Exploring Granada – Granada, Spain

Exploring Granada
Granada, Spain

Granada gets hot. Africa hot, which may partially explain why there is a long history of Moors and Arabs making their homes in the area. Being inland, there are no Mediterranean breezes to cool things off, just endless brown, desert-like landscapes and arid plant-life decorating the hillsides (until you run into the Sierra Nevada mountain range of course, but that’s a different article all together). As if sangria weren’t tempting enough on its own, this dry climate only intensifies one’s cravings for a cool, refreshing flagon of the fruity stuff at the end of each day. But you have to earn that jug of yummy goodness, my alcoholic friend, and Granada has several endurance testing offerings that will keep you on your feet all day, paying your dues and driving you into a thirsty, frothing delirium for that first sangria of the evening.

Alhambra

At the top of this list of resilience testing attractions is the Alhambra, a giant, thousand year old fortress, boasting fantastic Islamic art and architecture, atop a hill on the outskirts of the city. The Alhambra was built by the Moors back when they dominated southern Spain and is very nearly too fantastic to be done justice to in print. Innumerable tour buses parade up the hill at all hours of the day, but if you’d like a nice, scenic walk and not go through the embarrassment of being seen on one of those heinous tour busses, making your way to the Alhambra on foot is very rewarding, even if you set off without a map and mistakenly go up the much longer and inviting “back way.”

Depending on the time of year, touring the Alhambra may require serious planning. Book ahead if you go between June and August or count on hours of standing in line in spirit sapping heat for tickets and again to be admitted into the Alhambra itself. Even showing up early in the day during the off-season will test your patience stamina and crowd tolerance, but what awaits you is worth every bit of aggravation. And don’t make the mistake of happily sauntering through the entrance when you arrive on foot! Although there is zero signage to indicate this, the Alhambra ticket booth is inexplicably and stealthily located 300 yards further up the hill than the entrance! Tickets are not checked until you are several hundred yards into the Alhambra, so by the time you realize the error and someone explains that you have to backtrack a half mile in 90 degree heat for the pleasure of standing in line for an hour to get your ticket, your zeal may go a little sour.

With the striking Palacio Nazaries, the gorgeous Generalife gardens and the mighty Alcazaba fortress all being self-contained tourist sights in their own right, not to mention all the other attractions scattered around the grounds, the Alhambra requires the better part of a day to tour thoroughly. This is no Louvre, where after four hours you’ll be pitifully longing for a drink and a comfortable chair. Even at the brink of exhaustion and heat stroke the Alhambra will compel you to forage on as it becomes clear that mind-boggling woodwork, fantastic stucco or some other ancient piece of artistic beauty or primeval oh-wow moment is waiting for you in every building, room, nook and cranny on the grounds. So pack a lunch and screw on your game face for a long day of dazzling enjoyment.

Granada Statue

With the Alhambra’s immense size and its layout not being particularly conducive to a nice, logical itinerary (Those darn Moors obviously didn’t give even a second’s worth of consideration to a concise tour route when they built the thing. The nerve…), deciding where to go first and how to proceed between exhibits will keep you standing around and confused for a fair amount of time. Once you find your way into buildings like the Palacio, signs will keep you on the beaten path – albeit the signs are small and sometimes posted in inconspicuous places – and will eventually lead you to an exit. But, when you’re standing inside the main entrance of the Alhambra or on one of the connecting pathways between exhibits, you are completely on your own which allows you to make poor directional decisions that will lead you to do things like tour the Generalife gardens backwards without so much as a hint that you’re off track until you get to the entrance and the guard will resolutely refuse to allow you to exit, forcing you to turn around and take the very lengthy walk all the way back through the gardens to escape. However, with the gardens being as attractive as they are, the frustration of this predicament will not likely last very long.

Being the furthest from the entrance, the Alcazaba fortress, built between the 11^th and 13^th centuries, will likely be the last attraction you visit in the Alhambra. Unfortunately, it may be a bit of a let-down, especially if you tour it directly after the neighboring Palacio, but its views of the city and its sheer enormity and fortitude should nevertheless drain whatever remaining space you have left on your digital camera’s memory card.

Once you’ve had 12 hours to recover from the Alhambra, Granada’s number two foot taxing attraction is the narrow, steep, winding streets of the old hillside Arabic neighborhood known as Albaicín. Shops, high priced coveted homes, and sometimes dangerously slanted walls line every inch of these claustrophobic streets. Despite being only two or three stories tall, these structures loom so close together that, other than a brief period in the afternoon when the sun is aligned just so, the streets of Albaicín are thrown into a shroud of permanent cool shade which will be gratefully welcomed by any traveler visiting between the brain marinating months of June and September. Due to the lack of street space, much of the area can only accommodate foot, bike and scooter traffic. This transport limitation is even further reduced in the unpleasant places where the streets are so steep that they deteriorate into very precarious steps. The uneven rocks and stones that pave these thin corridors demand one’s constant vigilance as a sprained ankle is only a minor mis-step away. How the residents of this neighborhood move their furniture in and out of their homes is beyond me. In many places you can’t negotiate Albaicín with a fair sized wheelbarrow much less a moving van.

If you manage to escape Albaicín’s confounding snarl of streets while you still have strength left in your legs, you can cross the Gran Via de Colón and start the nearly endless tour of cathedrals, churches and plazas that are scattered around the south-western part of the city center. For some pleasurable voyeuristic ogling, wander the area during a Saturday afternoon and evening to admire the dozens of well-dressed and raucous wedding parties spilling out of the churches and parading through the streets to their receptions.

If you were dropped off blind in certain parts of Granada you might initially guess that you were in Morocco. In addition to the classic north African architecture and street designs, Granada hosts a strong Arab community which is evident in the copious number of Arabic shops and restaurants generously scattered throughout the city, blaring their distinctive music and smelling of tea and spices. There are few places outside of Tangier, Fès and Marrakech where you will feel the same sensation, with the added perk of there being no overbearing carpet salesmen trying to steer you into their shops.

Wall of Albaicín

Something that may stun a U.S. visitor is the fact that southern Spain has the largest wild cat population that I have ever seen. Granada is notably over-run, particularly around the Alhambra and in the immediate vicinity of any outdoor dining venues. Tiny dogs are by far the most popular Spanish domestic animal, so over the decades the abandoned cat population has ballooned to the point where they are almost as common as squirrels in some places. Cats pretty much have free reign to roam the streets, valleys and Arabic ruins all over the south of Spain. People sit around in parks in the early evenings and feed whole packs of wild cats like they were pigeons. The cats appear to be totally tame and disease-free, as people and kids fearlessly play with them and cuddle them during these feeding frenzies.

One of the less attractive parts of Granada – indeed all of Spain – is that with the possible exception of Italy, it has the dubious distinction of being the most scooter infested country in western Europe. Scooters are everywhere and they are all desperately in need of a tune-up. There are no noise ordinance laws in Spain and consequently, once the laughably substandard muffler on a scooter drops off, it is never replaced. You can hear these little noise-makers on wheels coming from blocks away, a phenomenon that is greatly magnified at night when the street traffic is thin and peaceful. The odd thing I noticed about the scooter community, aside from the universally muffler-free assault on the ears, was that whenever I saw a guy and his girl riding together on a scooter, inevitably the guy was always the one wearing the helmet. I’m not clear on the exact rules of chivalry in Spain, but with the Spaniards being so courteous in every other way, I couldn’t understand why the guy wouldn’t surrender his helmet to his girl, so that she might be spared a brain damaging injury when the inevitable collision with a wild cat occurred. Then I realized that perhaps these women were turning down the helmet in the interest of preserving their painstaking hair styling efforts. Either way, I saw an unusual number of women walking around Granada with broken arms. Coincidence?

One of the less obvious, but nevertheless hugely popular qualities about Granada is the practice that bars have of serving a free plate of tapas whenever a drink is ordered. Tapas are small, tasty plates of food served in bars and cafeterias which are just a small snack on their own, but three or four tapas can easily replace a full meal. This food free-for-all is particularly coveted by budget backpackers and students that are able to get their swerve on and a decent meal all for one low price. The quality of tapas varies greatly throughout Spain. In some of the less tapas devoted regions of the country like Valencia, you might be served something as basic as a pathetic, dry, little piece of baguette bread with some ham and cheese on it. Then there’s places like San Sebastian where tapas preparation is a colorful, mouth watering art form. Granada tends to fall in the middle of the spectrum, but considering that the tapas are free, there’s little reason to complain.

Although the Spanish have a prevailing reputation for being in an unending pursuit of pleasure and leisure, Granada is not the place to find this atmosphere. If drooling lethargy and drunken afternoons in the sun are what you crave, go straight to the Mediterranean coast. If you want to see some truly amazing sights, eat and drink for a pittance and retrain your body to sleep through a concerto of mufflerless scooter noise, set aside at least two days of high-speed vigor in Granada before you retire to your beach chair.

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