Granada
SPAIN
I Want More Moors!
By LYNDI
Monday, November 25, 2019
With only 10 days in Spain, I felt like we needed to come prepared. We had purchased entry to several of the most popular sights before we left home, bought our flights from Barcelona to Granada well ahead of time (instead of winging it and taking an overnight bus at our leisure) and even booked a couple hotel rooms in advance. So when it was finally time to tour the Alhambra – one of our main reasons for traveling to Spain in the first place – I was impressed that we almost totally blew it.
The arrival to Granada went smoothly as planned – a short trip on Vueling Airlines (where we were prepared to try our lightweight luggage trick again), an easy city bus from the airport to the city center, and a reservation at a central hotel made settling in pretty easy.
Traveling in late November, we were prepared for some cold and rainy days, and our first day in Andalusia certainly met those expectations. It was a light rain, but pretty gloomy for the entire day, so our initial walk through the old part of town wasn’t too impressive. Quaint shops, classic churches and cobblestone streets just don’t hold up in crappy weather.
We ducked in to our first real tapas bar on Calle Navas as it fulfilled three important criteria: kept us dry, provided us with the legendary Spanish experience of free food with every drink we ordered, and helped us keep our eyelids open as jet lag once again reared its ugly head.
If you know anything about Aaron and me, it’s that we love a good bargain. I’ve eaten tarantulas and maggots partly because they came in my favorite flavor: free. So when we ordered Spanish wine and alcohol-free beer and it came with complimentary mini paellas, we were in heaven. I can’t remember being that hungry, but we just had to keep ordering to take full advantage of Spain’s worst-kept secret.
However, full tummies and warm hotel rooms don’t do a lot of good for fighting off naps. So while Aaron snoozed, I took another walk around town to power through and hopefully get on a normal sleep schedule.
And it was pretty successful! By then the rain had cleared and the clouds had parted a bit, so ducking in to little shops and walking through Granada’s famous Albaicín district was pretty pleasant.
Granada served as the last remaining Moorish stronghold in the country, and the Albaicín district has remained intact with its narrow, winding streets and whitewashed homes that housed the Muslim population after the Reconquest in Spain. Until, that is, Christian Spain decided the Arab Quarter would look better with Christians in it and eventually expelled the entire Muslim population. Walking through the Albaicín district today definitely feels like another world – the 11th century architecture and infrastructure remains intact, and the narrow roads mean only pedestrians can slowly meander through.
The Mirador de San Cristobal sits on top of the Albaicín hillsides, and offers a spectacular view of the sun setting over the Alhambra. Several restaurants and bars have set up shop near the mirador, and I took full advantage of the wide-open vistas with an alcohol-free beer. And, of course, free tapas. I made it to 8pm that night, while Aaron’s nap provided him a more normal bedtime, but we were both still up and at it way too early the following day.
Spain does a lot of things well, but really drops the ball at breakfast. I think the typical Spaniard grabs a coffee and maybe a cheese sandwich, but the sit-down, slow-paced breakfast joint is not really a “thing”. We found a cafe the following morning for coffee and omelettes, which we considered a win, but still felt hurried as about 8 men hovered over our table waiting for us to leave.
Aaron had arrived in Spain with a nasty cold – I was on a countdown until I would also be hacking and sneezing day and night as well – but on the morning of the 26th he woke up feeling like his old self. So after spending an hour at a local travel agency to line up bus and train tickets for the remainder of our journey, we embarked on one of Europe’s great “free walking tours” that would take us around the glorious, sunny streets of Granada.
Our guide Brujo was brilliant – a native of Granada, perfect English and a couple history degrees to boot, he took us to lookout points, spilled some of Spain’s hidden stories and gave recommendations for our Alhambra tour later that day. The tour lasted 2.5 hours – much longer than any other walking tour we’d ever taken – but it was the perfect way to gear up for our final day in Granada.
And it was finally time! To gain entrance to the Alhambra that sits on top of the city, you need to buy tickets well in advance. In the summer months, this might mean weeks in advance. In winter, our ticket purchase a few days prior was sufficient to get us 4pm slots at the Nasrid Palace gateway. So we took the C32 bus up to the Alhambra’s gates to arrive at the entrance right on time. At the wrong entrance. Little did we know that the Nasrid Palace is on the opposite side of the fortress complex from where the buses drop you off near the “Entrance” sign. The lady checking us in told us to hurry to the Palace so we could enter at 4pm as that was a strict time requirement.
So Aaron and I booked it through the gardens and palaces and finally got to the zoo, er, Nasrid Palace. The place was swarming with tourists – whereas the rest of the Alhambra that we had raced through was pretty sparsely populated.
Just following orders, we got in the back of the line just in time and were led through the palace gates along with about 100 other people who also had 4pm entries.
So turns out we did it all wrong. The Nasrid Palace was nice, but trying to get a photo of anything was a laborious undertaking to not have 30 heads in the way. Forget taking turns of great viewpoints – as we learned, the polite photographers were the chumps and it was every Instagram account for itself.
Also – and this is important – we didn’t need tickets to the Alhambra. The fortress complex is free! To see Nasrid, you need pre-paid tickets, and although impressive, we enjoyed Generalife and the gardens to anything we saw inside. So we wandered the rest of the Alhambra after our “chain-gang” tour of Nasrid, trying to see the spectacular settings before the sun went down. Instead of racing the setting sun – always a losing battle – we could have entered the Alhambra at any time on any day and enjoyed a much slower paced tour of one of Europe’s top sights.
The Alhambra’s cornerstones were laid in the first century and really built out by the Emirate of Granada, Nasrid emir Mohammed ben Al-Ahmar, in the mid-13th century. It remained as a well-kept palace and residence of both Moorish and Christian leaders until the 18th century, and maintains classic Islamic architecture alongside “newer” Renaissance modifications. A tour around the Alhambra is a can’t miss, and after about 90 minutes and decreasing visibility, we felt like we’d given it our best shot.
We walked down a stony path behind the fortress to Granada’s Darro River, then back up the steep hillsides of the Albaicín to the mirador at the top. Aaron grabbed a beer to join in with the dozens of other tourists enjoying a cold beverage on the stone wall that serves as a makeshift community gathering of hippies playing drums, tourists loading up on photos of the Alhambra in the distance, and two California women asking us “what is that big building across there we’re all looking at?”. When we told them it was the Alhambra, they said, “Oh yeah! We were there yesterday!”. Man, Americans ARE dumb.
Back down in the city center, we found a table at La Castañeda – a popular traditional Spanish restaurant on Calle Navas. We shared a large meat and cheese platter, further trying to give our unborn child scurvy by providing zero vegetables or fruit in this meat-heavy cuisine culture.
Being impressed with Spain’s abundance of alcohol-free beer, I asked our waiter if there was any alcohol-free wine on the menu. He nodded enthusiastically and said they had “jugo de montañas”. Oooh! Juice of the mountains – let’s give that a try! So when he brought a cup of apple juice, I realized my Spanish ear could use a little improvement, since he had fulfilled his promise by bringing “jugo de manzanas” (juice of apples). But it came in a big wine goblet, so I was happy.
We felt much more Spanish as we finished dinner close to 10pm and were in bed by 10:30. With one of Spain’s highlights in our rearview mirror, we left Granada and our tourist-heavy itinerary for beach, sun and relaxation on the Costa del Sol.
