Current mood:

tired

Crazy Cordoba and Grand(ish) Granada
So having soaking up the loveliness of Seville for a few days, we decided to head to Cordoba for a day trip before moving on to Granada.

Cordoba is an interesting mix of old town, currently being rebuilt and rearranged town, and modern new town :). Cordoba´s primary attraction is the Mezquita, a old Moorish building with a beautiful Mihrab or prayer area.

In the courtyard is a lovely grove of orange trees, watered by a series of shallow, inter connected trenches from the fountain. This is the area where the devout would wash their feet and hands before going it pray way back when.

The inside is a myriad of beautiful arches in striped white and orange, with carved wooden ceiling panels in between. Sounds strange, but when you´re standing inside surrounded by a few hundred its very beautiful and impressive! The Mihrab, an area where prays were read (if I have that right) is particularly stunning, with an amazingly intricate arch way and small alcove with beautifully detailed carvings and patterns, of a similar style to those I´ve seen before, but more colourful and with more use of shimmery metallic colours. This is then proceeded by a series of equally beautiful and ornate, although less colourful arches, that progressively get smaller until the Mihrab is framed at one end. I just stood there fore several mins admiring the beauty of it.

By contrast, the cathedral built inside the Mezquita buy knocking a bit down during the reconquest was impressive yes, but not beautiful in my opinion. The whole thing just made my skin creep to be honest, and I left that area pretty quickly to admire the pretty Moorish stuff again :)

The rest of Cordoba is a bit of a contrast. We ran out of time to look inside the Alcazar de los Reyas Cristianos, noteworthy because this is apparently where the Spanish Inquisition was based back in the day (I dread to think how many witch burning were ordered or condoned from within that building).

What else, what else? The old Roman bridge near the river is currently covered with construction material, and the river banks and frontage area appear to be a ´work in progress´, a bit like several bits of the rest of the old town, where building are being knocked down and moved around. Cordoba had a strange vibe to it, the beggars were more frequent and obvious, and the number of tourist shops selling tourist tat much higher. Cordoba appears to be one of those places that receives loads of day trippers, and is becoming more a tourist town because if it, and not in a good way. I hope that the apparently thriving new town is self sufficient enough to sustain a life of its own, but I fee it will go the same way as San Giminano in Tuscany did, and become a tourist husk with no life blood of its own.

Following Cordoba we returned to Seville for the night, then caught a train east to Granada.

The big draw card of Granada is of course the famous Alhambra and gardens at Generalife next door. After it was built up so much by everyone else, I was expecting to be blown a way - a bigger and better version of the Moorish stuff I´d already seen . . . .

Bigger is certainly an apt description, but I´m not convinced that better applies . . . Perhaps if we hadn´t already seen some impressive examples in Seville and Cordoba it would have made more of an impact. It was certainly big, many more rooms, to the point of almost getting lost in the place, but its was all of a similar style to what we'd seen before, if anything less ornate. The famoned Patio de los Leones was under reservation, with the lions on holiday whilst they got all fixed up :) I´ve got the post card anyway so I don´t need to see the real thing, right? :) The Salon de Embajodors, or thrown room was large an impressive, but again similar to previous examples we´d seen. Don't get me wrong it was beautiful, but it just didn't floor me like I was expecting it to, possibly because I had such high expectations from what other people had said.

The adjoining Generalife is basically a series of inter-connected garden areas with a series of lovely fountains. The majority of these were well looked after, and Jen and I spent sometime sitting in the shade of carved archways, cooling off in the breeze and listing to the splashing of the many fountains. The gardens area extensive, and around every corner is another lovely area with flowers and hedges and its own lovely trickily (or often gushing) fountain! I don´t know where they get there water from, but they do seen to use a Lot and its all so lovely a cool (I know this because there are several fountains where you can stick you hands, or in our case our arms in up to our elbows and cool off. Most excellent when you've been walking all day in the sunshine).

Come to think of it Seville and Granada also had Heaps of lovely fountains, sometimes moving massive volumes of water. I have no idea where it comes from, given the dryness of the surrounding countryside. Maybe its ground water or something . . .

The rest of Granada was interesting. Its much higher up than Seville and a bit drier. There's a university and an old Gypsy area up the hill that gives Granada a distinctly studenty vibe, with a far number of ferals and their dogs to boot :) The street along side the Cathedral was particularly annoying for beggars and I snapped at one woman one day when she tried to foist bits of plant at me (do not annoy the hungry Sarah who has been walking all day and is in need of coffee if you know whats good for you :P ).

The view from roof top terrace at the hostel was Stunning, with a fantastic view of Sierra Nevada in the distance and Granada laid out below, but apart from this the hostel was a bit of a disappointment. The staff were lovely, but the hostel itself rather cramped and grotty around the edges . . .

Seville is defiantly somewhere I´d be happy to go back to and just hang out for a bit, but I don´t really feel the need to go back to Granada, and one day was defiantly enough in Cordoba (am quite glad we didn´t stop overnight there).

Am currently Madrid a day early after two nights in Almeria, but I think that´s a topic for another post, which I may or may not be bothered to do tonight! Its late and I wanna have enough brain power to appreciate the royal palace and perhaps a museum or to in Madrid tomorrow.

Cheers
S.