Bill's Blog

Andalucia

Andalucia is a large province in the south of Spain. All the cities are beautiful and tinged with a strong Moorish influence seen in its architecture.

Saturday and Sunday we were in Seville. I found it to be the most charming of the large cities that we have visited. The streets are so narrow, and still little cars passed down them. The cathedral was extremely beautiful, both inside and out. It seemed there was a church every two blocks. Not only did we see structures built hundreds of years ago, we saw a wonderful 20th century structure, the Plaza Espania. It was built 90 years ago for huge exposition. Check out my photos of the plaza. We also found a wonderful plaza called Alameda de Hercules. It is several hundred meters long and about 200 meters wide. We found families and friends enjoying the late afternoon sun, having a drink and a bite to eat.

Monday we went to Jerez de la Frontera, where we spent the day exploring the old city. We saw churches, a castle and monuments. In the evening we when to the home of our couchsurfing hosts, Paulo and Elena. They are wonderful people. We went out for a bite to eat and talked late into the evening.

On Tuesday we visited Cadiz. This is one of the oldest city in europe. It was a nice city to wander through with wide streets and many plazas. We enjoyed it a lot.

Wednesday, we drove along the coast, stopping in in a couple of towns and once to look at the beach. Our first destination was Vejer de la Frontera. This is one of the more beautiful hilltop white villages. They are called white, because all the homes are white washed. From a distance the the white buildings can be quite a sight. We stopped to look at all the old buildings. From Vejer we traveled to Arcos de la Frontera. It is on a higher hilltop and was even more striking than Verjer.

We drove to Ronda and found a hotel. Ronda is known because it is built on a 200-foot high rock. Through the middle of the rock, there is a gorge. The old bridges that cross it are beautiful. The surrounding countryside is easy to see from the top of the rock. There are a number of sites in the town. It seems that there are so many tourists here, that they have taken to asking an entrance fee into everything, even the churches. We kind of expect the locals to exploit their popular location, but charging to go into a fairly ordinary church seems a bit over the top.

Granada turned out to be not a nice as we had hoped. We found an an excellent pension on Friday. Unfortunately they could only provide a room of one night, once again we were caught be a holiday weekend. We left to see about tickets to Alhambra. Alhambra is a fantastic castle founded abound 1100 by the Moors. It was surrendered to the Christians in 1392, who continued to use in for another 200 years. Tickets can be purchased online. But none we available for us on Saturday. We discovered that the only way to get the tickets was to arrive before 8:00 AM on Saturday. With this knowledge we continued to explore the city.

On Saturday, we were up early and made our way to the fortress and its palaces. We waited two hours to buy our tickets. Then we spent hours exploring the gardens and buildings of the fortress. Finally we were able to see the palaces of the Moorish sultans of Granada. They were simply fantastic. We

We left Granada on Saturday and stopped at a guesthouse out in the countryside. On Sunday we drove along the eastern coast to Altea. The most striking thing about the drive was the tremendous amount of construction that had taken place during the past ten years. Like the USA, thousands of new condos sit empty and unsold and thousands more condos were started but never finished.

From here we are moving north to Valencia and Barcelona.

Rainbow at the Altea Beach

Posted by bill at November 1, 2010 12:35 PM