Just some more sights of downtown Granada. I've stretched out the posts to give you an idea of how much time we spent waiting for our Alhambra time slot. Note the fake smiles on Catherine and Tracey as they listen to the history lecture in the previous post.

To kill time, we walked downhill to the city centre, which is quite large, and meandered about until ending up at what appeared to be the main square. We spent a few hours here, eating a very leisurely lunch and doing some shoe shopping. Let's talk a bit about the city's history as we linger over our flan and red wine, shall we? As you know, Andalucia was the center of the Moorish kingdom in Spain, and the last part of the country to be recovered by the Christians. Seville and Cordoba were world famous centers of Muslim learning and culture, but they were conquered by the Christians in the thirteenth century. Granada, which had been a pretty small backwater, became the new Moorish capital largely because it was the city farthest from the ever encroaching border. Refugees from the rest of Andalucia swelled Granada's population, and for 200 years the city prospered as the last Moorish capital until finally being conquered by Catholic Spain in 1492. The Moors and Jews were then expelled to Africa and hordes of Spaniards from Madrid were imported to completely erase the last traces of Moorish influence. Pretty serious stuff for lunch talk, no?

68. Granada

Thursday was our other big group trip, to Granada. Granada is still in Andalucia but away from the Costa del Sol, and ranks with Sevilla and Cordoba as the must see cities of Andalucia. Unlike the other two, however, Granada is really a one-hit wonder, as the home of the world famous and extremely popular Moorish palace of Alhambra. The popularity is important, because we drove a couple of hours to get here, got lost in the big, pretty non-descript city to arrive at the Alhambra gate around 10 am. We managed to snag almost the last tickets of the day, but the downside is we weren't allowed in until 6 pm.

As the day was drawing to a close, we had seen only a small fraction of my intended sightseeing itinerary due to my crappy navigating. I then compounded the error by taking a wrong turn shortly after leaving Arcos de la Frontera, which sent us west to the Portuguese border rather than east toward home. After two hours of going in completely the wrong direction, I finally realized the error, and we corrected course, adding about five hours of driving to the day. As an added bonus, we did get to drive by Gibraltar, that big rock thing pictured above. Couldn't see much other than that it was an enormous rock. It's self-evidently an important rock since Spain and England have been fighting about it for a long time, but from a distance it just looked like a rock. I also decided that I would no longer use maps to navigate, but since our sightseeing targets seemed to sit atop big rocks, Somchai could just drive from rock to rock and we'd be in much better shape.

We parked the car outside of town (the photo with the paved street), figuring one "streets so narrow we crashed our car into the house" story was enough for today. We then ducked through the arch at the end of the road, and climbed up a series of stairs and steep narrow alleys.

67. Arcos de la Frontera

We then drove for many hours, missing several of my intended destinations until we drove into the unmissable Arcos de la Frontera. This sizeable town is built on a huge rocky outcrop disrupting the monotony of flat farmland surrounding it. Its defensive positioning atop a rock explains both the fact that it has survived through centuries of war, and that we managed to find it despite our poor navigation.

66. Ronda la Vieja

Our next visit, to the original Ronda, is a good lesson in civic planning. If you locate your town on a nice rolling plain instead of a giant rock, it ends up in little piles of rubble. Actually this is all that's left of the Roman settlement 2,000 years ago. It's mostly a large empty field, filled with cow shit and the occasional pile of rubble, with a couple of vicious dogs wandering about. But at the end of the field, there is a fairly well-preserved amphitheatre. Not worth making a detour for, but if you're driving by and your car breaks down in front of it, it's not a bad place to wait until the tow truck arrives.

Of course, not all the residents are cavedwellers, and the town has lined the mountain with typical whitewashed houses. I may be reading too much into this, but they don't seem particularly religious, since they located their church in about as remote a place as possible. After walking around the town for a bit, we got back in our slightly damaged car and motored to our next destination.

The two sides of town are connected by the Puente Nuevo, which as Mom knows is the New Bridge. It's called the New Bridge because the first bridge to cross this gorge collapsed the day it was finished. The bridge empties into the more modern town square, pictured here. Below the bridge, dangling from the cliff face, is a very nice restaurant where we had a three hour lunch.