ANDALUCÍA (PART ONE)

And now a short version in English for my colleagues and friends.

DAY 0: Prelude

Cashing in on the 200-odd overtime hours I collected over the last peak, we took some holidays (3 weeks in October) and decided to go South and have a long weekend and generally just to get as far away from Madrid as possible.

We also rewarded ourselves with an old love of mine: a mirror-reflex digital camera. I used to “work” with a proper analogue, film-based camera when I was learning photography back in the days, but developing the pictures drove me to bankruptcy every time, so after a while without a camera, we bought a small compact camera. But it’s not the same. I need to feel the lens actually work when I turn the rings, I need the weight and the grip and all the little things that come with a proper camera. So we bought a damn expensive Nikon D90, immediately went to a “test-drive” into La Pedriza (just 45 kms North of Madrid), in preparation for the big trip.

From Manzanares (Nikon D90 Demo)

The original plan called for a Granada-Sevilla-Cordoba trip, and we actually managed to reach Granada before it fell into pieces. For Granada, actually, planning is a must, as certain parts of the Alhambra palace complex require an “appointment” and the number of entries each day is limited. So one can try to get a time in advance through the Internet, but in that case you might need to do it weeks in advance. Or you go there very early in the morning, before it is actually open, wait in line and get your appointment before they run out of numbers.

 

DAY 1: Alhambra, Granada
25. OCTOBER 2008

(click on the “TOVÁBB” link below to read the full post)

We opted for the latter one so we started one day earlier, reserved two nights at a hostel and got there Friday night for the big Sunday tour. The place is truly epic, showing you a much more sensitive time when moors ruled much of Spain, the southern part which they called “Al-Andalus”. Alhambra is a testament to their splendor, and latter ages fortunately didn’t ruin the sights, but added to it without meddling too much into the original architecture.

The architecture, which is called mudéjar in Spanish and is a mixture of arabian and visigoth and iberian motifs. Seeing the Alhambra does take at least a day, going to the limited admittance places first then sleeping like a baby at night to discover the rest. You can actually imagine not only that people could live in this magical place but you can actually imagine yourself living there.

From Alhambra

We had one full day, slept like babies, though and next day we moved on.

 

DAY 2: White Villages, Wild West
26. OCTOBER 2008

This is where things started to not go according to plan, but in a good way… for a while, anyway. Susana, Cseper’s colleague mentioned some white villages near Granada, which she said were a must see. In retrospect she must have been talking about the Pueblas Blancas, the chain of frontier towns around Cádiz, between Sevilla and the sea.

We “accidentally” found an other set of white villages, called Las Alpujarras, which are along the southern slopes of the Sierra Nevada, also moorish in origin but more agricultural villages than frontier towns. They start some 30 kilometers south-southeast from Granada, and like pearls on a necklace, spot the winding road to the east. It was a hoot to drive through that part in our small citycar, which even packed full, made all the twists and turns fun to go through, while enjoying the staggering view behind every corner.

It is not a long stretch of road, but we managed to stop almost every 5-10 minutes to take pictures. Finally we did reach Trevélez, the highest of the little towns, full of French tourists at that time, which, according to the signs is abundant with hospitality, and ham… and carpets… lots of them. And you can also buy chestnut jam (which we did).

From Alpujarras

Then came the interesting part: Trevélez was at the corner of a long and deep valley, at the meeting point of two mountains. We continued along the road on the other side and surprisingly soon enough we reached a whole new fauna, where rocks were frequent, trees got rare and smaller, and we could see low hills rolling in the distance.

The GPS suggested we will run out of concrete soon, but I didn’t believe it. Soon enough though, at a highway overpass the road ceased to exist and we had to dodge construction vehicles along the not yet existent highway. At some points we were not sure if the road under the wheels was still concrete or dirt. According to the GPS we were right on track, and apparently service roads are included in the map of Europe. We drove long miles on agricultural service roads used by trucks, snaking between plantations nestled between the low hills at the southeast rim of the Sierra Nevada.

It was a charming road in a sense, we couldn’t stop grinning, especially when the occasionalcar passed us, possibly wondering how a small car with a Hungarian license plate got there. We were right where we wanted to be the GPS told us to be. The orchards and hothouses looked peaceful enough against the red soil, and eventually we got to a proper road…

…which was closed down for that particular Sunday afternoon. We had to take a 50 kilometer detour, which was actually annoying, because I was planning to make up for the time lost with taking picture of every curve on the road by doing a little sporty driving. Not a chance.

Not only that but around El Ejido we apparently entered the planet of hothouses. All along the flat plains, to the sea, it was an ocean of hothouses covering every inch of earth. It was an out of this world sight, freaking us out a little bit, although we jokingly agreed that this must be the supply of all the fruit juices in all the supermarkets in all of Europe.

Eventually we did make it to our destination, a small town called Tabernas, some 15 kms north of Almería, which is proper Sergio Leone Country. He shot all his famous spaghetti westerns in this area, and some of the movie sets are still there, and they actually use it occasionally.

For a filmgeek like me this is actually Holy Ground. One of the first things on my wishlist since moving to Spain was to visit this place. And here we were…

You can walk right into the villages that Clint Eastwood prowled decades ago, and you even get a little stunt show. Because we lost a lot of time and it was getting late, we didn’t have a chance to explore the rest of the countryside and find the locations they used for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, for example.

From Tabernas

DAY 3: Lost…
27. OCTOBER 2008

From Almeria-Malaga

We slept in Almería, and we were debating if we should discover the Alcázar in the city or hunt for the movie locations, or just simply move along. Not realizing it was a Monday, we went up to the fortress, found it closed and in the meantime, managed to leave my backpack on a bench. Two local boys on a motorcycle found it, the only problem was they just drove away with it. An old man saw the whole thing. We didn’t. My backpack had my laptop in it, including some 600 pictures, most of them from Alhambra. It was a painful loss, as Alhambra is really gorgeous and those captured moments I cannot get back. Of course I wasn’t happy about losing the whole laptop, but it was already old and didn’t worth much in hard cash, and the only irreplacable things were the pictures. The backpack on the other hand was a sturdy, trustworthy thing, I bought it especially for the laptop, and in this sense it represented more value.

We of course reported the whole thing to the police in our terrible caveman Spanish, the first time we really had to use Spanish in an important situation. It must have been pathetic and I’m afraid our Spanish didn’t improve since then, but we managed to explain everything and file a report. We had to buy a new battery charger for the camera and a memory card (PS2), too in hope of recovering some pictures from the first one.

We continued off in a foul mood towards Malaga, and found a hostel to sleep in for the night before deciding where to go next.

(to be continued)