Days 11-13  Granada

We spent a few days in the mountain city of Granada, and here is the street where we lived in the small palace of Santa Ines.

The city sits at the base of the original Sierra Nevada mountains which are nearly as tall as the California version.  Sierra Nevada translates into ‘mountains covered with snow”.  September is not a good month to see snow in the mountains, but we did see signs to ski resorts.

The big draw to Granada is the Alhambra.

There is wall a mile long around the fort and palaces you see in the picture, and people visit it by day and enjoy it from viewpoints in the evening.  To tour it, you are advised to get your ticket months in advance due to its popularity.  From it’s location, this site was built and successfully defended by the Moors (Muslims) for 800 years!  

The Alhambra was part fortress and at one end, the army was garrisoned. Our tour took us through the many parts of the fort.

Back in the day when this was a working fort, jail cells were holes in the ground with a trap door, and the prisoners accessed the cell by rope.

The highlight was the Moorish Royal Palace.  Several of the rooms had courtyards, and two of our favorites are these two:

There are some large gardens within the walls that were aromatic as well as beautiful.

Jan Studer encouraged us to try what we might call the Turkish Bathes (and what they call the Arab bathes).  Three of us have colds and coughs, so it was a chance to test whether they were therapeutic.  There were hot bathes of various hotness and steam, a cold bath, and the part I liked the most, a massage.  After two hours, you feel 20 years younger.  No pictures were allowed of the bath - sorry!

On one of our days, we took a tour of olive groves and learned about the processing of it!  Spain is the top producer in the world with 45% of the total.  Neighboring Italy is a distant second producer with 25% of the worlds olive oil.  The town we visited has the oldest known press and we got a special tour.  The stone below was pulled by a donkey, and the stone smashed the raw olives into a pulp.

Then, we did the taste test of 5 different oils, something I can’t recommend.  I love olive oil and know it is a healthy oil, but drinking it and swishing it around in your mouth before swallowing is not as fun as when I do it with wine!  Here are some of the other tasters sitting in front of their five cups of oil.

One of our days in Granada was a Saturday.  Every night a few evening hours are used for walking the common areas and enjoying the evening air with friends and family.  Saturday evenings are more lively with music in many of the plazas.  It was interesting to run across the following in late afternoon in one large plaza.  There are lots of young people in Granada and the attention is usually on them.  In this plaza, it’s the older people dancing and the young people watching.

On more than one evening, we went to neighboring Arab Quarters for the view of the Alhambra at sunset.  Finding a good viewpoint is part of the challenge as well as navigating throughout the small and erratically laid out streets.  For over 1000 years, the Jews and Muslims have gotten along very well here in Granada.  This picture reminds me of the Jewish word ‘Shalom’ meaning peace.