Templo de Debod

There is a 2,200-year-old Egyptian temple sitting in a park in Madrid, and it got here by boat. The Templo de Debod was originally built in the early 2nd century BC, about 15 kilometers south of Aswan in Upper Egypt, commissioned by Nubian King Adijalamani of Meroe as a chapel to the gods Amun and Isis. Over the following centuries, Ptolemaic pharaohs and Roman emperors — Augustus, Tiberius, possibly Hadrian — kept adding to it, expanding a modest shrine into a proper temple complex.

Then in the 1960s, Egypt began building the Aswan High Dam, and hundreds of ancient monuments along the Nile were about to be drowned. UNESCO launched an international rescue campaign, and Spain sent engineers and archaeologists to help dismantle and relocate the temples of Abu Simbel. In gratitude, Egypt gifted the Temple of Debod to Spain in 1968. The temple was dismantled stone by stone, shipped from Alexandria to Valencia by sea, trucked to Madrid, and painstakingly reassembled in the Parque del Oeste, reopening to the public in 1972.

It's one of the only ancient Egyptian temples visible outside Egypt, and the only one of its kind in Spain. The hieroglyphs on the interior walls, the original stone blocks, the carved reliefs showing offerings to the gods — they're all real, all authentic, all profoundly strange sitting on a hillside overlooking Madrid's skyline.

But the temple's second life has given it a new purpose that Adijalamani never imagined: it's become Madrid's favorite sunset spot. The reflecting pool in front of the temple mirrors the building and the sky, and on clear evenings, half of Madrid seems to gather here with wine bottles and picnic blankets, watching the sun drop behind the Casa de Campo. An Egyptian temple, a Spanish sunset, and two millennia of accumulated wonder.