We started off with Granada:
We've both been here on day trips before and always spent the whole visit getting to, then exploring, the Alhambra. It is without a doubt a beautiful and fascinating place. The Moorish decoration which has been preserved here is wonderful and it's a great place to wander around for a day – but we'd done that and wanted to see a bit more of the town! Instead we headed for another Moorish remnant – the hilltop area of Albaicin. It's a devil to get to in a motorhome – especially when the satnav insists on trying to send you along roads that are only for taxis and buses, directs you to go the wrong way along one way streets etc – but eventually we found a parking spot up at the mirador of San Cristóbal. Fortunately this turned out to be perfect as we could walk down through a maze of twisting, narrow, cobbled streets, lined with traditional white houses but no pavements – remarkably serving as a busroute – to the mirador at the church of San Nicolás, which had been recommended by the Rough Guide.
The view over Granada at sunset was indeed very lovely; glowing snowy peaks to our left, misty hills in the distance, plumes of smoke from the farmland around and, as the sun set, bright city lights in front of us. We found a square where groups of Spaniards were getting stoned and listening to a genius gypsy drummer playing a box (a very special box). The area seems to be a magnet for artists and musicians. We admired the view of the Alhambra lit up and glowing opposite us and realised that we'd never seen it from a distance before.
Later we set off to look at the gypsy cave quarter of Sacromonte. It was the usual maze of streets with normal looking frontages on houses, but on closer inspection you realise that they extend back into the cliffs. This is a famous place for flamenco and there were lots of places offering flamenco lessons or shows. We decided not to partake!
The next day we clambered down the hill into Granada and visited the Capilla Real, where the Catholic Monarchs (King Ferdinand and Queen Isobella, 'Los Reyes Catolicos' the royal couple who conquered the last of Moslem Spain) are buried. It was a low-key place by Spanish Catholic standards – white walls visible between the decorations and generally very northern gothic rather than flouncy baroque. There are lots of top quality exhibits in the museum including some of King Ferdinand and Queen Isobella's splendid clothes, lots of Flemish paintings (with some spectacularly ugly baby Jesuses), a Botticelli annunciation and lifelike painted wooden statues of the pair. In the chapel itself there were also big marble effigies of Ferdinand and Isobella, their daughter Juana La Loca and her husband Felipe the Handsome on elevated platforms so high you couldn't really see them. It's a shame as we were looking forward to seeing just how mad Juana was!
The rest of our visit involved rambling around the pedestrianised streets admiring the many Moroccan crafts shops and a nice walk alongside the river, past bits of Moorish fortification, with smart 16th century town houses and remodelled Moorish palaces.
Our next main sightseeing stop was Cordoba, but en route we spent a couple of days in Cabra, out in the main olive growing region of Spain. As soon as we got west of Granada the country looked greener and more prosperous; olive plantations and large well maintained country houses everywhere. Most of the olive trees were big, old, well maintained trees, not recent planting. There were olives still on many of them and people harvesting them by hand by banging the trees with sticks and catching the olives in nets on the ground.
Cordoba – go there if you can:
The Mesquita / cathedral is truly amazing. There's no point repeating what's in the guide books, except that it really is spectacular.
The current owners, the Catholic Church, are clearly very sensitive about its past and although all the guidebooks and street signs talk about the Mesquita (Mosque), when you get there it is only ever called the Cathedral. The pamphlet you are given with your ticket takes great pains to establish the Catholic title. They complain that a Visigothic Christian basilica was 'expropriated and destroyed' to make way for the mosque (so their turning it back into a Cathedral was just putting things right). The Rough Guide however, claims that the Moslem authorities bought the old Basilica from the Christians. I don't know how to settle that argument if no-one kept the receipt.
The leaflet explains that the modifications to the Mesquita / Cathedral were made because of the 'inconvenience of celebrating the Liturgy amid a sea of columns', and also takes pains to explain that the real importance of the Cathedral is its role as the seat of the Bishop, from which he provides pastoral service to his flock. This, it claims, is more important that any physical or architectural glory. If they really felt that way I wish the Bishops of Cordoba could have worked from comfortable modern rented office space, or a practical prefab like the Jehovah's Witnesses, rather than hack about such a beautiful building.
The simple beauty of the original mosque contrasts everywhere with the glaring presence of bolted on baroque kitch. Some visiting Germans were slack jawed amazed at rectangular crucifixion scene cemented into the centre of the old Moorish prayer niche. The whole floor has been excavated (mainly, it seems, to find evidence of the pre-Moorish Visigothic Christian basilica. I'm not sure what they found from before the Visigoths) and replaced with smooth shiny Spanish airport marble flooring. In the centre of the Mesquita / Cathedral is a shiny white renaissance choir (effectively a whole church plonked in as if by a malfunctioning Improbability Drive). As King Carlos V said (even though he'd given it planning permission) :
“You have built what you or others might have built anywhere, but you have destroyed something that was unique in the world”
To be fair, not 'destroyed', not even entirely spoilt, although it is a pity to have lost the original effect, which must have been like peeking at the Imam through a forest.
Final grumble; the leaflet observes that the expropriation of the Basilica is “a reality that questions the theme of tolerance that was supposedly cultivated in the Cordoba of the moment”. This is a bit rich. At the time of the Christian reconquest I don't know how many Christian churches there were in Cordoba, but there were apparently sixty synagogues. After the reconquest the numbers are much simpler; no mosques, no synagogues (and after 1492 no Jews either).
From his seat in Cordoba Cathedral, the Bishop's valuable pastoral work goes on. According to El País (3 Jan 2011):
“UNESCO has a plan to “make half the global population gay”. This surprising declaration came from the Bishop of Cordoba, Demetrio Fernández, and was made during the celebration of the Feast of the Holy Family in this Andalusian city (Seville) on 26th December … For the prelate, this is about “the final success of a culture which wants to break totally with God, God the creator who has fixed in our natures the difference between man and woman”.
We spent some time wandering around the Jewish quarter and old town walls of Cordoba too, but unfortunately it was raining and therefore not as picturesque as it would have been in the sunshine (I think we've become spoilt!)
Next day we visited another Moorish site about 7 km outside Cordoba, the Medina Alzahara.
If the Mesquita wasn't so wonderful this place would be far more famous.
One of the Moorish rulers of Cordoba, coming from a family with a tradition of founding new cities, decided to build a brand new, splendid city less than 10 km from Cordoba. I'm still not sure why he wanted to do that, and no-one at the time would have dared to ask him. It was topped with a splendid palace, further down was an area for the court and government, then the rest of the city, all designed in the latest style and furnished to impress. It was only used for about seventy years, before being sacked during a civil war, abandoned and forgotten. Many of its treasures were carried off (turning up in some odd places), and the walls were quarried for building material.
We were surprised to find a splendid modern museum with plenty of information (in Castillian and English) and artefacts, including the bronze deer that used to be the Cordoba archaeological museum's star exhibit (looked very unlike a deer, more like a stocky Norwegian wooden horse). All this (except the shuttle bus to the ruins) is free with an EU passport, which seems very generous when they've so recently spent so much on it.
The ruins themselves are a huge expanse of excavated low walls and floors amongst shade trees, reminiscent of parts of Pompei. Occasional buildings had been reconstructed to their full height, which was really necessary to give an impression of the original scale and splendour of the place. Fortunately it was now sunny and warm so we had a very enjoyable wander about.
Neither of us have seen much of the Islamic world, but this glimpse of old Al Andaluz has certainly whetted our appetites. However, it may be that Christian Spain preserves some of the finest achievements of Islamic art and makes them more accessible than they'd be in many counties. I've been pretty hard on the Catholic Church in this blog, but we got into Cordoba Cathedral / Mesquita for eight euros. In contrast I recently read a book by a non-Christian man who's lived two decades in Yemen and has never been allowed to see the inside of any of their mosques.
