Granada - Day 2

Not much is open on Sundays in Spain, so we went for a lazy walk towards the Sacromonte, the old gypsy quarter of the city complete with currently inhabited cave dwellings. The walk ended up being much longer than we'd actually planned as we got a little lost, but it was certainly worth it.

View back towards Granada, the Alhambra is on the hill on the left

We thought this road would go somewhere, but it just kept taking us further away from Granada

Sierra Nevada

Now we're much further from Granada, you can just make out the Alhambra on the furthest hill. The trail we're on is a powerline access road that we used to get back

Gypsy cave dwellings

Granada - Day 1

Granada was much more to our taste. It had hills, so you could climb up out of the main city, and was generally much smaller and more manageable. Granada was the last Moorish stronghold in Spain, and that's easily seen in the architecture. Also the Alhambra, which is the lavishly decorated Moorish palace, is visible from almost any part of the city. We arrived in the afternoon, and decided to search for a place to stay up the really steep hill in the Moorish district. We didn't find anything, got pretty tired, but did get some good views of the rest of Granada:

The next morning we visited the Alhambra:

View from the Alcazaba, the old fort in the Alhambra. The building in the sun in the distance and the hills behind are where we went hiking the following day.

In the Palacio Nazaries, the lavish palace that the Alhambra is famous for

Every wall was carved this elaborately, and it's not a small place

View from the Generalife, the summer palace and gardens adjacent to the Alhambra

Generalife

Later we walked up into the Albaicin (the older part of town) to watch the sunset.

View of the Alhambra

"House of Tradition and Translation"

Sevilla

We travelled to two cities last week, Sevilla and Granada. We spent two nights in Sevilla, then moved on to Granada and stayed there for four nights. Sevilla was a bit large for us, and there wasn't all that much to see. Still some pretty sights though, and the largest church in the world!

Cathedral at night

Bells in the cathedral tower, which was originally the minaret of the mosque that stood on this site

The tower that we climbed up

Plaza de Espana, where the 1929 Fair of the Americas was supposed to be held. The Great Depression messed that up.

Torre del Oro, Tower of Gold. Used to store the gold that was brought back from the New World.