Museo del Ejército

Your bloggist has too many faults to list in just one post, so let's just have two: I am rather dilatory in doing any research prior to going anywhere and I have a tendency to wander off the subject of toy soldiers when writing here. As luck would have it the first has given me a chance to address the second.

The Alcazar is the large building to the right

Whilst on my recent peregrinations I found myself with a couple of hours to kill in Toledo (the original rather than Corporal Klinger's home town) and the military museum in the Alcazar seemed as good a way to spend it as any. One of the many things that I didn't know about the Museo del Ejército was that it is the national army museum of Spain and would take far more time than I had available in order to do it justice. My initial reaction was to focus on the Peninsular War (or War of Independence as the locals call it) because it is of course very much le jeu du jour, as we say in Yorkshire, with a brief nod to the Italian Wars. However, all that went out of the window when I discovered that they host a collection of some 40,000 model soldiers. Even the legendary war games room would have to doff its flat cap to that lot.

The display covers a wide range of scales (mainly the larger ones), in a variety of materials (including some carved from wood!), and especially noteworthy are some very large exhibits of flats. So, without further ado, here are some photos:

Moulds - the display is comprehensive

That's the Kaiser and the Czar on the sled, presumably before 1914

3,500 figures in this case alone

That last sign shows how we all started out; except for the girls of course, I don't remember any of those.


Toledo itself is a lovely place to visit, so let's finish with a photo of the cathedral:

Or not quite finish: a couple of days before I was there a bad storm had passed through and a 100kg stone had fallen from the tower on the left; check your travel insurance before you set off.