The CB and I are sitting in one of the very many tapas bars in the middle of a bustling pedestrian thoroughfare in Salamanca. This town’s very much smaller than Madrid so the even smaller old town where all of the nightly action is, attracts everyone from barely mobile seniors to barely born juniors.
It’s only 8.00pm so we are the only ones eating at this particular place. This allows the waiters to lounge against the the restaurant wall and smirk as the jail-bait flounces past in their barely there cut-away shorts and midriff etc baring tops. We were expecting rain tonight and it’s about 20degC, around 15 degC lower than Madrid so you have to admire these girls’ dedicated following of fashion despite the elements. The boys buzzing around them seem pretty happy too.
This place is famous for a frog. It’s a particular little frog perched precariously on a skull half way up an imposing and incredibly detailed mural carved into a sandstone wall above a 16th century door in the University of Salamanca founded in 1218. It’s the 4th oldest in the world (the university, not the frog) after Bologna in Italy, Paris and Oxford. There are various legends relating to one’s ability to find the frog. These relate to good luck (of course), fertility (of course), passing exams (doubly of course – it’s a university after all) and lust for prostitutes and resultant exam failure (it’s a university after all). It would be virtually impossible to know it’s there if someone (the sculptor perhaps) hadn’t pointed it out at the start. From the ground it looks like a pimple. Until we were told about it I wondered about the obsession with frog themed souvenirs in the tourist shops.
And here’s a conspiracy theory to end them all. Salamanca has an “old” cathedral (building commenced in 1102) and a “new” cathedral (building commenced 1513). In amongst all of the ornate carvings next to one of the main doors is a carving of an astronaut who is the person closest to God – stands to reason why he would be there right? He was originally reported as being on the old cathedral but that was the 12th century so that would be ridiculous. They didn’t even have flip phones then. It’s next to the new cathedral door which makes 400 years more sense.
So this is a mystery that has baffled experts since it was discovered in 1992. Were all of these magnificent gothic cathedrals scattered across Europe built by time travellers or spacemen? Or was the astronaut added in 1992 when the cathedral was refurbished. A truly confounding mystery.