Toledo is a city about an hour south of Madrid. It has a wonderful cultural heritage and was declared a UNESCO  site in 1986 for its extensive array of monuments. We visited the city and were rewarded with trips to its magnificent cathedral and El Greco’s fourteenth century house. Todays post – my first in a new series of Buildings of the Month – is it’s twentieth century railway station. 

Toledo Railway Station, like the city’s cathedral has been built on the site of an earlier building from 1858. Architect, Narciso Claverría y de Palacios’s 1919 masterpiece was built in the Neo-Mudéjar style. This reflects the regions eclectic history of Moorish and Iberian Christian cultures and was very prevalent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Spain.

The architectural style employs typical Mudéjar elements such as the horseshoe arch, arabesque tiling, and abstract shaped brick ornamentations for the façades, all within a quasi gothic Christian symmetry. The entrance elevation contains the central booking hall flanked with two identical naves and a tower. The tower replicates the style of the church towers in the city.

To us the glory was the interior of the booking hall with its beautifully carved wooden furnishings and its stunning decorated abstract ceiling. The architecture has a clarity of definition due to its restoration in 2005. The old Toledo – Madrid railway line was dismantled and replaced by a high speed connection to the capital. There were other stations built in the style in the area such as Aranjuez, also near Madrid.

We were fortunate to arrive early for our train to Madrid so had time to savour this masterpiece over a coffee and pastry. We mused on our several trips to the University City of Oxford and smiled at its glorified bus shelter railway station! Watch this blog for future “Buildings of the Month”