Sunday 11.14.2010


The Alhambra


It is only slightly less perfect this morning with some low overcast and fog reducing the value of our million-dollar view. We’re moving a little slower as we hobble down for breakfast after our marathon-hiking day yesterday. Catarina is smiling as always and we quickly use up her English and our Spanish vocabularies but breakfast is good. Our host Manuel is speechless this morning, as in laryngitis. He has been sniffling and coughing the last few days so we wonder when it will hit us. Barcelona or Madrid?


This afternoon is our Alhambra visit so we don’t want to kill ourselves before that. We hike down into town and do the arm-in-arm Sunday morning paseo along the tree-lined boulevard with a few hundred other couples. We also get into the cathedral for Sunday morning services. This is allegedly smaller than the Seville Cathedral, but because it is not as segmented it actually seems larger.


There is rain predicted for later and we know we will not want to walk back down here to find a restaurant after another hiking afternoon, so we go in search of a couple sandwiches and perhaps a bottle of wine to have in our room later. We know all the little shops will be closed but we have hopes for a supermarket we found while lost yesterday. Nada. Nothing is open today so we are considering our options when we walk past an Irish Pub that has a lineup of sports events in the window. Lo and behold at 19:00 this evening it will be the Bears-Vikings of American Football. Problem solved. With that taken care of we can hike back up our hill to relax for a couple hours before our tour begins.


We have been referring to our Alhambra tour for over a week and it is a pretty big deal. We won't go into the detail of the tour here - there are plenty of places to get great information if anyone is interested. We will mention a couple of things about the tour and the property in general.


La Alhambra is one of the most visited sites in Spain with as many as 8,000 people per day. It is the ancient palace of the last Moorish civilization in Spain and the final holdout in its struggle with the Christian monarchs to the north. To get in you have to get a ticket with a morning or afternoon time slot that allows you four hours on the grounds. You must also specify a half hour period during your morning or afternoon in which you will enter the palace. You can then stay in the palace as long as you wish or until your four-hour slot is finished. When we got our tickets in Ronda (from an ATM?) we asked for a Sunday afternoon and it specified 4:00 for the palace.

Our time slot begins at 2:00 so we wait until 2:15 to avoid the opening rush and then walk up the hill and find our gate. The audio tour has been recommended so we find the appropriate rental counter and get programmed in. There is also a Matisse exhibit of his works created during the period from 1910-1920 that were influenced by his visit to the Alhambra and we start there. We are certainly not art devotees, but the work is interesting and a good beginning to our tour.

We have been to Versailles which is perhaps the most palatial of the European royal palaces, and it is very much a palace from a "let them eat cake" point of view. We royals live here, the horse are there, the gardens are right behind, the swans are where they should be, and we'll try to find a place for the servants to bed down. The Alhambra, on the other hand, is an all-inclusive enclave of fortress, palace and medina with gardens, fountains and courtyards here, there and everywhere. The palace walls are a mile and a half around and at one point a couple thousand folks lived inside. It is shaped like a ship on the highest hill in Granada with the fortress, Alcazaba, as the prow, the Palacios Nazaries and the Medina occupying the center, and the Generalife gardens in the rear. Joining and atop the original palace is the Palace of Charles V who as conqueror had the right of one-upsmanship.

Unlike Versailles which was very formal, the Palacios Nazaries is soft and comfortable with intricately carved walls, ceilings and doorways, decorative tiles, and water and shrub filled courtyards. There is a much greater feeling of peace and serenity as you wander about and imagine life a thousand years ago. When many people around the world were still wearing skins and living in caves, this was a very civilized place. Unfortunately for him, the last resident of the original palace didn't fare any better than the handsome couple at Versailles, but at least he was hustled off to Africa in 1492 with his head still attached. We won't do a room-by-room here, but if anyone is interested, we have tons of pictures and there must be a DVD somewhere.


We finish our slot at 6:00, take a half hour break and then continue down the hill for the football game. We grab a couple of Murphy's from the bar and get settled in a back corner near the toilet with a little TV. The bartender tells us that there is usually a crowd of American students that come in and they have to put American Football on the big screen, but not tonight. It is raining a little and there is no food to be had here so John scurries across the street where he finds a couple slices of pizza which we wash down with more Murphy's. There is one kid from Atlanta who comes back to chat and catch the score but he is really watching soccer in front so is not to be trusted. Stupid Vikings! We leave after the third quarter and the game decided.

It has stopped raining and we make our final walk up this hill overlooking the city. What a nice stay!


Today's Picture: One of the many courtyards in the Alhambra