Salamanca

Salamanca is the city where the stones are golden and the students sing for their supper. The university, chartered in 1218 — among Europe's oldest, and for centuries with Bologna, Paris and Oxford one of its four lamps — built the town in Villamayor sandstone that hoards the light: the Plateresque facade whose carved profusion hides the famous frog (finding it grants luck in exams), the twin cathedrals joined like generations (a carved astronaut, smuggled in by modern restorers, orbits the new portal), the Casa de las Conchas armoured in pilgrim shells, and the Plaza Mayor — by common consent the most beautiful square in Spain, a Baroque drawing room where the whole city takes its evening turn.

The musical soul of the place is the tuna: the student minstrel brotherhoods in black doublets and ribbons, descendants of the medieval scholars who sang for their board, still serenading beneath balconies with bandurrias and tambourines — Salamanca's oldest continuous music, degree-bearing and incorrigible. Unamuno's ghost presides from the rectorate he twice held; his house keeps his papers and his anguish. The concert record's register — choirs, church music, cultural centres, visiting ensembles — plays against eight centuries of lectures. A frog on a facade, an astronaut on a cathedral, songs under windows: Salamanca teaches everything, twinkling.