Salamanca Audio Tours

Salamanca is built almost entirely from golden Villamayor sandstone, a warm amber-coloured limestone that absorbs the light all day and radiates it back at dusk in a soft glow that has made the city one of Spain's most beautiful. The University of Salamanca, founded in 1218, is one of the oldest universities in the world, and the extraordinary Plateresque facade of its main building, carved with medallions, skulls, and a hidden frog that students traditionally find for good luck before exams, is one of the great set-pieces of Spanish Gothic-Renaissance art. For eight centuries, scholars from across Europe came to Salamanca to study theology, law, and medicine, and the city's intellectual self-confidence is still palpable.

The Plaza Mayor, built between 1729 and 1755 to a design by Alberto Churriguera, is widely considered the finest main square in Spain, an enclosed Baroque rectangle of identical arched portals three stories high, animated around its edges by medallion portraits of Spanish monarchs and generals.

The square is the city's living room at every hour, from early morning coffee through the afternoon paseo to late-night after dinner drinks. The twin cathedrals, old and new standing side by side with their towers rising above the roofline, can be explored together, and if you climb to the roof of the new cathedral you get a view across the Tormes River plain that explains why everyone who comes to Salamanca takes some time to consider staying.