Paradors in Spain - II

I: Sevilla

Sun, 5 Nov 2006 16:18:02 -0800

Sevilla

It was just past noon when our plane landed in Sevilla. The city bus we took to the center of town was full of young people. Since we have been senior citizens for some time now, everyone else is young. Most of the older travelers from the plane seem to prefer the comfort of taxis to get to town. From the Puerta de Jerez, the end of the bus line, to Hotel Alminar was about half a mile, which we walked past lots of torn-up streets because they were building an underground line there.

Hotel Alminar, at Alvarez Quintero 52, was just a few hundred yards from the Cathedral and the Giralda, the very heart of Sevilla. It was a small, but modern hotel, superbly located in the center of town and we had a nice-sized, well-lit room on the second floor for €110/night. They had larger rooms on the third floor for €135/night. But it was not worth the extra money. The staff was extremely nice and helpful. Tried my best to speak Spanish with them, but they actually spoke very good English. We could use the hotel’s laptop to access the internet for a nominal fee. By the way, there was no parador in Sevilla.

Sevilla is the artistic, cultural and financial capital of southern Spain. It is the capital of Andalucia. The Guadalquivir river flows through the city and forms a boundary of the old city. The newer, outside areas of Sevilla are just like many other large cities; nondescript, sprawling, suburban areas dotted with occasional big office buildings built from a template from their local WalMart store, and devoid of any character. But the old downtown was interesting; comprising of graceful old buildings and monuments, and many narrow one-way streets. It is easy to get stuck there if you drive a car, which befell my brother Andy, when he was there a few years ago.

left: View of the Guadalquivir river. Old Sevilla is on the left. The tower on the left in the distance is the Torre del Oro, built by the Almohad dynasty as watchtower and part of the defensive barrier on the river.

The tapas of Spain

To go to Spain is to enjoy their tapas, the small appetizers covering edibles ranging from mundane to the exotic. They are served on small plates, doled out as a small portion from a larger container, but sometimes specially prepared as such. This is important travel advice. If you want a larger portion you order a raccione. Half of that is a medio raccione. The tapa is the smallest serving. The size of the serving depends on where you order the tapa. How more impressive the establishment, the smaller the tapa. How smaller the town, the bigger the servings. In some small towns a tapa is almost a full meal in itself.

We had some tapas at Duplex, just a block away from the hotel, because everything else was closed for the afternoon siesta. The quality was so-so. But in the late evening we had tapas at the Cerveceria La Giralda on the Calle de Mateos Gago. This place is recommended in most tour books and the quality and the assortment of their tapas is indeed mouthwatering. This is by far one of the best tapas places we have enjoyed. At around € 2.50 each, the tapas were very reasonably priced; certainly after coming from London. Try their Casuela Tio Pepe. A major problem is that the place is always full, also because in Spain people like to linger at the tables after their meals.

Another tapa place I would recommend is the Vinera de San Telmo, within walking distance from Los Gallos. It is a small place facing the Pasco de Catalina de Ribera park. They serve excellent tapas and a very good Rioja wine. The owner was a real Porteño from Buenos Aires. It was a place definitely worth visiting. Rather disappointing was the Tapas restaurant of Robles, just across Robles proper, which was presumably one of the best restaurants in Sevilla. The tapas were OK, but certainly not comparable to those of the Cerveceria La Giralda.

Talking about Robles, we had dinner there one evening. They had outdoor tables on the covered sidewalk just fifty yards or so from our hotel. They pride themselves on having a very fine gastronomical cuisine and they intimate that the king and queen of Spain dine there if they are in Sevilla. Maybe the royal couple were there one time only and decided that was enough. We had high expectations, and we were not wrong about their prices. But the food was disappointing and the service was desultory. Avoid Robles and stay with the Cerveceria la Giralda.

At one time we also had lunch in a small bodega on the Calle Alfonso XII. The 3-course daily special was, I believe, €5. Beans with ham was the first course, broiled sardines was the second course. It was pretty tasty too; these two dishes were also some of the local specialties of the region. Eating in these small bodegas are fun, although they can be very full at lunchtime.

Old Sevilla boasts many beautiful buildings. The Casa de Pilatos is a small mudejar-style palace started by a rich merchant around 1521 and subsequently expanded by his heirs. The Mudejar style is a blend of Moorish and Gothic architecture, developed primarily for Jewish and Christian patrons, who wanted to assimilate Moorish elements in their buildings. There was a nice large open courtyard –there were a lot of nice courtyards in southern Spain— Greek and Roman sculptures, arcades, gardens, and walls tiled with beautifully azulejos, the cobalt blue hand-painted ceramic tiles. There is a garden lush with fountains, exotic plants and flowers in resplendent colors.

right: The main courtyard of the Casa de Pilatos

The top floor has more furniture and is more livable, decorated with paintings of the 16th-17th century, including one real Goya. The present owners live in a wing of the palace.

left: The intricately decorated coffered ceiling in one of the rooms

Even though this was a private residence, the owners did spend money on artisans to make the place look nice. The coffered ceiling on the left is an example of the many small touches.

We also had a look at the Hotel Alfonso XIII, a neoclassical palace. It had been refurbished as a top-end hotel for the 1995 exhibition, opulently decorated with intricate tiles and carvings, and other ornate architectural touches of the style of that period. As befitting their self-appointed status, the staff comports itself with dignity and sang-froid bordering on the hautain, as befitting a real 5 star hotel. You have to make an impression on the tourists looking around the corridors for the bathrooms. It is very well located on the fringe of the old city.

right: The main courtyard of Hotel Alfonso XIII. The dining room is in the background.

One of the upscale stores in the hotel sells “genuine” artifacts from antiquity. For a few thousand dollars and more you can get pieces of Roman and Greek sculptures guaranteed to be hundreds or maybe even thousands of years old.

Adjacent to the hotel is the Faculty of Law of the University of Sevilla, awash with students running around and attending classes when we were there. But it used to be the site of the largest tobacco factory in Spain, where at one time hundreds of women worked there to roll cigars and cigarettes. It was here that the story of Carmen was spawned and one can easily imagine that in the now austere halls and courtyards a Carmen had once danced and flirted with Don José.

left: A courtyard in the Reales Alcázares. This used to be the area of the antechambers to the main reception hall.

The Reales Alcázares is rightfully rated as one of the ten top highlights of Andalucia. The oldest section of this castle complex dates from around 913, but successive rulers; Moors, Romans, and Catholic kings, have added, changed and improved the structures and the decorations. Particularly Pedro I, in the 14th century, added a lot to these buildings. The building is laid out as a maze of Moorish, renaissance, gothic and baroque styles.

right: There are intricate lattice works in the halls and doorways, superb tile-works on the walls, and beautifully laid-out courtyards.

The halls have superbly decorated ceilings. There are gardens, fountains, cypress-lined paths, palm trees and magnolia shrubs. The Salón de Embajadores is the most brilliant room of the complex, with a dazzling dome carved and gilded on the inside and inscribed in Arabic as having been constructed by craftsmen of Toledo and completed in 1366. The buildings have also been used in recent years for the weddings of the Royal Family of Spain.

The Cathedral of Sevilla

We devoted an afternoon to the Cathedral, the centerpiece of the city. In 1248, after some 500 years under the Moors, the city was re-conquered by the Christian forces who, paradoxically, threatened the Moorish inhabitants with massacre if they damaged any of the city’s magnificent edifices. On this site was the huge Almohad mosque but in 1401, the mouldering structure was demolished and the current church was built on that site. When it was finished about 100 years later it was, at that time, the largest Christian edifice in the world. It measures 415 feet by 270 feet, and the nave rises an astounding 140 feet. It is a rather rambling structure and it is impossible to get a good picture of the building unless from the air.

left: A partial view of the Cathedral of Sevilla.

The main altar of the Cathedral, in the Capilla Mayor, has as backdrop a 15th century Flemish retablo, which is also the world’s largest altarpiece. The 60 feet high work of art is made of wood, covered in gold-leaf, and decorated with 45 biblical scenes adorned with some 1000 polychrome figures, most of them around 10 inches high.

The main floor was really too cavernous for one church and inside this space is a smaller chapel building. As one can imagine, the building is huge, with a large number of halls adjacent to the main church area. These are meeting rooms, treasury rooms and some very simple and peaceful patios, where you can sit quietly to meditate on the foibles of life without disturbing the notables entombed in the walls.

left: In a quiet courtyard inside the Cathedral of Sevilla.

The catafalque of Columbus.

Inside the Cathedral, in a prominent location on the side, but still inside the church, is the tomb of Christopher Columbus. It is unusual that he is not buried in the earth, but the coffin is up in the air, in a catafalque born on the shoulders of the larger-than life statues of the kings of Castile, Leon, Navarre, and Aragon. Christopher Columbus was originally entombed, as he desired, in Santo Domingo, but when that island became independent of Spain, his remains were shipped to Cuba, which was still a Spanish colony at that time. But when Cuba became independent, his remains were then shipped to Sevilla, where he now rests. Both Santo Domingo as well as Cuba still claim to have his body. Only recent DNA tests established the identity of the small amount of remains found in the coffin as his, based on the similarity with the genes of his son and his brother, whose bodies have been entombed in Sevilla. But there may well be pieces of his body in those two other places.

left: The catafalque of Columbus on the shoulders of Castile and Leon

Adjacent to the Cathedral is the 45-m high Giralda tower, another landmark of Sevilla, the remains of the original Moorish mosque built between 1172 and 1195 on that location. It is an easy walk up a sloping ramp inside the tower. You make a 90 degree turn after every few meters and after every turn you have walked up (or down) 1 meter. The picture of the cathedral was made halfway up from this tower. Huge church bells are mounted in the top of the tower and the enjoyment of the nice views of the city from the top is slightly tempered because of the fear that these large bells could toll any moment, possibly pulverizing our eardrums in the process.

Somewhere we read that the Museo de Bellas Artes was the best Museum in Spain after the Prado. That was probably true some 50 years ago, but I suppose that write-up conveniently did not update this information. It is a nice museum but it is substantially less than the Guggenheim in Bilbao or the Museo Thyssen Bornemisza in Madrid. It is maybe comparable to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid.

This Museo is housed in a 17th century convent and their forte is their collection of paintings, focusing primarily on the Sevilla School of Zurbaran, Cano, Murillo, Cordero, and Valdéz Leal. The collection was interesting but rather disappointing because of our higher higher expectations; there was not even a single Velasquez. But entrance to the Museo on that particular day was free. And some of the paintings were real nice, as the one on the right.

right: Alonso Vàzquez (1540 - 1608) Sagrada Cena. Painting in the Museo de Bellas Artes.

One evening we spent enjoying a flamenco show in a the small Los Gallos theater, which seats not more than about 100 patrons. But the intimate surroundings did contribute to the atmosphere as the audience easily became involved with the magic of the surroundings. And the performers, sensing this, redoubled their efforts to put up a really spectacular performance. The cast was not large, three female dancers, 2 male dancers, one female singer, 2 guitarists, and 4 male singers/accompanists. There were actually quite a number of tourists in the audience, which is usually bad for the “duende”. the magic and chemistry between the artists and the aficionados. But it worked quite well that evening. Or maybe we were just to dense to miss the fine points of the flamenco.

left: Flamenco dancers at Los Gallos.

We were supposed to have left Sevilla the next day, but Khoon was sick, so we decided to stay another day at the Alminar Hotel. We cancelled our arrival in Ronda for that evening and we postponed the rental car pickup by one day. The staff of the hotel arranged for a doctor to visit Khoon and to be the interpreter. Which was good, because the doctor found out that Khoon had an elevated blood pressure for which he prescribed nitroglycerin. But he also found bronchitis. The doctor’s house call was only € 90, and the required antibiotics less than € 10.

The next morning we bade farewell to Mr. Francisco Maranjo, the very personable “adjunto director” of the hotel Alminar, and who also ran the desk that morning. We headed for the Estacion Santa Justa to pick up our rental car. The hotel had called a taxi and we found that these taxis charge a substantial premium for being called. We could just as easily have flagged a taxi from the street at this time of the day for much less money.

The process of getting the rental car was time-consuming, so we didn’t leave the station until around noon. We had a 5-door Lancia Musa, with 6-speed manual transmission, a 4-cylinder 1368 cc diesel engine, with about 22K miles on it. It was a 5-passenger boxy-looking car but it had a hatchback, so we could stow a lot of luggage in the back. Which we needed.

II: Granada

Sat, 4 Nov 2006 20:23:14 -0800

Granada.

In Granada we had, as expected, some trouble locating Hotel Inglaterra, where we had our reservations. But after driving through signs prohibiting the entry of local vehicles and going through the maze of small streets typical of the old inner cities of Spain, we finally did find the hotel where we had obtained a nice room for the off-season price of €79, breakfast and parking extra. The hotel was located at the Albaicin, the old Moorish quarter of Granada and the streets and the surroundings were just like in Morocco. There were lots of small stores selling stuff from Africa and there were many Arabs around. There were also many small restaurants with North African type menus. We had dinner at the Taberna Salinas, which served pretty good Moroccan food. Unfortunately it was already getting late after we finished dinner so we did not have any time to explore the Albaicin further or to go to a tea-shop to drink tea and sample the typical Moroccan sweets.

left: The Albaicin at night

In the early morning the next day we tried to have a look at the cathedral, which was just a block away and which housed the tombs of Ferdinand II and Isabella of Spain, the most powerful couple in the history of Spain. Their marriage brought together major portions of the country and they were also the ones who financed the first voyage of Columbus. But visiting hours for tourists started at 10:30 and it was only 9:30 a.m. But going in through a small side door, we found a mass in progress, which ended 10 minutes later and then we were all kicked out. So we didn’t see too much of the interior of the church.

From our rooms in the Hotel Inglaterra we could see the ramparts of the Alhambra less than a mile away up on a hill. But for us to get there with our car we had to drive through the crowded streets out of town again and then back via a separate road leading to the Alhambra complex. That was easily a 20 mile detour, and I think there is a public bus nearby the hotel Inglaterra which could have brought us to the Alhambra directly.

The Parador at the Alhambra.

At €250/night the Granada Parador at the Alhambra is the most expensive of all the paradors. The rooms were not much different than in the other paradors we had visited, and you had to make reservations months in advance to get a place. We were at the Alhambra parador at 11:30 a.m. and obtained the last parking place. But our rooms were not available until 1:30 p.m. Since Norma was a member of the Amigos de Paradores we were offered our free drinks and we were told we would get priority if a room became available. Which we rather doubted.

The Parador was originally part of a mosque and a small palace built between 1332 and 1354, which was later converted into a Franciscan convent. The interior has been converted in classical Arabic and Christian style with modern amenities. Another alternative to the Parador is the Alhambra Palace Hotel, also on the premises of the Alhambra, a 4 star establishment with lower rates than the Parador.

Maybe because the staff knew that it was the most desirable parador of the bunch, service was desultory and barely adequate, all the way from the reception to the servers at the restaurant and café. You could see that the staff really didn’t care. I had bought tickets for the Alhambra complex through the Internet several months earlier, but I still had to go to the ticket office to pick them up. And the ticket office was about half a mile away going down the hill and then going up another hill making it a one-mile roundtrip. There was a shortcut to get there, but you needed the entrance tickets to get there. Which you had to pick up first at the ticket office. From the ticket office back to the Parador you could not use the shortcut either, because then your ticket would be invalidated for a future entry into the Generalife complex.

One would assume that if you stayed at the parador at the Alhambra, you would be there because you wanted to visit the Alhambra. They could have the entrance tickets there for their guests instead of us having to walk all the way to the ticket office. When I broached this subject to the, they just shrugged.

right: The Court of the Lions in the Nazrid Palaces. Note the fine filigree work on the walls

The marvelous complex of buildings called the Alhambra was constructed in the 14th century by the Moorish rulers of the Emirate of Granada in al-Andalus. It is, of course, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the inspiration of many poems, songs, and ballads.

The site was actually started started in 1238. There are three complexes for which an entrance ticket is required; the Nazrid Palaces, the Alcazala fort, and the Generalife garden complex. The ticket is valid only for the day of issue and you can only get into each of these three areas once. They are extremely strict about this. To see all this requires a lot of footwork and a very good management of your time. If you have only time for one, by all means visit the Nazrid Palaces.

Our time slot to visit the Nazrid Palaces was 2:00 p.m. By regulating the flow of visitors everybody has a chance to enjoy the lovely splendor of the architecture. A lot has been written about the Alhambra, but the grace and elegance still strike one speechless with admiration. It is impossible to adequately describe the beauty of the the art displayed, especially the delicate lattice works of the arches and the ceilings throughout the buildings

Left: Detail of the arches in the Court of Lions.

The Court of the Lions is the heart of the Nazrid Palaces. It was roped off and visitors could only walk on the peripheral hallways. With so many visitors around, this arrangement allowed us to make pictures of the Court without the clutter of a zillion people all over the place. After several hundred years outside, the lions were getting chipped and looking a bit tired. Restorations are under progress to make them as they would have looked like originally. Somewhere I must still have a picture of me standing beside the lions taken in 1953 or so, when I was there for the first time. And in one of the halls we saw a plaque stating that Washington Irving spent time here at the turn of the 20th century writing his “Tales of the Alhambra”.

From there we walked to the Alcazala, the fort at the end of the Alhambra. The Alhambra in Granada was the last major Moorish bastion in Spain to fall to the Catholic Kings. That was in January of 1492; it was the year 777 of the Muslim calendar. The Moors had been in Spain more than 700 years..

We could walk on the ramparts and look at the fortifications and the foundations of the rooms, long ago destroyed, inside the walls.

right: The Alcazala fortress.

It was already late in the day when we walked to the Generalife with its fountains, huge immaculately manicured 8-10’ high hedges to form “walls” and “gates”, and terraced gardens. But when we tried to take the shortcut back to the Parador, it was already closed for the day. So that meant another half-mile detour down and then up.

left: A courtyard with fountains in the Generalife complex.

The Parador in Granada is convenient because it is located right in the middle of all this. Without lodgings here you would be a rather tired day-tripper after you have seen all three elements of the visit. The closest cafe or restaurant to sit down or rest is about half a mile away. If you have a room in the parador, you can rest in between. One major attraction of staying at the Parador is that you can visit the Nazrid Palaces again in the evening when they are open from 8-10 p.m. They say that in the evening the place looks magical, lighted up with much fewer visitors. But to do this you have to walk half a mile in the dark downhill and then uphill to the ticket office to buy tickets available after 7 p.m. You then have to go back to the Parador, from where it is indeed a short walk to the Palaces. One would assume that the Parador would offer the service of having someone pick up the tickets for the guests, since there would be many people interested. No; they didn’t have this service. And they didn’t care either.

But after a whole day traipsing around we were too tired to get the tickets, and apparently a lot of people thought the same, because the dining room of the Parador was full during this period. Both Khoon and I had the special 5-course “Menu of the Region” for €45 each. Some of their specialties are big beans plus ham, and bacalao, or dried codfish, from Norway. It was very good food, but not exceptional. But the 1999 Rioja went well with the meal.

The next morning we had breakfast at 9:00 and were ready to leave at 11:00. But then we walked a few hundred yards to look inside the palace of Carlos V, which was built next to the Nazrid Palaces.

right: Inside the palace of Carlos V.

It was a huge unwieldy-looking Renaissance monstrosity built around a large open circular court, decorated with colonnades around the inside perimeter of the building, and the entrance was free. Next to the exquisitely constructed Nazrid Palaces, this palace looked barbarically uncouth.

We found there were two exhibitions goings in the Palace, both free. The first was on the ancient jars found in the area around the Alhambra; many of them were decorated with fine abstract geometrical designs. Some of the jars were huge, several feet high. The second exhibit was on Christopher Columbus, covering his life and his 9 voyages of discovery and what happened afterwards to the places he “discovered”. There are some of the letters he wrote; he does have a beautiful penmanship. There is also a museum in the castle, showing some of the artifacts found around the castle of Granada.

III: Jaen and Ubeda

Thu, 2 Nov 2006 20:50:01 -0800

The Parador of Jaen

Jaen was less than 100 km away. The parador of Jaen was located in a castle high up on a hill overlooking the city of Jaen. It was already visible to us many miles before we arrived at the city. About a mile before the parador we stopped at the restaurant El Horno de Salvador for lunch. It was a nice place with the maitre d’/owner in tails waiting to welcome us. That should have tipped us that it was an expensive place. But there was nothing around for miles. And indeed, their prices are inflated, €5 per portion of melon for dessert, €100 for a simple lunch.

The castle of Jaen, built in a commanding position on the top of the rock hundreds of feet above the plains, was shaped like a ship with the prow sticking out in front in the air.

left: The “prow” of the castle of Jaen, high up in the air. This is the safest part of the fortress, because invaders are not going to attack this

Where the parador was located, in the middle of the ship, it was only 50 yards wide, with steep drops on both sides of the parador. From the flatlands it was a fairly long drive up to the castle. But many people come here for an outing to walk around the ruins of the castle and to enjoy the view of the surroundings, including the city of Jaen below. Around the battlements are exhibits showing the history of the castle. As can be expected, none of the invaders tried a frontal assault up the steep walls in the region of the prow; they all came from the back of the ship set in the mountains and where they just had the fortifications at equal level to contend with. The castle of Jaen itself dates back to 1000 AD and it had been occupied by the Moors, then conquered by the Catholic kings, and later even by Napoleon. The main sitting room has impressive 20 meter high crossed arches.

Right: The rooms in the parador of Jaen are very nice. From the balconies the views are marvelous.

Dinner was at the Parador and Khoon had the roast suckling pig, but it was rather disappointing because the skin was not as crisp as we had expected. The meat was good, but they seem to use less spices than what we would expect. For the nightcap we each had a glass of wine in the bar; that was our welcome drink of the Parador, because Norma was a member of the Amigos de Paradores.

Breakfast at 9:00 a.m. the next day was very good and extensive as usual. They even had soy milk, to go with the red wine, if you so wished. We drove down the hill into town to visit the Cathedral of Jaen, a huge Renaissance edifice with lots of 18th and 19th century paintings and baroque sculptures.

The church is called the Assumption of the Virgin Cathedral and construction was started in 1249 on the ruins of an ancient mosque. The famed architect Andrès de Vandelvira had contributed extensively towards the shaping of the building. The cathedral was large from the outside and beautiful from the inside.

Inside is also the cloth, claimed to be used by St. Veronica to daub the face of Christ as he was struggling towards Golgotha, and which has miraculously received an imprint of that suffering visage.

left: Inside the Cathedral of Jaen.

The Parador of Ubeda.

Our destination of the day was the parador of Ubeda, some 60 kms away. In Ubeda there were no directional signs to the parador and I had to ask directions several times before we found it. It was an old palace in the middle of town which was being renovated, and so they did not have elevators yet. The staff had to lug our suitcases up one broad wide grand staircase from the reception floor. But to assuage our pains of having to wade through construction, there was a present for us, a bottle of virgin olive oil. The gift also reminded us that these few days we had driven through miles and miles of olive trees. In many places all one can see are olive trees as far as the eye can reach over the hilly landscape. Occasionally there would be a factory where the olives are pressed.

In this old palace, which used to belong to Dom Fernando Ortega Salido, the Dean of Malaga, we had a standard renovated room, not too large but quite adequate. We ordered an upgraded room for Khoon and Hiang and for €30 extra, they were put in a room with a medieval looking four-poster canopied bed and a balcony overlooking the square.

No long-time parking is permitted on the large square, which gives the buildings around, the 16th century Church of El Salvador, the 17th Church of Santa Maria, and the Palacio Vazquez de Molina, a cleaner look. The square was also the place where the elephant trains for the city-tour starts. You see these trains in many cities in the Iberian Peninsula..

right: The City Tour train

For the standard fare of €3 you get a 20-30 minute bird-eye view of the city. This one was a big hoot, as the driver turned on catchy hoompah music as he careened down the streets, waving at everybody to sing along.

Breakfast, at €17 a head, was very good, as usual. Many times we get the “Golden Days” Special for travelers 60 years and older, where we get a discounted rate for the room plus free breakfast. Now, a few years later, when the global recession has apparently reduced the flow of guests, the age criterion has been reduced to 55 years. For a couple, only one person has to be over 55 to qualify. Each parador has different rules when these promotions are available, so it is not always available.

left: The altar of the Sacra Capilla de El Salvador.

Before we left, we visited the church adjacent to the parador, the Sacra Capilla de El Salvador, built in 1536-1559, commissioned by Francisco de Los Lobos, a counselor to king Carlos V. It was a small church, but it had an impressively huge, gold-leaf covered altarpiece, with caryatids and atlantes as columns and pilasters. It was a masterpiece of Andalusian Renaissance.

right: The ceiling of the chapel

IV: Cordoba and Zafra

Wed, 1 Nov 2006 21:30:26 -0800

The Parador in Cordoba.

We then drove to Cordoba where we again had trouble finding the parador. Next time we go to Spain we’ll be taking a GPS system with us. But we did find it after some time. It was a modern building, some 3 kms outside the city proper, in the foothills, where the temperature is always about 2-4˚ C cooler than in the city proper. The parador was nice but not memorable. The claim to fame was that Abdurrahman I, one of the greatest caliphs of the time, had a palace built in this same spot from where he supervised the construction of the Mezquita complex in the city proper.

La Mezquita is less well-known as the Alhambra in Granada, but it is just as awe-inspiring in its beauty. Abdurrahman I started the project in 786 AD and it was only completed some 2 centuries later. Cordoba is a busy city and it is difficult to park downtown, so we took a taxi to get there. After you walk through a grove of orange trees, the Patio de Los Naranjos, you enter, with an area of 85,000 sq feet, the third largest mosque in the world. The architectural style combines Roman, Gothic, Byzantine, Syrian and Persian elements. You see some of the 850 still standing red and blue columns, topped with double arches, and with one horseshoe arch above it all. These columns, most of them in alabaster and granite and adorned with semi-precious stones, have been recycled from other monuments and palaces. This created some problems since the original pillars were of course of unequal lengths. But they solved that by burying part of the lower end of the columns, so the top would be aligned with each other.

right: A ceiling in la Mezquita

The most important point in the mosque is the Mihrab, a small portal, opulently decorated in the classical Moorish style with the finest Byzantine mosaics possible. The Mihrab points towards Mecca. La Mezquita used to house an original copy of the Koran and an arm bone of the prophet Mohammed, making it a major Muslim pilgrimage site.

In the 16th century, Carlos V authorized the construction of a baroque cathedral smack in the middle of the mosque. Some 60 of the 1013 original columns were removed to make space for what some people call a monstrosity. The cathedral was of course also opulent, but in a different style. There is extensive use of Cuban mahogany and Carlos V once prohibited the use of this wood anywhere else in the kingdom to ensure adequate supplies for this church. There are now sections of the Mezquita which are walled off and in one room we could peak in, we saw it beautifully decorated in the Moorish style, but on the middle wall was a statue of Ferdinand II and Isabella, he holding a globe in his hands and behind him the weapons of Castile and Leon.

left: The baroque Cathedral built right in the middle of la Mezquita.

The complex closed as 6 p.m. and we had to leave. But there was a small gate on the side which was left open. There was a barred and locked metal gate to prevent access but through the opening you could still see a part of the the interior of la Mezquita.

I thought this was a nice friendly gesture for those tourists who were late. As we exited the complex, a calèche driver offered to give us a 40-minute tour of the town for € 40. Which we accepted; and 40 minutes was more than adequate because it was getting cold and we were happy and chilled when the tour ended. We walked to the Roman Bridge and from there we took a taxi back to our parador.

The Madihnat al-Zafra

The next day we headed for the Madihnat al-Zafra, a large archeological site of a palace complex which flowered for only 100 short years before it was destroyed by outside forces. There is a story that these palaces were built by Caliph Abdurrachman III to please a concubine, but this is probably not true.

right: The excavated ruins of Madihnat al-Zafra

It must have been a very beautiful place and it has now been partially reconstructed to give the visitor a feel on how the place looked like in its days of glory. There was a throne room and in front of it there used to be a large reflective pool of mercury. There must have been a lot of rotting teeth because of mercury poisoning in those days. Behind the pool were extensive gardens. The site itself is quite large, some 1500 m long by 750 m wide, or about 112 hectares. What you see in the picture is only about a tenth of the original city. For a good part of the 10th century it was the political and administrative capital of Al-Andalus province.

left: Inside one of the reconstructed rooms of Medihnat al-Zafra.

From the ruins we took a shortcut over the mountains to the N433. In retrospect it would have been wiser to drive back to Cordoba and take the N433 from there, because the shortcut over the mountains went over slow, narrow, and curvy roads. At least there was nobody else on the road, because the locals know better. We lost two hours to traverse this route, before we hit the first village, Villaviciosa. There we had a huge lunch, because each tapa we ordered was almost a meal by itself. They eat a lot in the countryside.

The Parador in Zafra

It was 6:30 p.m. when we arrived at the parador in Zafra. It was located in a castle right in the middle of town. It used to be the Alcazar de Los Duques de Ferla, and a plaque stated that it was built in 1437 – 1443 in the Gothic and Mudejar style.

right: The Parador in Zafra

Inside the forbidding outside walls, still adorned with nine battlement towers, there was a nice open courtyard. The building itself has beautiful coffered ceilings and ironwork from the original palace. The staff suggested we go to La Roboteca, a small restaurant off the Plaza Chica, just a few blocks from the parador for dinner. It was an excellent suggestion. The chef was Dutch and the presentations were very imaginative. The sauces were superb, blended in with pieces of caramel, nuts, and an occasional piece of rock salt. The after-dinner drink was a liqueur steeped in bellota or hickory nuts. It was a memorable meal.

left: The pleasant courtyard of the parador.

From Zafra we left for the Algarve in Portugal. But that is another story.