Travel- Touring the Alhambra
posted in Travel |Friday was the big day to tour the Alhambra. The Alhambra is the old
village/palace/fort complex constructed on the hill above Grenada and various
parts of it date back 1200 years and span many different cultures from the
Romans, Arab/Moorish, Catholic kings to a modern day monastery. I’ve done a lot
of travel around the world and this is both one of the coolest things to tour as
well as one of the longest single sites (if you want to check out the whole
thing).
In the days prior to our departure the weather forecast for Southern Spain
didn’t look good but luckily the weather forecasters were wrong and it was
absolutely beautiful. We hiked all over and I took an amazing amount of
pictures- over 1000 in this one day. The Alhambra has so many examples of cool
architecture so I took lots of close ups of various carvings or various designs,
plus there are a ton of great spots for panoramic photographs. It will probably
take me weeks of playing around at home to pull together some higher quality
panoramic stitches.
 Medium Web view.jpg)
After touring all day we found a dinner place on a local square a bit away
from the central tourist masses and returned for a second time to get some
gelato at the Cafe Bib-Rambla.
Another twist on the timing of our trip is that it was Holy Week (or Semana
Santa). Many of the towns in Spain have traditions where they take their statues
of the Virgin Mary out of their churches and parade them around while often
dressed in clothes that resemble the Klu Klux Klan to American eyes (although
the Spanish traditions are much older and I gather the Spanish are annoyed that
the infamous American organization stole their symbol). These statues are on
these giant platforms and are often carried by 20-40 men marching along an inch
at a time.
We were tired after dinner and tried to pick up a taxi to take us up the
hill. The driver refused to take us and at first I was pissed, thinking he just
didn’t want to take the fairly short ride which would probably require him to
take a fairly long return with no fare (the streets out of the Alhambra are not
straight-forward to put it mildly). The driver managed to communicate to Stacy
that the way was blocked and sure enough we looked over and saw a police car
blocking the road up to our hotel. We set off on foot but were unsuccessful
asking the cop where and when the procession might be. We kept looking around
and just as we were getting close to the top we started seeing some lights and
noises. My reaction was “hurry up, let’s go before we miss it” but Stacy
accurately pointed out that the thing’s don’t move very fast at all and there
was no rush.
The procession at the Alhambra was a pretty small one I gather and they
weren’t even wearing the special clothing. Still it was pretty cool and it
wasn’t over until past 1am and they had delivered the statue back into the
church right next to our hotel.
]]>