Palaces of intricate carvings, tiled walls and cool fountains
‘Granada’s bar owners give away free food’
spring are the best times of the year to visit this region: the days are bright enough to feel like you’ve escaped the gloom of home, but you avoid the horrible heat of summer, when temperatures can reach up to 45˚C – so now is a good time to go.
Ispent just a day in Granada, but there’s enough there to warrant a much longer stay. Arriving at lunchtime after the two-hour drive from Malaga airport, we stopped off for lunch at El Coso, in the arches of the city’s bullring.
It’s a restaurant that does a high quality modern take on traditional local dishes: flakes of cod served with orange, croquettes of salmorejo (a variant of gazpacho) and excellent Iberian ham.
Suitably refreshed, we were ready for our lightning tour of the Alhambra.
It’s not hard to see why this complex of 13th and 14th century palaces – and later additions built when the Christians reconquered Andalusía – is Spain’s most visited tourist attraction (another reason to go in spring or autumn, to avoid peak season crowds).
It’s a wonderful experience: room after room of incredible, intricate carving, stunning ceramic-covered walls, cool patios and fountains, and the stately gardens too which are known as the Generalife.
Granada has another claim to fame: the bar owners give away free food. In a tradition that would instantly bankrupt any pub back home, all you have to do is order a beer to get a halfdecent serving of tapas. Which means that a bar crawl can actually be the best way to explore: a tapas tour of Albaicín, the old Arabic quarter with its narrow streets and rows of tea shops,
offers the perfect combination of eating, boozing and sightseeing.
Just under two hours’ drive from Granada are Úbeda and Baeza, two towns that, despite being hidden away up in Jaen province, have a distinctly Italian look to them. This is because both towns employed the Renaissance architect Andrés de Vandelvira to build enough palazzos, chapels and arcaded courtyards to keep visitors impressed for centuries.
We visited Baeza, the smaller of the two, first, before moving on to Ubeda, where the glorious Plaza de Vázquez de Molina is home to, among other perfectly preserved 16th and 17th cen- tury gems, Vandelvira’s Chapel of the Saviour, as well as our lodgings, a very venerable Parador, the second oldest in this State-owned chain of historic buildings that have been converted into hotels.
Another couple of hours away to the west is Cordoba, which also has enough attractions to justify staying for far longer than the day we spent there.
The Mezquita is the big one – the beautiful, vast medieval mosque that later had a 16th-century cathedral plonked in the middle after the Christian reconquest.
Close by is the Judería, the old Jewish disctrict. It’s a touch touristy here, but you can easily forgive the souvenir shops, as the area is so visually distinctive, with its winding alleys, whitewashed walls and flower-filled patios, that you can see why the crowds come.
For a break from sightseeing, the Hammam Al Andalus baths cannot be bettered – they’re done up to resemble the old Arab baths, which were found all over the city. A visit with massage costs €36 – well worth it if you have been doing a lot of walking.
In our next stop, Seville, the first thing you notice is how smartly the locals dress. And the city’s architecture is every bit as imposing:
The enormous cathedral, the Alcázar palace, the Archivo de los Indios. I’d been there before and was not disappointed on seeing it a second time – it’s the sort of place that makes a permanent impression.
Sadly we had only a few hours to explore – but we did fit in a superb lunch at local institution Taberna del Alabardero, where the bistro does a set menu for €18.50. The highlight were buñuelos, a sort of Spanish profiterole, filled with sweet creamy chestnut goo, possibly the most delicious thing I’ve tasted all year – and definitely the perfect note on which to end our tour, before we raced on to Malaga and the airport.