Granada, Spain 2/21/11--2/23/11

It's olives, olives everywhere. Or at least we are seeing olive trees everywhere as we drive from Granada to Cordoba. We haven't eaten any olives in Spain. Actually we haven't eaten much of anything because we've been sick, but we are on the mend and will hopefully make up for lost time.

Although we couldn't do much dining in Granada, we did drag ourselves to The Alhambra (from the Arabic meaning “red castle”)which was the main site on our itinerary. It is still a beautiful palace-fortress even though seeing it in the winter means there aren't many flowers as there were in the late spring almost forty years ago when we first saw it. I could see the roses starting to poke out tender new leaves and imagine what a fragrance the thousands of them would produce! The fortress itself consists of many buildings because it was once a town with several thousand inhabitants. It was originally built in the 9^th century by a caliph for its ideal locale on top of a rocky promentory at the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range. It has a near-ideal climate, fertile plains and the close proximity of a river which allows for the hundreds of miles of flowing water that meanders, falls, and creeps through the entire complex.

The main part of the fortress is taken up by a palace, a cathedral, and a military outpost built by the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella (of Christopher Columbus fame) who converted a mosque which had been built in the 13^th century into a Renaissance church. All this happened after the Christian conquest of the Islamic Moors. The secondary part which contains most of the gardens is called the Generalife and consists of a Moorish style villa, surrounded by tile porches, huge gardens, fountains and waterfalls, intricately and precisely clipped ancient hedges and bushes and is built on an adjoining smaller promentory, divided from the rest of the fortress by a ravine.

Unfortunately, it was left to ruin for several hundred years until American author Washington Irving visited there, fell in love with the old buildings and their stories and wrote Tales of the Alhambra in the late 1800's. That's a nutshell history if there ever was one!

We spent the entire day there, just meandering in and out of interesting buildings, enjoying particularly the Palacio Nazaries which is a maze of porches and rooms surrounding beautiful fountains with geometric designs in tile and with ceilings unlike any we'd ever seen. They were carved stucco and looked a little like tiny concave clouds that hung down anywhere from a few inches to more than a foot. They formed large designs of geometrical patterns, surrounded by Arabic script which is beautiful in itself. Cedar coffered ceilings also were of geometrical design and stunning.

Palacio Nazaries



The Generalife (Architect's Garden)



In addition, there was a very nice collection of Henri Matisse which we enjoyed as well as the Moorish art in the Museum des Bellas Artes. After all that, we dragged ourselves back to our hotel and hunted down a restaurant serving comfort food (it would be our first real meal for 4 days)---Italian.

The Alhambra