3 Days in Salamanca

Start with a facade that needs no ticket. The Casa de las Conchas, the House of Shells, was built between 1493 and 1517 by Rodrigo Arias Maldonado, a professor at the university and a knight of the Order of Santiago, and more than 300 stone scallops cover its walls. The scallop is the symbol of that order and of Camino de Santiago pilgrims. The ground-floor window grilles are fine Spanish Gothic ironwork.

Since 1993 the building has housed a public library, so you can usually step into the courtyard, with its marble columns and coffered ceiling, without paying.

Facing the House of Shells is the Clerecía, a baroque Jesuit college whose first stone was laid in 1617 under Queen Margarita of Austria. After the Jesuits were expelled from Spain in 1767 it passed to other hands, and it now belongs to the Pontifical University. The real attraction is the tower walk called Scala Coeli, the Stairway to Heaven.

The route climbs the bell-ringer's staircase through three exhibition rooms and past galleries that look down into the church, then out onto the balconies. From there the university facade is at eye level, and the cathedrals are close. The last stretch is a narrow spiral with no lift.

King Alfonso IX founded the university in 1218, and Alfonso X recognized it in 1254. Its historic building, the Escuelas Mayores, has a facade from about 1529 that many call the masterpiece of Spanish plateresque: a wall of carved stone so dense with medallions, shields and grotesques that it looks like lace. In the first tier the Catholic Monarchs hold their scepters.

Now find the frog. Somewhere on the facade, perched on a skull, is a small carved animal that's actually a toad. It warned students against lust, and by tradition anyone who spots it unaided will pass their exams. Inside, the highlights are the lecture hall of Fray Luis de León, the grand staircase and the old library.

Salamanca eats like a farm town with a university attached, which is to say, a lot of pork. The local picnic food is the hornazo, a bread-dough pie baked around pork loin, chorizo and boiled egg, traditionally eaten on the riverbank on Lunes de Aguas, the Monday after Easter Monday. The festival's origin story involves students ferrying banished women back across the Tormes after Lent. Bakeries sell hornazo year round.

For a sit-down lunch, order the lentejas de La Armuña, small local lentils stewed with chorizo, or chanfaina, a spicy rice stew with offal. Ask for the menú del día if there is one: it's the cheapest way to try them.

Tucked into a corner of the same square is the university's old preparatory school, the Escuelas Menores, finished by 1533 around a single-story patio of mixed arches and granite columns. Boys studied grammar, rhetoric and Latin here before they could enter the Escuelas Mayores.

One room holds the Cielo de Salamanca, the Sky of Salamanca, a 15th-century astrological ceiling painted by Fernando Gallego, who started it in 1483. It once covered the vault of the old university library, and was hidden behind a false ceiling until 1901. A third of it survives: constellations, zodiac signs and wind heads on a deep blue field. It's free.

The Plaza Mayor was built between 1729 and 1756 in the baroque style to designs by Alberto Churriguera, and it has 88 arches under a continuous gallery. Medallions in the spandrels show kings and local heroes, including Cervantes, Columbus and Unamuno.

The stone is at its best in the last half hour of sun, when the whole square glows. Terrace drinks cost more than in the side streets, but you're paying for the view.

With tens of thousands of students, Salamanca's bars are an extension of the campus. Drinks places cluster on and around the Plaza Mayor and on the streets near the university, and Thursday is often named as the night the week starts to pick up. Calle Prior, a block west of the square, is the easiest place to begin.

There's no one famous bar. The experience is following the crowd from one place to the next, small drink in hand, and the ground rule is to keep moving. Bars fill late, so eat first.

The Dominican monastery of San Esteban sits on the edge of the old town and feels farther from the crowds than it is. The church was built from 1524 to 1610, and its portal is one of the greatest plateresque works in Spain, with reliefs of the martyrdom of St Stephen. Tradition holds that Columbus explained his plan to the friars here.

Inside, the baroque altarpiece designed by José Benito de Churriguera in the 1690s fills the chancel with gilded wood. The Cloister of the Kings and the Escalera de Soto, a staircase of 1553 to 1556, are the other highlights. Across the plaza is the Convento de las Dueñas, with a cloister whose pillars carry strange beasts; the nuns are said to sell biscuits at the door, cash only.

Salamanca has two cathedrals, built one into the other. The Old Cathedral was founded by Bishop Jerome of Périgord and built from the first third of the 12th century to the end of the 14th, in Romanesque and Gothic style. Its domed crossing tower, the Torre del Gallo, is topped with a rooster weathervane. When the city outgrew it, builders added the New Cathedral beside it in the 16th century, mixing late Gothic, plateresque and baroque styles until 1733, and its tower rises 92 m.

One ticket covers both cathedrals, the cloister and the Episcopal Palace exhibitions, with an audioguide and a fixed route. Outside, on the Puerta de Ramos of the New Cathedral, look for the astronaut and the demon eating an ice cream, added in the 1992 restoration.

Lunch today should be tapas in the lanes between the cathedrals and the Plaza Mayor, a few minutes from Casa Lis. Calle Van Dyck, about a kilometer north, is the locals' strip of bars, with pork ribs and the pincho moruno, a paprika and garlic pork skewer; save it for an evening. Order a plate of cured ham, and ask for jamón de Guijuelo. Guijuelo is a town about an hour south of Salamanca whose hams carry a protected designation of origin and make up about 60 percent of Spain's Iberian ham, mostly from Iberian pigs aged for years.

Add a tortilla española, ask whether the kitchen has farinato, a fried sausage of lard and breadcrumbs, and wash it down with a glass of red from Toro or Ribera del Duero, two wine regions on the Duero.

The only art nouveau building in a city of sandstone is a house on the old wall. Casa Lis was commissioned by Miguel de Lis, a leather industrialist, and designed by Joaquín de Vargas y Aguirre. Its river-facing wall is two floors of iron-and-glass galleries over a stone base, finished around 1905, and a stained-glass roof by Juan Villaplana covers the patio. Since the collector Manuel Ramos Andrade donated his holdings, it's a museum of art nouveau and art deco: glass, furniture, ceramics and a small section on Russian ballet.

It isn't an architecture museum, so go for the light in the glass rooms and the view over the river.

Behind the cathedral, a small garden climbs the slope of the old city wall. The Huerto de Calixto y Melibea opened on 12 June 1981 on about 2,500 square meters, and takes its name from La Celestina, the 1499 tragicomedy by Fernando de Rojas about two doomed lovers. Tradition places their meeting here, but nothing proves it. It's a modern garden, not a medieval one.

What you're here for is the view: the towers of the New Cathedral over the treetops, with the Tormes below. Come an hour before sunset and the stone turns orange.

For a different view of the cathedrals, climb them. The Ieronimus visit goes up the cathedral towers and out along terraces among battlements, pinnacles and gargoyles, with a view of the Old Cathedral's retable from an upper gallery and the New Cathedral from a lower walkway. It's a separate ticket from the cathedral visit.

Go about an hour before sunset, when the sandstone changes color across the roofs.

Walk down to the Tormes and cross the oldest thing in the city. The Roman bridge has 26 arches, of which the first 15 on the city side date from Roman times, and it carried the Vía de la Plata, the road from Mérida to Astorga. It has been pedestrian-only since 1973.

Walk to the far bank for the postcard view of the old town stacked on the ridge, lit gold at sunset.

Ávila is a city inside a fortress. The walls run for about 2.5 km around 31 hectares, average 12 m in height and have 88 semicircular towers and nine gates. Work began in 1090 and most of what stands was built in the 12th century, so this is the most complete medieval circuit in Spain. On the east side you can spot Roman gravestones reused in the stone.

Climb to the wall walk. There are two sections on the same ticket: a long one of about 1,440 m, entered at the Casa de las Carnicerías, the Puente del Adaja or the Arco del Carmen, and a short one of about 260 m at the Puerta del Alcázar. Then walk the outside of the circuit, which is free.

The Cathedral of the Savior was planned as a fortress: its apse forms one of the turrets of the wall. It was built mostly in the 11th and 12th centuries in Romanesque and Gothic styles, and the gray granite exterior is plain and severe. Inside, the Romanesque parts are made of a striking reddish limestone known locally as blood stone.

Don't linger.

The Plaza del Mercado Chico is the old town's living room, with arcades, the town hall and plenty of restaurant tables. Ávila's signature dish is the chuletón de Ávila, a thick grilled rib steak of local Avileña-Negra Ibérica beef, served rare. Restaurants cluster along Calle San Segundo and around the square.

The sweet is the yema de Santa Teresa, a ball of egg yolk and sugar named for the saint born in Ávila in 1515. Every pastry shop sells them in paper cups.

Just outside the walls, the Basílica de San Vicente is one of the best examples of Romanesque architecture in Spain. It's dedicated to the martyrs Vincent, Sabina and Cristeta, and was built between the 12th and 14th centuries. The sculpted portals and the tombs inside are the reason to enter.

It's a ten-minute walk from the cathedral. Add the Convento de Santa Teresa, built over the saint's birthplace, if you have time.

For the classic view of Ávila, leave the walls and cross the Adaja. About 1 km west of the old town stand Los Cuatro Postes, four Doric columns around a granite cross, built as a wayside shrine. The skyline of walls, towers and cathedral apse rises on the other side of the valley.

Walk there about an hour before sunset, and wait for the stone to change color.