Saturday 11.13.2010


Granada!!

We may have mentioned how nice our lodging facility is. It still is this morning with the sun coming up behind the mountains bringing daylight slowly across the city as we watch. Catarina is our breakfast chef this morning and we have the usual assortment of meats, cheeses, cereal, yogurt, coffee, fruit and, of course, all the fresh squeezed OJ you can drink. Manuel pulls out his map to give us a walking tour for the day which looks simple in two dimensions.

We laze around until 11:00 knowing that five or six hours of hiking will be more than enough on this terrain. We start by going uphill around the exterior of the Alhambra walls on beautifully wide, wooded paths and after ten minutes loop around to begin the downhill portion which will take us down to the river. The walk past the original thousand-year-old walls is relatively steep and lined with stones, some of which are loose and some damp and slippery. We think that if this path were in Minneapolis all the children would have to wear helmets to walk down.


At the bottom we have the option of waiting for a little red bus to take us up the other side into the Albayzin (Moorish Quarter) or we can start walking up. Being relatively fresh we start the climb and about halfway take a detour into the Sacramonte neighborhood. Here the houses look normal from the front, but because they are built on a steep cliff, they are literally caves that are dug back into the hill. This area is supposedly now populated by the Romas (generally eastern European “gypsies”) but we don’t see a lot of folks out.


Our hike continues uphill to the San Nicolas viewpoint that overlooks most of the city with great views of the Alhambra on the opposite hill. We see a million pictures of the Alhambra at sunset and this was where they were all taken. St. Nicolas Square is not only home to the church of the same name, but also a Muslim Mosque. We walk the gardens of the mosque but, of course, the building itself is not open to the tourists.


Farther uphill is Plaza Larga where a small market is in full swing with a lot of locals and tourists milling about. From there we go up Calle Agua, a former street of Moorish baths, straddling the indentation in the middle of the street that was used for drainage. We loop around a few more blocks to Mirador Cristobal for a different angle of city views. We can almost see our place below the Alhambra, maybe.


From there we begin the long walk back down that takes us through more Moors, current Moroccans and lots of hippies into another couple streets of tiny shops selling hookah pipes, tea sets and harem pants. This eventually spills out onto Plaza Nueva where we had lunch yesterday. We decide to keep walking a bit further up the river that flows into town on this end and out on the other but is submerged below the city in between. The day has turned warm (mid-seventies), it is sunny and it is Saturday, so there are a million people on the streets. After plodding along with the crowds for a half-mile the street opens into a square of cafes with outdoor tables. A good time to stop.

We get a table in the shade, watch the entertainers and have a beer and lunch (Mary a salmon and cream cheese sandwich, John the chicken fajitas). A little Benji type dog has adopted us and stares at us with the occasional bark while we eat. He eventually discovers that there is slim pickin’s here and moves elsewhere.

For the rest of the afternoon we wander the commercial areas of downtown and eventually wind up on the other end where the river reappears. We are a little surprised to see it since we have no idea where we are, but it will be a nice landmark for us. As we turn to home on streets that stop and start and dead-end without warning, we have to pull out the map at every corner to take a new reading finally getting to the square at the bottom of our street. We are whipped by the time we get back up to our room. It is almost 6:00 and we have been walking up and down hills for seven hours (minus one for lunch) and we find that it isn’t getting any easier.

It feels great to get our feet up for an hour or two and watch another great sunset. Manuel makes dinner reservations for us tonight at 8:30 at the little restaurant right up the hill, Carmen de San Miguel. It is very nice and we get a window table overlooking the city that seems very familiar. John has the specialty of the house, the suckling pig with a vanilla puree and prunes and the meat is the best ever. Mary, breaking out of the box, has a pretty rare venison loin with a mushroom wheat risotto that is dynamite. This is in our top five meals of the trip, but alas, it takes a half hour to get the bill when we are finished. They just can’t figure that part out.

It is nice to have a hundred-yard walk downhill to get back tonight. We’ll probably hurt in the morning.


Today’s picture: Another view from our room of the sunset over Granada. Did we mention that we like our room here?