A Travel Blog
We spent five weeks in Spain in late 2017, including a month in Seville and a week in Granada. We also took day trips to Córdoba and the Pueblos Blancos.
On our last full day in Granada we hiked up to Sacromonte, the more remote eastern portion of Granada’s Albaicín neighbourhood.
The walk took us about an hour and the views became surprisingly rugged and rural quite soon after leaving the bustle of the Carrera del Darro area.
We visited several historic churches while in Spain but the Basilica de San Juan de Dios in Granada was easily the most astonishing and, in some ways, horrifying.
El Bañuelo are historic Arab public baths in Granada that date to the 11th Century.
The Bañuelo are now located beneath a nondescript house along the Carrera del Darro. From inside the house’s central courtyard we entered the baths themselves through a low door.
One of the smaller sights we visited in Granada was the Carmen de Max Moreau, a traditional house high in the Albaicín that was the former home and studio of Belgium-born painter Max Moreau.
Moreau lived in this house for the last 30 years of his life, until his death in 1992. He left the house to the city of Granada and it was opened to the public as a free museum in 1998.
Granada’s main draw is the Alhambra, a sprawling complex of palaces, gardens and towers that loom over the city.
Construction began in 889, on top of older Roman fortifications, but most of the palaces were built during the 12th and 13th centuries by the Emirate of Granada, the series of Muslim Emirs and Sultans who ruled the city at that time.
Near our hotel in Granada there’s a famous narrow street called Calle Calderería Nueva. It’s often described as a Moroccan souk, and having visited the medinas in Fes and Meknes and I can confirm that it does have a superficially similar vibe, though it’s cleaner and targeted solely at visitors and not locals.
The street makes for a colourful and interesting walk, at least the first few times.
Sunday was forecast to be the sunniest and warmest day for a while, so we took advantage and spent most of it trudging the knee-punishing hills of Granada’s Albaicín neighbourhood.
The streets immediately around our hotel — including the ones we use to get down to what I call “civilization” — are ludicrously scenic and we still can’t walk them without taking numerous photographs.
The Darro River runs between the hills of Granada’s Albaicín neighbourhood and the towering Alhambra complex. Along the banks there is a very scenic street known as the Carrera del Darro (Road of Gold in the original Latin).
The stone-walled Carrera runs along the left bank of the river. It’s lined with small shops, restaurants, and historic buildings. Stone bridges cross the river at several points.
After three hours on a pretty comfortable ALSA bus, we arrived in Granada early on a cloudy Saturday afternoon.
We took a taxi from the bus station up into the Albaicín neighbourhood where our hotel is located. Like Alfama in Lisbon and the Judería in Córdoba it’s a neighbourhood of steep hills and impossibly narrow winding cobblestone streets.