Our time in Córdoba had sadly drawn to a close, but no fear, we were off to bigger things: specifically, Granada. We spent our final morning packing, with pastries again for breakfast. Then it was off to the train station, because we got to take another high-speed train, which I was again excited for. We again got to admire the beautiful landscape of southern Spain. The castle we saw this time was the Castillo de Almodóvar del Río, though the more exciting sight was that of Archidona. First off, you know, so picturesque, the white buildings spilling down the hillside. But then you look it up on Wikipedia and find out the site has been settled since Paleolithic times and wowsers, talk about history. Bonkers. Another note is that in addition to the olive trees we saw on the way to Córdoba, we also saw a number of orange groves which was cool. Upon our arrival in Granada I was delighted to see that there as well the trend of orange trees continued, despite the city symbol being the pomegranate. Just can’t keep a good fruit tree down.

After dropping off our bags at the hotel we went off to wander Granada and man it was gorgeous. All the little streets and ancient history. Our hotel was right on the Darro so we were in the thick of it as soon as we walked out the door. We had gotten lunch but were still up for dessert so after getting our bearings a bit the next place we visited was the Teteria del Bañuelo which my super amazing wife rated as the best experience she had then had on the vacation. It is run by a lovely I assume Turkish woman, and besides having a gorgeous balcony with a view of the Alhambra, it also had a wonderfully friendly big ole café cat that was napping in the sun when we arrived but who soon enough swung by for some scritches. The tables had tile and the sun was shining and the excellent tea was served in cute little Turkish teapots and little Turkish teacups and the chocolate baklava and a “bird nest” dessert was to die for and it was great. Highly recommend.

The first real touristy place we visited in Granada was the Archeology Museum. It was small but with an admission price of a whopping 3€ it would have been a bargain at twice the price. The small size was actually an advantage for me; the archeological museum in Madrid was big and so full of stuff but I didn’t know what was going on so it was hard to keep track of it all. Meanwhile this was smaller and easier to understand. Plus according to the handy museum map, it was one of the first to be founded in Spain, having originated in 1842 as an Antiques office before getting a Royal Order in 1879. Neat! The building it is in is from 1539, or the façade is anyway. The sign near the door says it was built by Hernando de Zafra’s grandson, it is called the Casa de Castril, and is “decorated in a Plateresque style with an allegory that represents the lord of the house as a Christian hero hoping his victory over death.” Neat I guess.

I just said the archeological museum was small but boy does it pack a punch. They had some really cool stuff! There were perfectly preserved 7000-year-old woven grass sandals, which is crazy! Amazing stuff sticks around that long! Some dude or lady from 7000 years ago wove some grass together so their feet wouldn’t hurt so bad and here and unfathomable amount of time later we get to admire their work! Even older were some 1.5-million-year-old humanoid remains. Also extremely cool was a stone mold for bronze casting, and I had never seen that sort of thing before. And, of course, my absolute favorite (though actually I am still blown away by the sandals, I am a simple man that likes old things) was an astrolabe! Here’s another Google Arts & Culture thing of their collections so you aren’t limited to my silly pictures, very worth a perusal.

Despite how great it was the museum was still rather small so, still fortified from our tea and desserts, our first partial day in Granada was still far from over despite being very full already. Our next destination was the Capilla Real! Look man I was really bad this trip at figuring out what was going on with Spanish royalty. There I was back in Córdoba, rather stunned to discover that I was in Isabella and Ferdinand’s old pad, and now here I was in Granada, stunned to discover that the two of them were like a couple blocks from where we were staying! They were staying there permanently of course, because they are dead. Still very cool to see! No pictures again, sorry, you’ll have to go yourself. You walk in and see their big ornate crypt topper (I dunno it’s on top of the crypt) that is statues of them inside a big ornate chapel, and then you can descend a little staircase to see the sarcophagi themselves. You got Isabella and Ferdinand down there of course, but you also have Juana la Loca, which is a mean name, and Philip the Handsome, which is a PR job if I ever saw one and I really oughta hire that same PR guy frankly, and then finally poor little Miguel da Paz. Very cool to see and then as a breather you get to walk through a little museum of some religious iconography and if I recall correctly some monarchial paraphernalia, before exiting through the gift shop. That was a nice little surprise because most museums we had been to didn’t have gift shops and so I had no chance of getting a lapel pin, but the chapel had both a gift shop and a lapel pin for sale.

Okay with the royal visit out of the way, now our first day in Granada was winding down. After the chapel we poked our head into the madrassa across the street but there wasn’t much to see, and then wandered into more gift shops where we got some Turkish delight. What the guidebooks tell you about Granada is that it is the rare place in Spain where the bars still give you free tapas, so we were off to experience that. The place we chose was the Bodega Castañeda, I think. One thing I have really enjoyed about Spain is that you can just order a category of stuff. At bars I could just order a beer and receive a beer, no further discussion on brand or type or whatever required. At the train station coffee place I just ordered a “coffee” and the only question the lady had was if I wanted milk. Despite having enjoyed that, it was my super amazing wife learned the lesson better than I did; this bar we were at was known for its vermouth and when it came time to order I was paralyzed about what vermouth to order but she just asked for “vermouth” and lo and behold vermouth appeared! And tapas! It was great! Astounding and excellent. Vermouth in hand I then proceeded to bore my super amazing wife with my various thoughts on the economics of free tapas, like: How do you choose was tapas to serve? Do you try to avoid losing money on every drink or do you occasionally put out a fancy tapas so people feel like they are gambling and might order more drinks? If you wanted to forego free tapas, like as a bar if you wanted to stop giving out the tapas, do the other bars condemn you to keep you in line? I wonder.

But anyway that pretty much capped off our night and then all we had to do was head back to the hotel to rest up for the next day’s big adventure.

Despite all the things we had already seen, the day was not over. A remarkable and unexpected gem of Córdoba was the Museo Julio Romero de Torres. We had never heard of Julio Romero there, and I think what we were really trying to do was to go to the Museo de Ballas Artes next door. But they have the same entry way and the lady at the ticket counter I think was trying to ask us which one we wanted to go to and we didn’t understand and we wandered on into Julio Romero’s former home there and I am glad he did. Quite an interesting painter!

Unfortunately they did not allow photos inside the museum so instead of my crappy photos you’ll have to instead rely on the higher-quality ones that Google took. I keep harping on our lack of context as some cultural self-flagellation, but of course we were walking into this museum blind as well. There’s not a whole lot of explanatory text that I recall, and one of the first things they have you do is watch this uh artsy video. Very informative. One thing becomes very quickly clear about Julio Romero de Torres as you walk through the museum though: the man liked women.

The museum is not particularly large, featuring just a few galleries with a number of his generally pretty large-format works. Most of the paintings are about women. A large number of those were of perfectly normal women, as in like, this is a painting of a flamenco dancer. But I thought the most interesting paintings were the gender-swapped ones. The single most intriguing one was of the Archangel Saint Raphael. I suppose I am not deep enough in the cannon as to understand if angels are men or women, but I am pretty sure Raphael is usually depicted as a dude so making him a her is a choice and I wonder what he was trying to say. This was a theme of his, switching up your normal religious iconography. Here is the Pietà, but, you know, sexy. This dude should be way more popular on Tumblr, tell you what.

Alongside a note that the frames were big and ornate, other paintings I wrote down as thinking they were especially cool included:

• La Copla
• Cante hondo
• La nieta de Trini
• La sibila de las Alpujarras
• Diane
• Poema de Córdoba

I wrote down in my notes that I thought Poema de Córdoba was probably my favorite overall for what it is trying to do with myth and metaphor, but one that caught my super amazing wife’s attention was Naranjas y limones. She noticed that the painting only depicts oranges, making the lemons a metaphor, if you catch my drift. Wikipedia agrees with her, so that’s a point for my super amazing wife’s super amazing art analysis skills. The museum did not have a gift shop, but the little shops across the way did have prints, and much to her chagrin I bought one of Naranjas y limones. Speaking of oranges, I know this is just standard in Córdoba but I still love it, so I will note the museum also had a lovely little courtyard with lovely little orange trees and man I think that is all I want in the world:

Although we had already experienced quite the day full of culture and history, there was one more thing to do: flamenco! I mean first we had to get dinner, we went to an Italian place, or Italian-inspired anyway, always interesting to see a culture interpreted through a third culture, especially if it’s a different third culture you’re not used to seeing it interpreted through. Such a mix! Oh and also there was even more souvenir shopping, we got a cute little model house. But then, for real, flamenco!

This was my super amazing wife’s first experience with flamenco, but it was not mine. You see, as part of our education to become well-rounded Naval officers, the Naval Academy made us sit through various cultural events. I saw the Russian National Ballet Company put on Swan Lake and lemme tell you, I hated it. A much more popular event though is when they had us sit through a flamenco performance. They had the Academy’s etiquette instructor give us a lesson on flamenco etiquette the day before which annoyed all of us, because it went over schedule making us late for classes (which we could get in trouble for), and she made the other mistake of telling us that it was a complement to shout olé! a lot, so during the actual flamenco performance itself, which I remember being really good (way better than that stupid ballet performance) (this is not a “Russia’s invading Ukraine” opinion by the way, I’ve been hating on this experience for a decade and a half now), we all got to obnoxiously shout olé while in fact being square down the middle of appropriate etiquette. Anyway I was looking forward to seeing flamenco again.

It was really good! We of course went to one of the nightly flamenco performances that caters to tourists, but I read online that most flamenco is for tourists now anyways, so really when you think about it this was the most authentic type of flamenco. Entrance came alongside a drink ticket and we both got sangria (a dangerous drink for me). We settled in and waited for the show to begin. I was really impressed by the guitarist, who managed to look between bemused and bored while strumming out just extraordinarily complex music that these women (and one man) were dancing to. Vocals were provided by a lady who happened to be pregnant, making it all feel like a family affair. My super amazing wife was particularly impressed by the footwork, having experience in Irish step dancing herself. It was all really expressive and I wish I knew more about the subject as to have been even better able to appreciate what it was. I was stunned when 80 minutes had gone by and it was over, despite an encore. A very full day behind us, we finally head back to turn in for the night.

Reading this week:

• A Residence at Sierra Leone by Mrs. Elizabeth Helen Melville and edited by Mrs. Norton

Although the Mezquita was large by the time we finished the day was still young and there was so much more to see in Córdoba. One of the places I wanted to go in Córdoba was the bullfighting museum. Being an American who’s main exposure to Spanish culture is Hemingway, I am into the concept of bullfighting. When I went to Cancun on spring break one time I did actually see a bullfight. I would call it a pastiche of one but they did actually kill the bull. The opening act was dancing and cockfights (not to the death, though I later saw those in Guam). I have a poster from it as an homage to a poster my dad has from a Spanish bullfight we went to. All that to say that if it was the correct season I would have dragged my super amazing wife to a bullfight while we were in Spain, but it was not the season, so the next best thing was dragging my super amazing wife to the Museo Taurino de Córdoba.

Honestly it was a little bit disappointing. Maybe I didn’t know enough Spanish to really appreciate it for what it was but mostly it was just a bit small. I guess I am spoiled, or maybe I was expecting to be fed context that the museum already expected you to have. Again, being a reader of Hemingway I know a thing or two about bullfighting, or think I do, so I could understand some of what was going on but the treatment of bullfighting in the place seemed a bit light. There was some cool stuff about the history of bullfighting in Spain reaching back to ancient times, and the main focus of the museum I think was on some of the more famous matadors, the “Five Caliphs” of bullfighting. I was hoping for more that explained the art of bullfighting, maybe a more intricate cultural history, something like that. Nonetheless it was probably worth the price of admission, but not a place to spend the whole afternoon.

Almost the whole rest of the day in Córdoba was spent poking into interesting little place we more or less stumbled upon. After the bullfighting museum and even after some additional souvenir shopping we had plenty of time so when we stumbled upon the Baños del Alcázar Califal (Caliphal Baths) it was worth wandering in. Here’s the virtual site map, though maybe the Spanish Wikipedia page is more useful. It is a small museum built into the ruins of a hammam built in the 10th century by the Cordoban caliph al-Hakam II, Wikipedia tells me. They were used for a couple centuries and then destroyed when the city was taken over. There’s not a whole lot in the museum, mostly a guided path through the old rooms of the place. Once again lacking context for much of what was going on I didn’t really understand what I was looking at most of the time but I guess neat to wander around. The thing I was most interested in was the heating system for the hot room; apparently there was some cool pipes and there would have been a boiler (I love boilers) but I couldn’t really tell what I was looking at unfortunately. Oh well.

Two places wandered through, it was on to the next location: the Alcázar de los Reyes Cristianos. This is the thing I am most embarrassed about not realizing what it was. I am going to go on and on in this blog post about my lack of context and like, some of that is not my fault. If I grew up in Spain a lot of this stuff would resonate on a deeper level than “cool” or “aesthetic.” But a large chunk is my fault. Like I knew Córdoba was apparently an important city or whatever, but I didn’t realize how important. We had popped on into the Alcázar because it was supposed to have some pretty gardens. And pretty gardens it did have! Super pretty. You had to wander around some throne-room looking thing (reader this is foreshadowing) before getting to them, and we skipped going up the tower because the line was too long, but man the gardens are great:

Huge, too. Several levels, multiple water features, including really cool ones where there are like little water channels that empty into ponds and stuff or go around and all sorts of things. I love any kind of fruit tree, every garden should be full of fruit trees, and this place had a whole orchard of orange trees. In the middle was also a statue of a Columbus-looking guy. Weird, I thought. They also had a section with a bunch of stray cats, each of which was extremely cute. Besides the large garden there were little courtyards with more orange trees. It was calm and peaceful and beautiful.

Walking out, I finally looked up what the place was on Wikipedia. And like, oh. The Reyes Cristianos. Turns out the place was a primary residence of Isabella I and Ferdinand II! The statue of the Columbus-looking guy was because that was Columbus and this was the spot where he had his first audience with Isabella and Ferdinand in order to get support for the whole “journey to the new world” thing! A lot of important stuff happened in this spot and I thought it was just weird there was a throne room attached to the pretty gardens! I felt very silly. I could have really absorbed some history, even some nasty bits I guess. But hey the gardens were cool no matter what.

Our first full day in the beautiful Andalusian city of Córdoba dawned bright because we got, you guessed it, pastries. The entire time in Spain I was eating pastries and desserts heretofore unknown to me and they made it worth the trip. But we can’t spend the whole day eating pastries so we spent the time while we were digesting checking out the Mezquita-Catedral de Córdoba!

It didn’t take us long to get to the Mezquita from where we were staying, like I said last time we could see it from the porch of the place we were staying. We had timed tickets and audioguides which made us fret because when we showed up it was confusing where we were supposed to go. I eventually left my super amazing wife in the extremely long line (we figured so many people couldn’t be wrong) while I picked up our audioguides. The timing worked out perfectly because I returned with the audioguides at just the right moment for us to head into the building.

I am still a little unclear if I should feel bad about checking out the place, it being of course at one point a mosque. I mean, probably not, but at one point I overheard a tourist asking I think a tour guide about how Muslims felt about the mosque being converted into a cathedral and the tour guide didn’t quite seem to understand the question. He explained that the site was part of Spanish heritage because the Spanish had taken over Andalusia. There is a whole lot more to interrogate there than I really have the background for.

Anyway! The Mezquita! What a place! As I was wondering around I tried to keep myself from blaspheming and using particularly dirty language because, you know, it felt more respectful, but here in the quiet solitude of this blog I will say: holy fucking shit! I was not prepared for the experience! When we were wandering around Córdoba the previous day we passed by and around the Mezquita a lot. It is right downtown so you have to walk around it to get anywhere, and from the outside it is impressively decorated and the size of a city block, but man was I not grasping what the place was.

The thing is so gigantic and just jam-packed with beautiful, intricate, gorgeous details. I ran around the whole place taking pictures of every little decoration and architectural feature. I also tried to listen to the audioguide but a) I was very distracted every single time I saw a new motif and b) it has a very layered history that is hard to grasp in the moment (for me anyway) so I was losing the thread. But the various cultures and additions mean you just keep gilding the lily with more gilding and more lilies and it is non-stop man. Centuries of desiring to add to the profound contemplating of religion and spirituality and stuff really does numbers for the look of the place. As we continued to wander farther south some of this became de rigueur, just slightly, that it lost only a hint of shine, but as a first experience it could hardly have been more intense. You could get a permanent crick in your neck looking at all the ceilings, phenomenal and varied and stunning.

It is also hard to get a solid feeling for the place. Since it has been expanded so many times and is so big but still requires so many different supports for the roof, it almost feels like you are in a maze of warrens. You can’t see the whole thing from any given spot, or even a big part of it, so every time you turn the corner there is something new. For example, the Cathedral. It is called the “Mosque-Cathedral,” and so I knew they used it as a Cathedral, and I knew the Cathedral-y bit was somewhere in the middle. But I thought that meant like, there was a bit in the middle they just used as a Cathedral. But no! You turn the corner and there is a whole-ass Cathedral!

I was already so blown away by the Mezquita bits I could barely take in the Cathedral bits. I didn’t even take many pictures, but it is also so intricate and detailed! If something takes like 10 years to build these days that is a lifetime, but man, you spend a few centuries putting something together you have time to add a whole lot of fiddly bits! So many carvings and figures in stone and wood, not to mention the paintings, and just wowee. I am running out of words, clearly. Eventually we decided there was not much more we could take and head back out into the courtyard.

I have just gone on and on about the interior but I also loved the courtyard. Like the rest of the city it was filled with orange trees, but I really particularly liked what they did with the place. All over the city there was these pavings done with stones and so designs were inserted in, but more importantly for my tastes the trees were placed in basins with channels between them, for easy watering and a really beautiful effect. The courtyard was so beautiful that I lost track of time and we almost missed our tour of the tower. We had tickets and I thought we could go up pretty much whenever we wanted, but my super amazing wife had realized that we were supposed to go up in a single group with the other tourists. We missed that group but the guard let us scramble up after them anyway and so we got to check out Córdoba from above.

It was really gorgeous, to no one’s surprise. Not only do you get a more holistic view of the Mezquita, with the different roof bits making it more clear the shape of the place, but the city itself sprawls from the hills on one side, down to the river and then across to the rolling plains on the other. You could peer down into people’s courtyards and admire the Mezquita’s own orange grove and yeah man it was great. But the day was far from over, and so when it was time we head on down and off to the next adventure.

It was finally time for us to leave Madrid and we were going to do something very exciting: take the train! It would have been cheaper to take the bus, but I am an American and have an intense jealousy of well-developed high-speed rail networks and therefore wanted to take the train. We woke up and packed and got some pastries for breakfast and then off we were to the absolutely gorgeous Atocha Train Station. The only slight hiccup was actually finding the door but that wouldn’t be a problem twice.

Boarding the train went super smooth and let me tell you so did the ride. My super amazing wife has lots of experiences on high-speed trains but this was my first and I was over the moon at how smooth it was and how fast we were going. At one point I downloaded a GPS speedometer app to see how fast we were going and at that moment we were going 165 miles per hour which might be a personal landspeed record. Wild. But the landscape. Lots of rolling hills and fields just south of Madrid and for the rest of the day. And lots and lots of olive trees. These Spaniards really like their olive trees. Close to Madrid they were in regular orchards but as we got farther south and the land got hillier the trees got less regular. It wasn’t clear to me if they were really still olive trees (but what else would they be?) or if they were regularly harvested. Interspersed with the olive groves were I think hay fields though it was hard to tell, it was just short and green. I also spotted a big solar farm which I loved and the rivers we passed were like, meandering and split into small streams all over the place.

One thing that really impressed us is that we kept passing ruins that when I looked them up on Google Maps were just like, castles??? Out in the middle of nowhere and just sitting there??? Europe man, I guess it really is old. The names I looked up were: Castillo Almonacid de Toledo, Torre de Azuqueca o la Torrecilla, and Castillo de las Guadalerzas. There might have been more but naming every castle in Spain would take a while probably. As we got further south the landscape opened up into like, proper valleys and we were very excited to see sheep. Tell you what I see in art museums these pieces from people’s grand tours and they have like, sheep hanging out in and amongst ruins and groves and I thought it was a fantasy setting but here we are and that is what I saw! It is real! This is like Europeans seeing yellow school busses. The valleys we saw had like arched valleys and dirt roads and pine trees as we travelled through tunnels. It is wild and phenomenal.

Having been transported through a fantasy land we now arrived at our fantasy city: Córdoba! We got ourselves to our accommodations which were right downtown a block from the river (we could see the Mezquita from the porch), and then pretty much dropped off our bags and got to talking through the city. It was a startling difference from Madrid. We were there in February and in Madrid it felt like February. But in Córdoba it was sunny and beautiful and warm. My favorite part was that the streets are lined with orange trees, which is something every city should do. The architecture is ancient and the walls white-washed and the streets narrow and curvy and beautiful. Occasionally cars come by (in the morning when the delivery trucks go through I spotted a traffic jam that happened when one of the drivers popped into a shop for a pastry, leaving his car in the middle of the street) but not many. And these Spanish roof tiles! On the train I could look out across the landscape and see like authentic old Spanish ruins with the tiles, little country houses, just to die for. And in the city there were also old tiles with moss on them, just picture-perfect.

We strolled past the Mezquita into the old Christian neighborhood (I think) outside the old city walls and then came back in and checked out some small gift shops where we got some trinkets. We walked across the Roman bridge (nice to see long-term infrastructure investment!) and poked around the other side. At the terminus of the bridge is a tower which houses the “Museum of life in Andalusia.” I dragged us in because I thought it would tell the story of the tower or something but not really. It is a little weird. A meandering audio guide tries to give you a flavor of “east meets west” Andalusia life that maybe lands better in Spanish. But you can go to the top of the tower for the view which is worth the price of admission:

Views taken in, it was back across the bridge and more wandering. We went up to the Callaje de las Flores which didn’t have so many flores at the time but was pretty. There was a leatherworking shop with cool stuff I couldn’t afford. After that we got some gelato, swung by an old book shop by the river, and went out for a dinner which was just sublime. We got anchovies in vinegar for a starter, followed by cod with oranges which is a local dish and a stunningly good combination (little pieces of cod and red onion on top of orange slices, with some smokily delicious olives), and then octopus slices on potatoes and finally oxtail stew with fries in it and man that was good. From there we got some churros for dessert and called it a night, excited in our first full day in Andalusia.