Audioguides Aberdeen

Aberdeen is built from a stone quarried from the hillside immediately to the west of the city. The Rubislaw quarry ran for over three hundred years before it was exhausted, and its product went into almost every major building in the city -- grey granite with a high mica content that sparkles in direct sunlight. This is why Aberdeen is called the Granite City and also the Silver City by the Sea, and why it can look forbidding in cloud and luminous in sun, sometimes within the same hour. Union Street, the main commercial artery driven through the city in the early 19th century, has the scale and confidence of a capital and the granite solemnity of a church.

Marischal College, completed in 1906, is the second-largest granite building in the world after El Escorial in Madrid.

The University of Aberdeen was founded in 1495, making it the fifth-oldest university in the English-speaking world; its tower at King's College in Old Aberdeen still has its original 16th-century crown spire. In 1969 the North Sea opened up and Aberdeen became the Oil Capital of Europe, a status that has made it prosperous, inflated its house prices, and given it a peculiar demographic of engineers and geologists from everywhere. The port is still full of supply vessels.