Clatsop Community College
For Immediate Release: APRIL 21ST, 2006
Contact: Kristin Shauck at (503) 338-2472.
An open-registration 14-day tour of Spain in July is currently being
organized by Clatsop Community College Art Instructor Kristin Shauck.
The tour is packaged by Go Ahead Tours of Cambridge, MA, and will take
place July 6 to 19th. “A few spaces are still available,” Shauck
says, and she asks that anyone interested in taking the tour contact
her at 338-2472 as soon as possible for registration information.
The tour highlights the rich and spectacular historical and cultural
heritage of Spain, particularly in its fine art, gardens, churches and
sanctuaries, and Moorish mosques with arabesques, horseshoe arches, and
richly patterned tile mosaics that have influenced European art.
After an overnight flight from Portland to Madrid, Spain’s capital
and Europe’s highest city (2,100’), participants will join
the tour with four days in Madrid followed by a day in Córdoba,
two in Seville, one each in Gibraltar and Granada, two days in Valencia,
and a day each in Tarragona and Barcelona. The tour includes guide and
entrance fees, air, motor-coach and train fare, 12 nights hotel service,
breakfast daily and six three-course dinners.
Professional local tour guides show Madrid, particularly the Prado, the
largest art museum in the world. Among the masterpieces there are Valázquez’s ‘Las
Meninas’, Goya’s The Naked Maya’, and Bosch’s
triptych ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’. Works by Botticelli,
Rafael, Correggio, Brueghel, Rubens, Dürer, Rembrandt, and El Greco
are also on display. Optional excursions to other points in Madrid’s ‘Golden
Triangle of Art’ are available, and The Royal Palace of Philip
V with 2,500 rooms and an optional trip to the old capital Toledo’s
Gothic Cathedral, seat of the Catholic Church in Spain.
In Córdoba the tour will visit the Mezquita, an ancient mosque
and seat of the Caliphs converted into a cathedral. In Seville, the group
will see Flamenco dance performances as well as the fabulous gardens
and palace of Ferdinand and Isabella, the wonderful pools of Los Baño
de Doña Maria de Padilla, and the Gothic Cathedral where Columbus
is buried. In the days after, they will see the Alhambra and other last
holdouts of the Moorish sultans, an Andalucian town of underground caves,
a night at the coast, and Roman and medieval ruins.
In the last stop, the city of Barcelona the group will visit three of
the art nouveau architect Antoni Gaudi’s monumental creations:
La Sagrada Familia (Church of the Holy Family), the Parque Güell
(a garden village in the heart of Barcelona) and La Pedera, a residential
center. The tour ends with an optional excursion to Montserrat, said
to be the location of the Holy Grail of Authurian Myth.