Salamanca: Of Frogs and Astronauts

I do love quirky things. Some of you may have noticed. And Salamanca has quirkiness by the bucket load.

Just to set the scene: Most of the town’s historic sandstone buildings are embellished with amazingly elaborate carvings. We’re talking stuff like this:

It’s one of the portals of the New Cathedral. “New”, in this case, refers to 1513. (That’s when they started building it.)

As you can imagine, regular renovations of these facades are necessary to maintain their splendour. But it’s not all saints, angels and glowering gargoyles.

How about a bare-arsed, ice-cream-eating dragon? Doesn’t look in the least bit vanilla to me…

Yup, it’s an astronaut. He may have missed the launch when he joined the ensemble in 1992, but he looks happy enough.

Salamanca also has a frog obsession. There’s one hidden in the masonry of this portal belonging to the University of Salamanca:

During daylight hours, come rain or shine, you will find a conglomeration of tourists outside, squinting their little eyes out. Spotting the frog is meant to bring good luck. What, you can’t see it??? Let me help you… [And one of these days, I’ll learn to take a straight photo…]

Look at the grey part of the pillar and you’ll see three skulls facing down. The frog is on top of the skull furthest to the left, i.e, in the centre of the picture.

That frog has spawned copious offspring leaping about in hundreds of Salamancan shop windows.
This lot here seems to be keeping our astronaut good company 🙂

I had to crane my neck a bit to take most of these pics, so I’m linking this to travelwithintent’s weekly Look Up, Look Down photo challenge 🙂