You probably picked up from my last San José post last year that it was pretty much somewhere you visit once and that’s it. I certainly wasn’t expecting to go back there the following year, or ever again to be honest, but then stuff happened of course, and I felt I had to come back. This time I chose to stay more centrally in order to take a closer look at a couple of things, but to be honest the centre of town can be a bit scrappy, it’s smelly, messy, and full of downbeat beggars and apparent drug addicts. I’m being a bit cautious this trip – otherwise I might have loved it…
San José’s main church, the Metropolitan Cathedral, was built in 1871 as a replacement for one that was destroyed by an earthquake in 1820. Known for its stained-glass windows, the interior makes up a little for its rather bland-looking (to me anyway) exterior.
A much grander edifice lies just around the corner.
Rolling in cash and power from their magic beans, the Tico coffee barons of the 1870s decided to flaunt it and show they were a cultured bunch at the same time, and built the National Theatre using a levy on coffee exports. Modelled on the Paris Opera House, and full of specially-commissioned paintings and sculptures sent over from Italy, this riot of ornamentation and gold-leaf certainly does Belle Epoque flauntation rather splendidly.
Note the wooden floor under the seating. The theatre doubled as a dancehall, which you might not think would be much fun at a steep angle – unless you’re pitching Strictly Come Cheese-Rolling. If you’re not, don’t worry. When they wanted a level dancehall they flicked a switch, machinery would turn, and the floor would tilt and level out!
And they still use it. Although the national arts groups don’t use the theatre as their base anymore, the levelling-out process is still used to prepare the space for the celebrations that follow a presidential inauguration. It’s been that way since at least the forties, there’s a presidential election every four years, so that sounds comforting enough as a maintenance schedule.
As we continue on the theatre’s entertaining guided tour which leads us to the reception room, we walk into a guilded age.
This is the place where the punters in the very posh seats would nip out in the interval for a very posh chinwag. I’m sure I spotted the grooves in the tiled flooring where the mobile fish-and-chip van used to stand. The statue – again Italian – used to stand atop the roof (erosion meant they had to replace it with a replica). Some of the gold leaf in here was subject to a recent renovation and now looks utterly stunning.
Out of the theatre now and all its opulence. Around the corner is the Church of Our Lady of Solitude…
…and its Propeller Mary.
That’s my name for it. I don’t know what it’s really called. In fact I have no idea at all what it’s meant to represent, a quick online search coming up entry. If anyone out there knows why this church has a statue of a religious figure perched upon a propeller, I’d be grateful if you could pop it into the comments. Thanks!
And that was it for San José this time. I’m back here for a couple of days before I fly home, so there may be more, maybe more on Propeller Mary. Or maybe SJ really is a one-and-done, two-and-through sort of place. We’ll see.
But next it’s into nature before we hit the beach again…
orwellianTwo 