The only other royal residence which can form the goal of an excursion from Madrid is El Pardo, a shooting-box on a large scale, six miles from the capital. The hunting seat built here by Enrique III. was replaced by a palace in 1543. The building is very simple, and contains but a single court. The walls in the interior are hung with tapestries after the designs of Goya (made in Madrid) and Teniers (made at Les Gobelins). Students of Spanish art should visit this palace for a sight of the best of the very few remaining works of Gaspar Becerra--the Legend of Perseus and Andromeda. The chapel contains a copy of Ribalta’s altar-piece in Magdalen Chapel, Oxford. Over the staircase is a fine equestrian portrait of Don John of Austria, attributed to Ribera. These works of art having been inspected, there is little to detain you at El Pardo. The shooting in the adjacent covers is excellent, but few of my readers will have the time or opportunity to prove this for themselves.
Twenty-one miles from Madrid, on a plain two thousand feet above sea-level, is the little town of Alcalá de Henares, whose annals are so intimately associated with the history of Spain that it deserves more than passing mention. In 1510, Alcalá was a famous University town, esteemed equally with Salamanca, and frequented by the most learned professors, doctors, and students of that age. Here, it is claimed, was born the great Miguel Cervantes, and in the church of Santa Maria he was baptised in 1547. Catharine of Aragon, first of the wives of Henry VIII. of England, was a native of the place. But long before the sixteenth century, Alcalá de Henares was a town of importance, for the Romans settled here, and named the centre Complutum, while the Moors, at a later date, fortified the Roman station and called it the “stronghold” or “castle.”
Until the University, founded here by Cardinal Ximenez, was removed to Madrid, Alcalá de Henares was a town of note, populated by over ten thousand students. As early as the thirteenth century the Court frequently sat here to administer the _fueros_, and Alcalá was one of the first bishoprics founded in Spain. Cervantes speaks of the town of his birth as “the famous Complutum”; and Erasmus, in a letter to Vives, relates that “the cultivation of languages and polite letters has given celebrity to the University of Alcalá, whose principal ornament is that illustrious and truly worthy old man, Anthony de Nebrija, who has outstripped many Nestors.”