The Viennese Madrid and The Game of Hidden Gardens

Of how the “Jardines del Moro” can be a halt in the stone and the sights

Fall’s morning lost to the sun and the way too many steps. Tris, tras, tris, tras, where the hell is the damn entrance to the park? I know you’re there, rotter, why do you hide? And at last…oh…ah…oh…the Jardines del Moro (moor’s gardens) with its morerias and remnants of lost city, right there, scattered in between the pieces of bread of the busy-town-sandwich (Principe Pio’s awful mall and the Real Palace’s magnificence, monument to which the gardens belong).

The grounds are not big, but they’re very green indeed, strangling the racket and the voice of the bustling metropolis. From the tip of their tongue, the royal palace and its green mantilla seem to me, as if by magic, siblings of the fairgrounds of the Schonbrunn palace, where Sisí -unaware and absent-minded- made a fairytale burg out of Vienna. Less delicate it´s its ancestry, though…the Jardines del Moro are named after the shelter they were, back in the XII and XIII centuries, for the muslim soldiers that had Madrid´s popular mood cloudy and unsettled. The greeneries have been trotted by hunters, royal whims, and bystanders on their way to the Casa de Campo…

So many ailments and the years passing by have confined the gardens to the role of public park rarely visited and retreat place, thanks to the occasional chance, as I would say. Its two fountains will set up the music for you; its entry, the poncho of Highness; novel, stone bench, ready, steady, GO!

~ by travelandramble on September 28, 2007.