Andalusia Journal 2004
Córdoba & Granada
12/4
The next morning we got up pretty early and drove off to Córdoba. On the way we drove through a little town called La Carlota, which was founded after the expulsion of the Moors and Jews from Spain, as a way of repopulating Andalusia with German and Swiss colonists. Ultimately, most left (expelled for being protestant, or giving up on working the difficult Andalucian soil), but what remains is an unusually organized old town, arranged on a grid.
Córdoba itself is another mid-sized Spanish city that is very difficult to navigate by car in its older sections. However, the older section features a gem of Moorish architecture in Spain, the mezquita (mosque). On the site of a Roman temple, the Visigoths built a Christian church; on the same location, the Moors built a large mosque, which was expanded twice. Later, post reconquest, a church was built in the middle of the mosque, which is a pity although it too is beautiful. Most of the interior of the mezquita is a forest of red and white striped double arches – walking around in there is quite an amazing experience.
Then we walked in the Judería, which is a very old old part of town, and it used to be the Jewish quarter (pre-expulsion). There is an old synagogue there (the oldest in Spain, though it hasn't been active for years), which I thought would be nice to see. However, on the way there we stopped for sandwiches (serrano ham for me, chorizo for Eric and Susanne) and shopping in one store after another, and by the time we reached "la sinagoga", it had closed for siesta time.
So we got ourselves a hotel for the night (the very cheap Hostal Seneca, which has a nice central patio), and moved the car closer to bring our bags in. We also stopped for tea in a Moroccan-style tea house in a beautiful patio that had been covered over.
Then we went to the synagogue, which was beautiful and interesting – it's a very small space, more of less a cube, with mudejar-style decoration and Hebrew lettering.
Then we decided we wanted to escape the tourist area and see some of the "real city", which we'd driven through while trying to park. We might even find Susanne a bag.
We set off on foot out of the old section and into a newer section (still quite old by U.S. standards) of wide pedestrian malls and shopping. However, everything seemed a little dead. Was it too early?
We got hungry and stopped in little bar to get more food: this time tuna empanadas for Eric and Susanne and a chorizo bocadillo for me. We took our food to a little park in the middle of a broad boulevard, by a duck pond. The duck pond was pretty interesting, but more alarming was the vast flock of doves loitering around. They were mostly white, but otherwise just like pigeons elsewhere. When we sat, they began to converge on us, assuming we would feed them – an alarming sight even if you've never seen "The Birds". They lost interest in us quickly, though. (We only fed one, at the end of our snack: we gave a chunk of bread to a single lame pigeon we felt bad for.) There was a middle-aged woman there who was really freaked out by the pigeons – she sat with her mother and daughter, and when the doves approached she lept up and skittered back behind the park bench. Another family (mother, father, child) had come armed with food and a camera to take pictures of themselves with the doves. After eating, we wandered around among the doves, feeling a little more sanguine. I tried holding an arm out as if I were offering food, and a dove lighted on it, and then another came, though they left pretty quickly. Susanne decided to take a picture, and managed to snap it just as I was freaking out over the number of doves descending on my arm.
We left the park and returned to the shopping area, which was bustling now that the evening paseo had begun. We stopped in a few stores but didn't buy anything, and ultimately ended up near another part of the boulevard where there was a sort of Christmas fair: a long tent set up with shops inside. We walked the length of it, which was fun, but they didn't sell anything you couldn't buy in the U. S. (There were a lot of posters of Bob Marley, actually.)
So we decided to go to dinner, stopping at the hostal on the way. We wanted to go to a restaurant that sounded very promising: a friendly family-run affair. However, when we got there it was closed – it looked shut down, in fact.
So we tried another place that was recommended – it went against our rule of not going to fancy restaurants, but it sounded really good so we went anyway.
It was called El Churrasco, and was supposed to be one of the best places in the Judería. It was in fact very good. We began our meal by sharing patatas a lo pobre (potatoes and scrambled egg, basically, but very delicious). Eric and I started with salads (mixta for me, lechuga, i.e. lettuce only, for Eric), and then both had the churrasco cordobesa con salsas arabes – a grilled pork loin with two arab-style sauces: a spicier red one and a sweeter green one. Susanne's main course was a baby pork shoulder with a very long complicated name which I didn't write down – something along the lines of petilla de icheron a la severoniana etc etc. Whatever the name, it was very good. We drank a nice reserva Rioja with dinner. For dessert, Eric had something called leche frita, which literally means fried milk, and was in fact a slab of thick custard, fried, with ice cream on the side. It was very good. Susanne had a flan which was, I think, good. I had the most interesting desert: baked apple with cinnamon and quince rosemary honey. I think "rosemary honey" meant that the bees had fed on rosemary flowers, because it did not taste of rosemary, nor quince especially, either. It was very good nonetheless.
We walked back to our very cheap hotel and turned in. Eric was concerned about having a toilet so far down the hall, and I was concerned the room would be cold, but neither ended up being a problem, and we slept OK (except we all heard each other snore at some point over the night).
12/5
While the room wasn't too cold in the morning, the rest of the hotel was quite chilly. It was too cold to have breakfast in the beautiful open-air patio, so instead we ate in a tiny room off the patio. Breakfast was basic but decent.
We returned to the car and drove off for Montilla and Baena. On the way, on a whim, we stopped at a little town known for a particular kind of pottery. It ended up not being very interesting, and we almost didn't get out of the car. We wandered through the local market (clothes, tools, etc.), and then walked into a pottery studio – which was cute but not very interesting. By the market we saw another place with, I thought, very tacky metallicized pots.
On to Montilla. In Montilla we went to Alvear, a big montilla manufacturer in the center of town. We asked about a tour, but there was only one tour and it was going to be in Spanish for a group of students. We figured a montilla tour wouldn't be very different from a sherry tour or a manzanilla tour, and the more interesting thing was the degustación afterward, so we walked around the complex to the store to have a degustación.
Once again we tried three types: fino, pale cream, and pedro ximínez. In Montilla, unlike with sherry or manzanilla, all wines are made with the pedro ximínez grape. The higher sugar level of the grape means that they don't need to add brandy to raise the alcohol level – as I understand it, anyway. If we'd been on the tour I might know more.
Anyway, the montilla was delicious, and the fino and pale cream were remarkably like their sherry equivalents.
Eric and I bought half bottles of the fino and the cream, as well as a pedro ximínez (but not the same pedro ximínez we tasted). We also bought a bottle of pedro ximínez vinegar, which is very much like a sherry vinegar but a little mellower and sweeter. When we paid, we were given two tiny bottles of montilla vinegar, of a less sweet variety. Susanne made similar purchases and also got a tiny souvenir bottle of vinegar.
Then we left for Baena, where the best olive oil in the world is made at Nuñez de Prado. They have a type of olive oil they call Flor de Aceite, flower of oil, which is the oil which naturally runs off the fresh-picked olives before they are crushed. After collecting the flor, they crush the olives lightly for the extra virgin olive oil.
We hadn't called ahead for a tour (though we nearly did), so we couldn't get a guided tour – instead, we had a sort of self-guided tour. It was nice – and the very old bodega, where the olive oil is stored in half-submerged clay pots, was very cool.
We bought 6 bottles – a case. Susanne bought 3. (After we left, we all thought we should have bought more – it was pretty cheap, and in the US the same stuff is quite expensive when you can find it.)
We had lunch in a local restaurant/café, called El Primero de la Mañana. One of the appeals of this restaurant was it advertised out front gazpacho – typical Andalucian food, one of my favorites, but not typically served in December. We all had menús : Susanne and I had gazpacho and stewed chicken – the gazpacho was tasty but with less green pepper than I usually make, and the chicken was simple and delicious, the sort of food that fills in the cracks; Eric had sopa de mariscos & fried boquerones.
Then we drove to Granada. Granada is near the Sierra Nevada, which are covered in snow 3/4 of the year – it was rather like having the alps rising up in the middle of sun-baked Andalucía.
Like so many Spanish towns, it is nearly impossible to navigate the streets of Granada, especially as you near the historic center. Part of the problem is the maps in our guidebooks, which never indicate which streets are off-limits to cars. Another problem was that the main drag through town was temporarily closed to traffic, and a police officer kept shunting us back where we'd come from. So after driving around and around we surrendered and parked underground at a plaza.
In order not to walk all over town looking for lodging, I bought a phone card (for pay phones) and called around to hotels.
Everywhere we called, they said "tonight, yes, tomorrow, no". At the Hostal Niza (nearby) the very nice woman there told me, in Spanish, "tonight, yes, tomorrow, no," and then switched to perfect English to say "and you won't find it anywhere."
It turned out Friday was Dia de la Constitución, a big national holiday, and hordes of Spaniards were descending on Granada because of its proximity to skiing in the Sierra Nevada.
The hostess was very funny–she seemed to be, actually, German-speaking, but she counted to herself in French. She had the sort of accent that all Europeans fluent in English have. She lead us to our room (a 2-room 4-bed suite w/ facilities), and complained about the smell of stale smoke (present in every hotel room so far), and said "they're not supposed to do it, but they all do, and" – voice dropped – "the Spaniards are the worst." (And she was right – Spaniards, or at least Andalusians, smoke, literally, everywhere.) Another gem: "Talk to my husband in the morning, maybe there will be a cancellation. My husband thinks he speaks English, but..."
We asked for a recommendation for dinner, and she sent us to Las Seis Peniques. (Her first recommendation was the buffet at another local hotel, which she hadn't been to, but other guests had, and they had liked it. I said I would never get Eric to a buffet, and she said "but these people were French, and you know how hard they are to please.")
Las Seis Peniques was a sort of family-style place. Our waitress may or may not have been a gypsy. She was selling tickets at the next able to a flamenco show in the gypsy quarter, and told them to ask for so-and-so, her cousin. Also, Susanne had the idea that she was asking her colleagues about some Spanish words. (I had been considering trying to go to a flamenco show, but the guidebooks seemed to say they were almost all tourist tripe, and ultimately I decided I should have gone in Seville, and some other day I would.)
Dinner began with a free house aperitif – something you can't buy anywhere, which doesn't have a name. It was tasty, and I might have bought a bottle if it had been available.
I ate melón con jamón first, which I had been wanting for a day or so. For a main dish I had solomillo rosini, at the waitress's recommendation because it was more special – it was just OK (I am writing this up from notes days later, and unfortunately I don't recall exactly what it was. It was a cut of pork with a sort of sweet sauce with maybe dates and mushrooms, or something along those lines. The sauce was actually OK, but the meat was more lackluster, and I'd made the mistake of ordering it medium-rare-ish, which always freaks me out with pork products).
Eric had sopa de ajo to begin, and for a main dish, the traditional rabo de toro, oxtail. He liked it a lot, but I didn't care for the marrowy taste.
Susanne just had one dish, a fried egg covered by sautéed favas and ham.
Just as we'd had a round of aperitifs (in shot glasses), we had a round of digestifs. These were not liquor, but apparently pomegranate juice. (Granada means pomegranate, which could be a coincidence, I'm not sure – one option for dinner I had considered was pork "granadine", in pomegranate sauce.)
We didn't have desert there, preferring to look for ice cream. When we didn't find any, we went back to the hotel and went to bed.
12/6
Rather than trying to stay another night, we decided to move on – we checked out early and left our bags behind the front desk, to go visit the Alhambra.
The town was still mostly asleep (it was 8-something on a holiday), but we found one bar where we could buy breakfast. It was pretty crowded. We had sort of the usual: coffee or chocolate with tostadas. They offered tostadas with ham, so Susanne and I had those, for the first time since Seville.
The Alhambra is at the top of a very large hill, and we set off to hike up rather than taking a cab (which Susanne would have preferred). We arrived , after much pausing a breathing, and bought tickets. It was not as crowded as we had feared, though there were certainly a lot of people – significantly, unlike at other tourist destinations, we were surrounded not by foreign tourists, but by Spanish tourists.
Admission to the Alhambra buys you admission to the Nasrid palaces at a specific time, and the rest you can look at at your leisure. The Nasrid palaces are at the far end of the Alhambra, so in fact you more or less have to head straight there, dawdling only very little.
The Nasrids were the Moorish tribe who held Granada after the rest of Andalucia had been reconquered by the Castilians. The palace is a true Moorish marvel, not mudejár, although it was altered later by the Spanish to suit their lifestyle. The walls, ceilings, and patios are adorned with amazingly intricate flourishes, lattices, and calligraphy. The patios also feature simple and beautiful pools and fountains – often the pools were fed at one or both ends by a fountain in the shaped of a straight spout that was so elegant and clean it would have fit well into modern architecture.
At the end of the palaces there are gardens, though it wasn't quite the time of year to view them. In fact, it was quite cold – in the fifties, but warmish in direct sun. I thought, it may be this temperature right now in Chicago, only in Chicago I wouldn't be standing outside.
The palaces rather wiped us out, and we gave only a cursory look to the rest: the Carlos V (I think) palace, a curious renaissance palace, square outside with a circular courtyard, which had been unfinished until this century; the Alcazár (again, I think), a triangular three-towered citadel at the end of the Alhambra; and the Generalife, a former royal hunting estate turned public gardens. The Generalife was being repaired, and we apparently couldn't enter anything past the first courtyard (though in fact, judging from a map we looked at later, we could have seen more if we had tried going around the building – but we were in the mood to move on.
We descended the hill, which was not as hard as going up, but still pretty hard.
We had lunch at a bar near the hotel – it was almost packed, but it was early yet, so we got the last available table. Perfect! We forgot the name of the place almost immediately – it began with a "C" and ended "tá". It was very good – for that sort of standard bar food/tapas.
First they brought us a complimentary selection of sliced sausages, which were all very tasty. Then I had a tomato salad with garlic and parsley (very good even off-season), followed by a ali-oli stuffed potato (yummy!), which was a baked potato stuffed with boiled ham and olives, with aïoli sauce (called ali-oli in Spanish). Eric had scrambled eggs with serrano ham and green beans (also yummy). Susanne had a nice tortilla de patatas.
Then we got our bags, bought some ice cream on the way to the car (it wasn't good), and then drove off, to go to Antequera.