Did I mention we live beside a palace?

If you googled Bethel in La Granja, you may have noticed a rather large property right close to us. That's right, it's a palace. It was the "Summer Home" for the Royals of Spain, as La Granja is a signficantly higher elevation and, therefore, cooler than 40-degrees-Celcius-Madrid in the summer.

We've walked around in the gardens a fair bit already, but on Thursday, we had a day off, one of the many Fiesta days. So we went and toured the inside of the palace and then another one, the Hunting Palace, just a few minutes away in Rio Frio.

We took lots of pics outside, but, unfortunately, we were not allowed to take pics inside either of the palaces. So we bought some souvenir picture books and took pictures of the pictures in the book to post (still with me?).

So here we are outside our back door...we walk up our street...around the corner...

 

and there it is!

Some of the gardens are fancy like this...and there are lots of fancy fountains that for some reason I didn't get a picture of yet...

 

but then other parts of the gardens are left natural like this...

 

When you get to the furthest point away from the palace, this is the view:

And this is us (yes, the flowers are still blooming here):

 

And here are some from the inside (from a book, remember?...no rules were broken!)

 

Almost every ceiling was elaborately painted.

This is the church connected to the palace.










This is the much less elaborate Hunting Palace...that's right ~ out in the boonies where the Royals stayed when they wanted to hunt deer, foul, foxes, rabbits, etc.

However, the inside was anything but rustic...almost as elaborate as the Summer Home, but without the humongous tapestries and murals on the ceilings:

 

All in all, a great field trip day!