La Granja

Most students at Elmira College, and even their parents, have visited at least once the Corning Museum of Glass just a short drive away. No matter how many times you have visited, you can always find something new and exciting, another dazzling creation formed with this shiny clear solid composed of tiny swimming molecules of silica, sodium carbonate, and calcium oxide. After class, on this gorgeous eighty degree sunny day, we took a similar tour at La Fábrica Real de Cristal, or Royal Glass Factory, in the nearby town of La Granja, that despite its extreme similarities had one major difference from the museum at Corning: the glass made here was produced specifically for the use by his majesty Rey Felipe V in El Palacio Real de la Granja de San Ildefonso in the eighteenth century.

We began our trip at the fábrica de cristal, where the royal creations glowed in glass boxes that lined each room. Pairs of balloon shaped bottles for olive oil and vinegar were engraved with pencil thin gold flowers. Next to them, was a table of "S" shaped and spiral decorated cylinders that are meant to hold the candles in chandeliers. Aqua colored glass bottles and tea cups labeled with the calligraphy inscribed names of royalty flashed their brilliance, taunting our hands that blocked by glass, could not touch them. What was even better than seeing these antique works of craftsmanship shimmering nicely in their displays, was to see them put in place in the Royal Palace.




It almost makes no difference that photography was prohibited inside the palacio, because no digital image, no matter how refined could capture what we saw today with our own two eyes, some of which, Cassie could tell you, were crying of amazement. Wooden carved flowers and angels adorned with leaves of real gold trickled down from the ceiling onto the walls, whose colorful satin and velvet sides were covered with paintings even more famous than the painters themselves. We continued walking until all students came to an abrupt halt at the hallway crossing all of the rooms in a horizontal line: extending in front of us were lines of arañas, what the Spanish call both spiders and chandeliers, adorned with fifteen square feet of sparkling glass ornaments made at the fábrica real. We worked our way down this hall to the royal bedroom where a bed shaded by a silk canopy faced opposite a large window through which one could see straight into the center of the extensive gardens that surrounded the palace.

The gardens at La Granja are rumored to be modeled after the Palace of Versailles, as King Felipe V was raised in France, and missed his old "backyard." And we were quite lucky to walk through the luscious greens today, for it was one of the three days of the year that the town "turns on" the fountains. Following a man with an ear-piercing whistle who carried the Spanish flag, we traveled to four different fountains, each decorated with statues of humans and animals alike. At the sound of his whistle, three men stood to the side and activated the fountain system, one that involves no electrical or gas powered machinery. Hundreds of chanting children lined the edges of the fountains screaming "¡Mójame, mójame!" "Get me wet, soak me!" Because when each fountain was activated, what started as a simple stream became a towering gush of water that drenched all things within a fifteen foot radius of its outer edges. Some of us rushed to the waterspout with the children, others ran for cover, screaming at the top of their lungs. Despite our contrastive efforts, at the end of our garden tour, everyone had gotten wet. But who could complain? We had the water with a three hundred year royal history soak into our bodies and had made the visit of a lifetime.