Southern Spain Days Five and Six - Granada

Wednesday, December 30th

Our time in Granada was really planned around our trip to the Alhambra - one of Southern Spain's main sites. Tickets are limited to 6,000 per day, and amazingly you still need to book early. We tried to make our ticket reservation a week or so before the trip, and they were sold out!!! Luckily, they hold back a few tickets to be sold by hotels, and our hotel had access to get some for us to go in the afternoon.

We spent the morning walking through the city, stopping into a few shops and visiting the main cathedral, which was almost devoid of visitors. It was interesting because it was lime-washed for hygienic reasons which turned the walls white. The end result is absolutely beautiful since pretty much every other cathedral is gray stone, so this was something different. We also went to the attached royal chapel where King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella were buried. As I noted in a previous post, this is where they set up their kingdom after successfully driving out the Moors.

We grabbed a picnic lunch and ate it outside the entrance to the Alhambra while we people watched and waited to be allowed in (they have a strict timed entry schedule). Finally at 2:00 we entered the Alhambra.

This was originally a fortress built on top of a huge hill overlooking the city. It was later converted to a royal palace for the Moors, and then even later turned into a royal palace for the Christians. The Alhambra itself is split into four main "attractions" all held within the grounds of the fortress, surrounded by a big wall.

Our first stop was the Charles V Palace. This was built by the Holy Roman Emperor quite some time after the Christian conquest of the area. The previous palace had been semi-converted, but this guy decided that it wasn't enough and needed a more European place. It is interesting in its design, as the 2-story building itself from the outside is a huge square, but the inside is dominated by a large circular plaza, surrounded by columns. The palace itself really doesn't seem too big, especially considering that the amount of unused space in the central plaza, but it is still fairly nice. The actual rooms have all been converted to museums and such that we weren't too interested in, so we basically just took in the architecture and moved on.

The next stop was the alcazaba, or main fortress. This is the oldest part of the complex, and is mostly in ruins. The main outer walls and watch towers remain intact, but the inner sections have all fallen apart. We walked in and along the walls and around the area. I think Sarah thought it was interesting, and I guess we did as well, but it seemed pretty similar to some of the castle ruins we've seen elsewhere in our travels.

The third site was the Nasrid Palace - the main Moorish palace and by far the top reason to visit the Alhambra, if not the city of Granada. This was the main palace built by the Moorish rulers and added to/updated by the Christians, who ruled Spain from here for several generations before moving to Madrid. It was an interesting mix of Muslim and European architecture, although it leaned much more toward the original Muslim side. It reminded us in many ways of the buildings we saw in Istanbul - lots of colorful tiles and big arches.

We really enjoyed walking all through the palace seeing all of the different rooms and gardens and courtyards. The most interesting was probably the Courtyard of the Lions, which is one of the most famous places in the palace. It is a large open courtyard with a fountain in the middle. The fountain was at one time surrounded/supported by 12 small lion statues, but when we were there they were doing quite a bit of refurbishment so some of the lions were removed and on display elsewhere in the Alhambra. Each lion head had spouts to shoot water out of their mouth to the ground, and also out of their head up into the main pool. The most interesting part is that when the Christians moved in here, they discovered that this fountain kept time, as each hour the water would shoot out from a different lion. They were amazed by this, and decided to reverse engineer the technology, so they took the fountain apart to investigate. Firstly, they were never able to figure out how it worked. Secondly, when they finally decided to just give up and put it back together, it stopped working.

Our final stop in the Alhambra was the gardens. These sit a bit above the rest of the complex and look out/down on it. Since it was winter there wasn't much in bloom, but the hedges were still very nice. There was also a pretty good sized house in the gardens that was a "getaway" for the royalty when they needed a break from the palace life (which I'm sure was really rough!!). We walked around through the gardens and marvelled at the place and its views of the main complex and the city below.

By the time we finished it was getting on in the evening, so we headed off to a really nice tapas restaurant in the city before going back to the hotel.

Thursday, December 31st

Our last day in Spain was fairly relaxed and uneventful. Our flight was in the mid-afternoon, but the airport was a couple of hours' drive away. We slept in and had a nice (ie, free) breakfast in the hotel, and then headed off into town. The one thing we hadn't done that was supposed to be nice was take in a view of the Alhambra and the city from an opposite hill, so we went up to do that first. From here we got a full view of the Alhambra, which was pretty impressive.

After staying up on the hill for a while (and laughing at Sarah, who managed to tear her pants on the one nail sticking out of the tiled ground), we headed back down to mosey around the city. We had plans to get paella for lunch, but still had some time to kill, so we popped into a bunch of souvenir shops and tried to find the perfect trinkets (which was, as usual, mostly a failure). Afterward we grabbed lunch (which was good but still not as good as Barcelona), and headed back to the car to pack up and go to the airport.

For some closing remarks...we really loved Southern Spain. We've realized that we have been pleasantly surprised with Spain in general. Both of us, but mostly me, didn't really have this country high on our list of places to see, and I definitely wasn't really "excited" to go see these spots. After three trips, though, we continue to be amazed at how much we love Spain. Something about the mix of sites and food and people's attitudes and weather is just wonderful, and some of our best memories from this assignment will definitely be from Spain!