Above is Alhambra at sunset, courtesy of our friend Dan, who was traveling with us. I believe he got this wonderful shot on our first evening in Grenada, while we were on our way to the Flamenco caves for an intimate family-and-friends performance in an actual mountain cave across the river. I can’t ask though, because, shockingly, Dan suffered a horrible bicycling accident in other mountains just a couple of days after we parted ways in Sevilla. He is still hospitalized in the the Malaga area with a number of broken bones, and he and his wife will be staying in Spain until he is stable enough to be moved.
Our lives can change so quickly. We are getting daily updates, and there is every reason to hope he will recover completely, but it will take some time.
Through this lens our trip to these two Moorish cities takes on a tinge of a last hurrah, or at least an inflection point. In this region we find narrow streets, many only one lane wide so always shady during the heat of the day, notable even in May. Wider streets may have a canopy. Granada is smaller than Córdoba and nestled among mountains, including the towering, snow-covered Sierra Nevada range, of which I do not have a good picture. Alhambra itself is a cluster of buildings interspersed with manicured grounds and gardens, a royal enclave home to over 2000 persons in its heyday. The intricately decorated Nasrid Palaces are among the many highlights (top row below).
Córdoba is famously home of the Mezquita, a mosque so enormous that later Christians simply built a cathedral inside after they conquered it. All Muslims–well, probably only male ones–would gather indoors at noon every Friday, so the open space was repeatedly enlarged to accommodate them as the population grew. The combination of mosque and cathedral emphasizes the contrast between the intimate, accessible deity of Islam and the remote, powerful deity of Christianity, an often jarring juxtaposition.
The Mezquita is on the banks of the Guadalquivir River, which also flows through Sevilla, and adjacent to the Roman Bridge, originally built in the first century CE and much maintained since. Across the bridge from the mosque-cathedral is a Roman guardhouse.
We walked along this river to and from restaurants during day and night, when the temperature was more bearable. Our lodging was very close to the Mezquita, where there are shops to visit during the day and buskers at night, including one quite good classical guitarist. It was magical to gather after dark with a sparse collection of fellow music lovers, beautiful music, the building towering above us and the river murmuring.
Dan particularly enjoyed winding up our evenings this way.