TraveLog - Granada

We landed at Malaga airport, where we rented a car. It took us about 2 hours to reach Granada - just quietly, seeing some landscape from one side and from the other. We stayed at Hospes Palacio de los Patos, which is maybe not exactly Burj al-Arab, but it's ok too. The hotel is located in a 19th-century palace, surrunded by small but cosy grounds. The swans in front of it rather don't fit my concept of a 5-stars hotel, but the rest is very much ok, as you can see on the pic.


The next day, evidently, we got up early to reach Alhambra. I think it was a good idea to have reserved the ticets online. The file to the normal ticket office was not so so long, but it's better to be on the safe side and to be sure we would be able to enter the palace. We reach the Generalife at 9 o'clock, but it was just the right time to see it all at ease before the closing time at 2 pm. But I confess that the idea of returning to Alhambra at 10 pm for "visita nocturna" was 100% silly. There was no special illumination nor nothing, it was just visiting Alhambra in the darkness - not suggestive, not romantic, nothing special of any kind... Better just to see it normally, by day.

The whole architectonical compound as we can see it nowadays is in fact composed by two palaces. It's hard to imagine two more contrasting buildings, and at the same time better explanation of the difference between being Muslim and being Christian. It means not only two different religions, but also two different lifestyles. As you can see on the pics, there is a gap between the sensual style of the Nasride palace and the massive building of Charles V.


In the Christian palace there are two museums. One of them (Museo de Bellas Artes) is just a current institution of the kind; except two or three bodegones I didn't find nothing particularily attractive in it. The other, the proper museum of Alhambra, is in my opinion much more interesting. The clue of the exibition is a large piece of ceramics with the image of gazelle, used as a kind of oficial symbol for the whole Alhambra.

Finally, there is the Nasride palace itself. It's hard to find a new perspective in a monument so often explored by the photographers, but nevertheless I would like to share some of my images.



After Alhambra, we went to another obvious part of Granada, the Albaicin. At the hotel they suggested us a restaurant on the top of the hill just opposite to Alhambra, in Mirador de San Nicolas. The restaurant, called Estrellas de San Nicolas, was indeed a very good one, not only for the view. We ate an excellent dish of codfish and a confit de pato, which indeed can be classified as sophisticated, and then the piononos, typical cream-filled cakes from Granada region.

The next step is of course the Cathedral, with the royal mausoleum. The Catholic Kings, Fernando and Isabel, are burried in the place of their utmost victory. The museum adjactent to the Cathedral contains not only their grave monument in finely sculpted marble but also an interesting and manifold exposition, with some splendid paintings of Dirk Bouts and Roger van der Waden. In the corner there are also some personal objects belonging to Isabel, and I was surprised to see she used as rosary still quite a Muslim kind of mesbaha.