Europe 2012 - England/Spain - The Finale (sans pictures)

As I’m on my way back home and will be back in the work-a-day world as soon as I get up on Tuesday, I am going to wrap up the final events with one post.  The final pictures will have to follow.

Saturday was check out day from the rental.  #3, 3A, and 3.1 had a morning flight from Malaga so I drove them down at 7:30 and got back to the rental at 9:30.  We did some final goodbyes out on the patio overlooking the village of Casarabonella one more time.  Then the others took off and it was just Wife and I waiting for the owner to come so we could take off.  We have rearranged our schedule.  Originally we were going to drive up the old capital of Toledo, another city with great Moorish and inter-faith significance.  However, earlier in the week, we were going on line to buy tickets to get into the Alhambra in Granada and found that they were all sold out except for this Sunday.  The Alhambra is one of the absolute must see sights for anyone interested in the Moorish period.  Wife and I decided to rearrange our schedule.  So after we checked out we did the 2 and half hour drive to Granada.  I was pretty tired from the big walk in Ronda on Friday and getting up early to take the kids to the airport.  We talked about getting lunch and then going into town to check things out.  However, one has to get up very early to get into the Alhambra (more on that later).  So instead we decided to have a nice lunch and call it a day.  This is pretty easy to do in Spain with typical lunch hour being 2 PM.

Our Tom Tom GPS map doesn’t seemed to have updated correctly when I downloaded it before the trip, but it got us to our hotel in pretty good shape.  The hardest part was seeing the hotel sign!  We drove by the place twice.  We were on the outskirts of town, as I didn’t want to pay a lot just for a bed.  As luck would have it, there was a very nice restaurant right across the street.  We walked in and were greeted by a nice case of fresh fish, their specialty.  We ended up having two versions of fish soup to start and then split a whole fish called a Lupine (?) that was cooked in salt.  This was a very old school place with a lot of tableside preparation so they took the meat off the bones for us and then served it with just a splash of some very good olive oil.  After we were done we were getting ready to leave and the headwaiter that had done the serving pulled us to the side and gave us a drink of a lemoncello type liqueur.  We mentioned that we were headed to the Alhambra in the morning (in our sprinkling of Spanish words) and he took us to the back room of the restaurant where there was a huge picture of one of the palace rooms.  Very sweet.  We’d shared a bottle of wine with lunch (which ended at 4:30) so that pretty much killed the day. 

Getting to and into the Alhambra is an experience unto itself.  There are only a certain number of tickets made available each day.  There are also two sessions each day; one that goes from 8:00 AM to 2 PM and the other from 2 PM to 8 PM.  You can buy your tickets online.  And if you can’t print out the voucher, you can get your ticket voucher from various terminals in Granada and at the Alhambra itself.  However, these are not the tickets themselves.  For that you have to go to another place to hand in the vouchers for the tickets.  And when you get your tickets you also get a reservation to go into one of the prime attractions the Nasarid Palace.  And if you don’t speak Spanish this all becomes quite a mysterious process.  And if you are going at our time of year, when sunrise isn’t until around 8:30 AM, you are doing this all in the dark.  But it all turned out OK with us getting going around 7 AM Sunday morning and driving through the dark streets to find the Alhambra and getting all the rest done. 

So how do you create a word picture of this incredible place?  Let’s start by describing its history.  The Alhambra – Red Fortress – was the home to the last remaining great Moorish dynasty in Spain.  After the Catholics had pushed out the North African Berber dynasties and taken control of the majority of the country, the kingdom of the Nasarids remained an independent force for another 200+ years.  It was during this period that they became the resting place for the multi-cultural society that had been al-Andalus.  The Alhambra itself was the palace-citadel for the capital city of Granada.  The Nasarids did what all the Moorish dynasts did they built a sumptuous palace.  In addition on the grounds are the fortress, a set of formal gardens that are from the same period.  Additionally there are some buildings (a palace and church) from after the Catholic final conquest (1492, the same year as Columbus’ voyage). 

The Nasarid Palace is the only remaining, mostly intact example of the architectural design and decorative design tastes of al-Andalus.  It follows a classic Islamic format where the exterior is not as much a focal point as the interior (the Palace really doesn’t look lime much from the outside) and fabulous intricacy of design based on geometric patterns on floors (even exterior), walls, and ceilings with ample use of water and fountains.  I know this doesn’t do a very good job.  Then there are a separate area of terraced gardens that go up a side of the hill and where each terrace is almost self-enclosed but where the whole affect is achieved when standing on the upper terrace.  There are reflecting pools, fountains, small streams of running water, and a water staircase going up the three sets of terraces where water runs down what would be the equivalent of banisters. 

This was truly the high point of the trip from a sightseeing perspective.  We finished up at 2 PM then we drove the five hours to Madrid.  We had a hotel very close to the airport but in the community of Bajaraz so we were able to walk to dinner for one last meal. 

Monday was just the long ass flight back to New Mexico and home.