Spanish Holiday October 2009

On Saturday 10 October Rosalind and I set off from Stansted airport in an Easyjet plane for Malaga. This was to be our big summer holiday for this year - we reckoned on the weather in the south of Spain being warm enough to call it a summer holiday.

The plan, meticulously worked out, was to spend a couple of nights in Malaga then work our way north, staying in Granada, Seville, Cordoba and Madrid before getting an overnight sleeper to Paris followed by the Eurostar to London. All the hotels were booked, and all the trains, thanks to the website Seat 61. The only journey not booked was a bus trip from Malaga to Granada. We reckoned that the train route was too indirect and long, and that a bus would be quicker. It wasn't till a few days before we left home that we realised that the day we had chosen for this bus trip was Spain's national holiday, and began to wonder if there would be any buses running at all that day.

The most stressful bit of any journey is in my experience getting to and from the airport at the other end. We once spent an hour waiting for a bus at Ancona airport, only to discover, as it sailed past, that we were standing in the wrong place, a couple of hundred metres away from the correct bus stop. So we then had to wait another hour in the sun for the next one. But in Malaga it worked alright and we managed to get off the bus within a couple of hundred yards of our hotel, which we had cunningly chosen between the two most important sites, the cathedral and the Alcazaba, around 100m from each.

Malaga (the link is to further pictures on Flickr) is the nearest airport and big city to the Costa del Whatsit and the Costa del Something Else, where all the British go for their binges of sun and booze, and I guess not many tourists stop there, but it has lots to see, and was an ideal place for our first ever days in Spain. It is a big place - some 650,000 people, but the old part where we stayed is compact but within yards of the modern centre. We walked around a bit on the Saturday afternoon we arrived. It was warm and sunny, and there were parakeets in the palm trees in the park near the harbour. I was surprised at the vegetation, expecting it to be similar to that of Cape Town, which is supposed to have a Mediterranean climate. But Malaga has not only the Mediterranean stuff - oleanders and the like, but a lot of subtropical plants like bananas, which in South Africa you would have to go as far north as Natal to see.

Apart from the odd church we also saw the Picasso museum. He was born in Malaga, and the museum is in an old palace. Not only is there a good collection of his work, given to Malaga by some of his relations, but as a bonus under the palace has been excavated and one can see the quite extensive remains of some Phoenician buildings, they having founded the city originally. It stayed open quite late, then we had supper out of doors near the Cathedral.

The next day, Sunday, was to be our only full day, so we packed in all we could. The cathedral wasn't officially open to tourists, but while searching for breakfast we snuck in while a service was on and were able to get a quick look. We spent the rest of the morning on the hill that holds the Alcazaba. There's the remains of a Roman theatre at the bottom of the hill outside the entrance (though that is being re-excavated or something at present, so it isn't much to see).







The Alcazaba is the Moorish fortress on a long hill which runs parallel to the coast. The walls are extensive, the gardens beautiful, and the views impressive. And the paths are steep. There's a good museum in the remains of the old palace at the top.

Further east from the Alcazaba is a higher hill with more Moorish ruins. In the heat of the day we came down from the lower hill, bought some lunch from a bakery and set off with it to the Castillo de Gibralfaro on this high hill. Hot work, so it was good to sit under the pines at the top and eat. The views from here are even better, and the ruins quite extensive and enjoyable.

We got down the hill in time to find a tourist information bureau who in answer to our worries about getting a bus to Granada the next day said that to be sure thousands of people would want to celebrate the national day by going to see the Alhambra from Granada and we ought to go to the bus station to book NOW. But the bus station was a mile or so away, and the day was hot, and the story didn't seem that likely as we had had to book our Alhambra tickets in advance over the internet. So we went instead to see the Picasso birthplace museum. Not very interesting to be honest.

That night our sleep was disturbed by a phone call from the hotel reception at 1am. They'd had an email from Rosalind's sister.

The message was to call home, and when we did next morning it was to hear that Rosalind's father had died the night before. This led to some discussion as to what to do next. We decided that as things were under control at the Northampton end for the time being we might as well go on to Granada as planned for that day, and work out things as we went along. There turned out to be no problem in catching a bus, and we were in Granada by the middle of the day. It was a matter of going north from Malaga, then east, by which time you are north of the Sierra Nevada, the snowy mountains, the highest range in Spain. Not that we really saw them very well.

Because of the public holiday the bus we caught from the bus station in Granada to get to the centre was diverted, and we had to find our way on foot from somewhere random, but that worked. When we got to the centre we found we were just in time to see a public procession with marchers in medieval costume, bands, and what appeared to be the town council (in modern dress and mostly looking slightly awkward). Granada is another big city - three quarters of a million people, and not at all what I had expected. It was the last bit of Spain that the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, conquered, and so has enormous resonance in Spanish history. They are buried in a magnificent chapel which abuts the Cathedral. The Alhambra, which is what everyone comes to see, is another Moorish fortress on a hill, this one on a spur above the city, and one of the wonders of the world.

Our hotel was an old house in the Moorish style in a narrow street on the opposite side of the valley from the spur the Alhambra stands on. It was just up from the river Darro. Further up the hill is the old Moorish quarter, and from the top the views of the palaces of the Alhambra are what all the pictures show. The hotel was a miniature version of the one we stayed in at Aleppo (was it last year?) - open courtyard, rooms looking down and across it, charming. Our room also had a window onto the narrow alleyway the hotel sits in.

We had time to walk up the hill behind us and have a drink in a restaurant garden looking across at the Alhambra, then explore a bit in the centre. There were stalls with hog roasts in a square near the cathedral, but we opted to go back to the hotel and start the process of trying to organise getting home.

Fortunately the hotel had organised internet access for the guests in a corner of a rather unused sitting room. The downside was that it was a very old computer which kept losing its internet connection and having to be rebooted. It also didn't have a printer. We had come to the conclusion that the way to get home now would be to fly from our next scheduled stop, Seville, which has an airport and flights by Ryanair to Stansted. This was successfully booked online, as was the cancellation of our hotel bookings in Cordoba and Madrid. For some reason it wasn't possible to cancel the Paris booking - I think it had been booked through an agency rather than direct. The Seville booking was modified from three nights to one.

Our meal that night was outdoors in a square a few hundred yards up the Darro from our hotel. I came rather short because, despite the earlier hot day, at night there was a cold wind up the valley and I was in my shirt sleeves.





Tuesday morning saw us out early climbing the hill to the Alhambra. Our tickets had been booked online before we set off from home. We had a wonderful day. The Alhambra is gardens, and Moorish palaces, and water and tiles. It was nothing like I had imagined - the hilltop is for a start quite extensive. The caliphs' palace is on the northern side of the hill so as to be sheltered a bit from the hot summer sun, and is all courtyards and shade and trees and formal ponds and different levels, quite higgledy piggledy. Truly a paradise on earth.










Around the middle of the afternoon we'd taken in as much of paradise as we were going to, so went back down the steep walk to the city. We found an internet cafe where we were able to log on and print out the plane tickets we'd bought online the day before, and that done we visited the Capilla Real, where Ferdinand and Isabel (and their daughter, Joanna the Mad and her husband) are buried. It is a treasury of art and decoration. You aren't allowed to take photos, but for once I feel the authorities are quite right to forbid them. And then the cathedral. I am a bit blank about that, but I think it was the place where we saw, in the apsidal ambulatory behind the high altar, a dozen or so glass cases each displaying an illuminated service book around three feet tall. They look sadly neglected. Was tempted to nick a couple, but how on earth does one smuggle, let alone carry, even one volume the size of these?

Supper was outdoors on a square in the Albaicin, the Moorish quarter. I was warmer tonight, having taken precautions, like a jumper. At the end of the meal there appeared three itinerant musicians, a guitarist, an oboist and a young woman singer. They serenaded us with blues songs for a while, then settled quietly on the steps across the square, strumming and singing quietly with a whole group of their friends who'd joined them. That was Tuesday.

On Wednesday, we took as planned our first and last Spanish train journey, from Granada to Seville, where we arrived in the early afternoon. Although is is some 60 or so miles from the sea, Seville was a great port in the middle ages and later. The Vikings even raided it up the River Guadalquivir, and later the golden fleets from the Americas unloaded here. We had just over twenty four hours to see what our originial plan of three days stay would not have been enough for. We did our best.

Our first stop after we arrived was at the station ticket office, where a young man whose command of English was fairly rudimentary went, despite that, out of his way to help us by refunding what he could of the money we had paid for train journeys we were not now going to be able to take. After this encouraging start we found our way to our hotel in the old Jewish quarter, quite near the cathedral. A walk past that towards the river brought us to the 13th century Toro del Oro, and then we walked up the riverside boulevard, a surprisingly broad stretch of land which we later discovered was until ten years or so ago the site of the railway station, now moved to the other side of town where we'd just arrived. As it was getting late in the afternoon we weren't sure what we should try to see, but then we realised that
we were going in the right direction for the Museo de Bellas Artes in a redundant monastery, where we spent the rest of the afternoon immersed in Murillos and Zubarans and other wonderful examples of Spanish art. There were one or two blank spaces on the walls, but we caught up with these paintings a few weeks later when we went to the Spanish religious art exhibition currently at the National Gallery.








I wish I could now remember where we ate that evening. All I do remember is passing a corner of a square filled with ranks of bikes for hire under the splendid Seville scheme. We saw all sorts and conditions, from office gents to students using them around the city centre.

Our last day, the Thursday, was a full one as the plane didn't leave till 9.15 in the evening. Our first visit was to the Hospital de los Venerables, a 17th century old people's home for priests. It has a chapel of some magnificence, and a centre dedicated to the work of Diego Velazquez, who like Murillo, was a native of Seville.




Then to the Real Alcazar, another royal palace dating back to the Moors, where the present Spanish Royal Family still have apartments. It is another riot of courtyards and tiles and gardens. That took the morning.





The cathedral took the afternoon. Built on the site of the 12th century great mosque of the Almodhad rulers, it has one of the biggest cathedral footprints in the world. It is all superlatives. I was moved by the courtyard, full of orange trees. It had been the place where ablutions were performed before entering the mosque. And there is the bell tower, the former minaret, which you can walk up by a ramp rather than the more usual steps in towers. Good views from the top.





It was 36 degrees Celsius that day in Seville. By contrast the temperature at 11pm at Stansted was somewhat colder. I prefer the Seville climate. We were met at the airport by our eldest - very civilized to be picked up like that.

Spain was a great success and we can't now wait to get back to take in the bits of the holiday that we missed. Maybe in the spring.