"Let your dreams be your wings."
Within my first few days of being here, Salamanca has made a first impression most people only dream of bestowing. I have concluded Salamanca is, quite simply, a city out of a story book.
To give you a run through, Salamanca’s Table of Contents starts at Plaza Mayor: the center square of the city, where shops and cafes line the square’s edges. The Plaza is like a hollow root of a beautiful tree: its core exists in the center and contains branches that stretch out in all directions, each leading to a different outskirt of the city.
Aside from its introspective base, Salamanca is lined with cobble-stoned streets, where few automobiles pass; and in its place, the feet of many scatter about, exploring the different branches of the rooted ground. The design of the city switches from purposeful symmetry through the Plaza Mayor, to a labyrinth of sorts, within the branches that extend from the Plaza. The streets lead to passageways that guide you into a beautiful maze, where with every turn, something new arises, constituting a type of lost you want to be stuck in forever.
The city’s second main focal point is its cathedral, (Catedral Nueva de Salamanca), where slabs of gothic stone are mounted onto one another, and stacks of spiked iron edges jut out as domed windows compress in. The 17th century windows and columns separate the cathedral into sections, slowly building up amongst three levels until the architecture reaches its top peak. A climb to the top tier will lead to a mesmerizing 360 view of the city, imposing the sensation that history is at your feet as the world is at your fingertips.
Climbing down from the cathedral towers, you find yourself winding through conjoined buildings filled with historical Renaissance masterpieces. The walls of these buildings all tell stories, each molded with intricate designs of faces and creatures, filled with hidden meaning and inferences.
Because the city runs off buildings rather than houses, neighborhoods become merely connected streets with risen structures planted at their base. At the bottom of each building exists a small business, restaurant, or supermarket. Moving up a story, the actual homes begin. These apartments are ridded of lawns and driveways, and filled with long corridors and miniature rooms. The space that lacks in Salamanca’s homes makes its amends through the territory adopted for the interior of the city. With this interior, Salamanca gives antiquity glory and transports its visitors to an era in history textbooks only speak of.
All in all, Salamanca is filled with rich architecture at every twist and turn. It’s a picture you only think exists within a lens, but realize after you take the shot, it’s reality; this is the life you get to live in. Esta es mi vida.
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