El Palacio Real de la Granja de San Ildefonso (The Royal Palace ofLaGranja de San Ildefonso)

How to get there:

We took a bus from the bus station. You can't buy your tickets ahead of time. You just buy them on the bus when you get on. I can't tell you the exact stop because we got off at the one before and had to walk to La Granja (we did get to see some of the town which was cool).

Special Events:

Two days of the summer, the fountains are turned on. Because of the drought, they can't do it that often and so on only a few select days of the summer do they actually turn the fountains on. It just happened that we went on one of these days on the 25th of July.

Our Trip:

After arriving at La Granja, we purchased our tickets at the ticket counter. Showing our student IDs got us the reduced ticket, which was around 4€, which included access to the palace and the gardens. After that, we followed the signs to enter the palace (NOTE: you can not take pictures in the palace but you can take pictures in the garden). We got to see a lot of years architecture, which was stunning. I really enjoyed the bottom floor more than the top floor. The bottom floor had more statues and was more Greek, which is probably why I liked it more. 

We then headed to the gardens. We ate lunch on a bench next to a little river feature. We then started to walk up the hill. On the way, we saw multiple fountains (not on of course). The statues in the fountain all looked to be related to mythology, mostly Greek and roman. It was really fun trying to figure out who was who.

We continued walking up the hill and made it to a good sized lake, which was gorgeously blue.

We walked around and found a man made waterfall feature, which was also really beautiful.

We then headed down towards the palace again, seeing gorgeous fountains and plant features. The viewer form higher up the hill of the palace was really pretty and looked a lot like Versailles, since La Granja is actually a smaller version of Versailles. There is a grand foundation leading to the middle  of the palace, which was probably my favorite fountain. 

We then headed to the small cafe they had to get a snack. I got a granizado ( basically a slushie). I got the Fanta Limon one. There were some more controlled gardens in front of the outdoor cafe which was were really pretty. 

We headed to the left side of palace, where there was a large fountain and passed that and few more gardens to find the labyrinth. We entered and it started out okay but we got to a point where you could see through the shrubs and it sort of got a little creepy as well as boring (because it wasn't taken care of and there were no statues or anything in the labringht). We headed out and made our way the fountain we had passed to get there to wait for the first fountain to be turned on. 

Basicallyhow this fountain event worked was that they would turn on one fountain for a little while and then the whole crowd would follow a man with a flag to the next fountain, which would turn on as the previous fountain turned off. We stayed for the first two fountains and then decided to leave because there were so many people and not a lot of space to actually see the fountains. By not following he crowd after the second fountain, we actually got a good view of the second fountain which was nice. We then headed to the bus stop (the correct one this time). 

It was really interested because people made sure to remember the order in which people arrived so that everyone got on the bus in the order that they arrived. When a new person arrived, they would ask  who was at the end of the line and then they would make sure to get on behind that person. See even had someone look at us as we were lining up to get on the bus and move us in front of someone else because they remembered that we arrived before the others. We made friends with some of the older ladies and men because of this and one lady was extremely funny and outspoken so it was neat. I also liked that they did this line up system because by the time the bus arrived, there were too many people to get on the bus but because we were one of the first to arrive, we were guaranteed a spot with this system. 

After getting on the bus, we drove home to the bus station, where we then proceeded to walk, to our houses.