The Remainder of Spain

I last wrote when I was in Seville, the day afterwards we went to the Roman Ruins at Italica which were very ruined, but a pretty large amphitheatre remains (picture below). We then took the high speed train to Cordoba – half the time of the normal train, free headsets, a movie, and even a magazine that you could order stuff from.

The primary attraction of Cordoba is a massive mosque (right) - originally the most important Islamic monument after Mecca - that had a cathedral built in the middle of it when the Moors were driven out of Spain. I had read about this a number of years back but it was hard to appreciate what the books meant until we went there. Much of the structure of the original mosque remains and we walked around much of it – and aside of many catholic ante-chapels around the sides it didn’t seem that striking. Then having toured almost the whole building we came in to the cathedral which really was right in the middle of the mosque. The mosque is one storey high, but they broke the roof to make the double height cathedral, which when you are seated in it, seems like a normal highly decorated catholic cathedral, if it weren’t that if you looked our of the sides the surrounding space is filled with Moorish arches. On our second day in Cordoba we went to a ruined Moorish palace complex (below) just outside of the city which was also very impressive.

From Cordoba we got the bus to Granada where we hired a car to drive to the Sierra Nevada Mountains. We stayed in a village very high up and paid the extra four euros to get a hotel room with stunning views (the picture below was the view from our balcony). On the drive there we went through a two described by the Rough Guide as being a popular area for hippies to move to. Whilst driving through the town I did have to avoid a few people walking down the middle of the road, try to ignore “the man with more hair than clothes”, however it was all tipped off whilst waiting at a red traffic light to leave the town. The driver from the car in front lept out, ran around the back of his car, started drinking water from the ornamental fountain by the road (with a bird sitting in it) then ran back to his car and drove off.

After a fun few days in the Mountains we returned to Granada where the highlight was a visit to the Alhambra on our final day there. Then we had our journey back, alas with Ryanair to Stansted, so the plane was late, we had to wait an hour for our baggage, therefore missing the last direct bus to Oxford. Thus after our scheduled landing in Stansted at 23:50 we got back to Oxford at 5:45AM. Boo. Ryanair are also in my bad books for charging us for insurance we didn’t ask for and then refusing to refund it – four letters of complaint so far….

Since Spain I have been at home with all the family as Kate, Obi, and Thea are visiting from Melbourne at the moment. It’s really fantastic to see them and Thea is really close to walking now. Now I’m back in Oxford trying to do some work to make up for my slacking off these last few weeks.

Cheers,

Ali