El Palacio Real (The Royal Palace)

Imagine a house -- beautifully decorated with hand made furnishing, silk wallpaper with your monogram sewn in, marble floors and out of every window there's a view to kill. Well, that's what you'd find in each and every room of the royal palace -- all 2800 rooms, that is.

Built in the late 1700s after the original palace burned down, the king at the time wanted to have the largest palace in all of Europe, and it still is today. Of the 2800 rooms, we were able to tour about 10 and each one absolutley blew me away. In addition to those rooms we were able to see the apothocary/pharmacy where recipes dated back to the 1600s and the weapons room with suits of armor for man, horse, and dog! It was really an amazing palace, the only problem is -- we weren't able to take any photos! The savvy investigative journalist in me came up with a sneaky little idea though -- i bought some postcards and then tookphotos of them!

These are some pictures from the courtyard between the palace and the royal basilica. I tried to take a video, but it wouldn't upload to the blog! Sorry!

the view from the courtyard, imagine how it looked before the city was built below! you could see for miles and miles!


to the left of this photo is the basillica, to the right is the palace!


this is the "short side" of the palace, although it's the main enterance it strectched much wider on the other side. this enterance faces the basilica.



below are the postcards!

this was my favorite room. it's hard to tell in the picture but the marble floor has a floral pattern, which is mimicked in the chair coveings as well. It then "grew" up the wallpaper (where it was sewn in so thick the flowers stuck out about 4 inches from the wall!) and then continued to grow up and across the vaulted ceiling. On the ceiling the flowers were ceramic and some of the vines "grew" outward from the ceiling for about a foot!

This is the throne room. although no one lives in the palace (apparently the king prefers one of his more modest palaces) he and the queen do have photo ops here and whenever diplomats visit they are greeted by the king and queen in this room. The thrones are between the lions in the middle of the left side of this picture. When President Obama visits in May, he will be greeted here and dinner will be held in the dining room -- that has seating for 145! and I checked, it's all one long table cloth, not a seem to be seen!