The alcázar requires that you choose a time slot when you purchase tickets. We didn’t know what time we would get there so we didn’t buy a ticket in advance. So we went straight there when we got to Segovia, arriving at noon. We decided to do the optional tower climb and that was also a timed arrival starting at 1:15.
They put many of the rooms back the way they knew them to be based on sketches that had been left behind.
In some cases they brought furniture and ceilings and other fixtures from other buildings.
They had stained glass windows recreated.
And they might have swapped some paintings out for some that were destroyed.
It’s a beautiful building both inside and out. A unique detail is the small chunks of iron used to decorate the exterior walls.
The tower turned out to be not as big an ordeal as we thought. There were a lot of stairs but there was one spot where you could step aside and take a break before continuing upward. Most of the steps seemed fairly modern although when you got to the very top you were walking on worn stone steps. The views from the top of the tower were exceptional. We even got to see snow on some of the nearby mountains.
And we saw storks nesting in the tops of some of the nearby trees. We didn’t know they were storks at the time. We looked them up later.
Between the position on the river and moat, you can see why a castle was built here.
