in matters of learning it was one. The stone, the students and the square are the three things everybody remembers, and none of them costs anything.

Give it two nights, walk it at sunset, and do not leave without finding the frog.

Or make it a longer trip

These trips pass through here on the way somewhere else.

Make it your trip

Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.

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Common questions

Is Salamanca a day trip from Madrid?
It is done that way and it should not be. The train is an hour and forty each way, which leaves five hours for a city whose best hour is sunset in the Plaza Mayor. One night turns it into a proper trip and two is better.
Where is the frog?
On the university facade, on the right hand side, sitting on one of the skulls. That is as much as anybody should tell you. The souvenir shops sell it in every possible form, so you can check afterwards.
Is one ticket enough for both cathedrals?
Yes. You enter the new cathedral and a door inside takes you down into the old one. The tower route, marketed as the Ieronimus, is a separate ticket and takes you up through the walls and along the roofs, which is the better half of the visit.
What about a day trip from Salamanca?
Ciudad Rodrigo, a walled town an hour and a half west near the Portuguese border, or Ávila with its complete medieval walls, an hour and a half east and easy to combine with the train back to Madrid. La Alberca, in the mountains south, is the prettiest and needs a car or a slow bus.
Do I need Spanish?
It helps more than in Barcelona or Madrid. This is a language school city, so plenty of people are used to hearing beginners, but menus and museum labels are often Spanish only.
Can I copy this itinerary and change it?
Yes. Copy it, add a day for Ciudad Rodrigo, and move the cathedral to the morning if you want the university in better light.