Category Archives: Photography

Alhambra, Granada and fleeting images…it could be a long one

The Great

Well another notch on the World Heritage gun. Seven hours in heat up to 34 degrees, exploring this special site.

The Alhambra was once an Arab city with 40000 residents. The ruins now are the fort, the Arab  Palaces of the Nasrids commenced in 1237 and a Renaissance palace built along Italian lines by Carlos 1 (the Hapsberg Charles 5) in the early 1500s. And the Generalife with its wonderful gardens.

Such is the reknown of the Alhambra that over 6600+ tickets are on sale EACH DAY. The palaces in particular have been a work in progress so what you see may be quite a stretch from what was there 8 centuries ago but still fleeting images stimulate the mind to wonder at the courts of the sultans. Many books have been written and pictures taken so no more from me…….

On the mountains above the Alhambra and the town, the snow sits on the Sierra Nevadas and in acknowledgement, I have the white almond gazpacho for lunch. I think about all those who ruled Empires from here and how transient they were. The Ozymandias thing.

The Great come and go

And in the English papers / BBC I learn that the Chinese will destroy more Buddha sites in Afghanistan as they work their copper lease. A different lease to the ones they have in Ethiopia where they are simply growing their food on someone else’s land…..a new concept in share farming. Oh and they are trying to stop trouble in Burma where they harvest water and further north, they fight with India over rivers. All the time their Foreign Minister gives Europe wise advice on how to get out of the current financial crisis. Another Ozymandias in the making.

Saturday in town

Everyone of Granada’s 228000 (or thereabout) residents must have been out this morning, shopping, drinking coffee in delightful plazas. How colourful it felt and not just because black is out in Spain. Pink and fuschia stand out and the occasional man wears red pants.

Balloons for sale!

IIn the street was the balloon man, the yellow clown, a scratch band doing Cuban / jazz with dreadlocked kids playing their hearts. There’s a bit of a 60’s hippie thing around. Down the street there was an Elvis impersonator.

Later a young man in a mankini stands  chuggalugging and a banana walks by; must have been a bucks’ nights??

Having coffee a wedding spilled down the street from the Church. Men in tails and elegant women in bright colours to outshine the young Middleton girls, with huge hats and perky one-sided fascinators.

In the shaded pedestrian shopping streets I see a row of 10 African peddlers selling fans and sunglasses. Moroccans make up 10% of the Granada population although not  visible apart from these young men.

As I write the  church bells ring.

Trivials

As I move about, I donate things to the people of Spain: expensive hair shampoo and conditioner in Seville, a transformer plug and IPad charger in the village. It is the least I can do for this struggling economy which shows no sign of struggling.

I am also interested in the old lady hypochondriac’s list of travel illnesses. So far I have been about to lose 2 teeth, one at the front; a serious disease of an unmentionable kind and a very serious digestive illness, possibly fatal, have also beset my mind. Apart from that I survive.

Spain does so much better than Sydney…from the wifi everywhere to the downloading of tourist info onto your phone to comprehensible signage especially on street – crossing light countdowns. Years ago I introduced the first noodle market to Sydney after I had been to Asia. Perhaps I should run for public office and do a few things again instead of wishing we did it better than we do.

Saturday night in uptown Granada

Dinner up  in the old Moslem quarter where a new mosque is going in…amazing after all the ones in history were swamped with churches. Plus Ça Change. The gypsy quarter near here was where Flamingo began.

Music players everywhere tonight including a group with a didgeridoo. Buck’s nights rituals abound too. Another bridegroom is dressed as a penguin. There seem to be standard songs to sing.

Much cheering in the bars because by drawing 1 all, Granadaco (the soccer team) appears to now advance to the premier league with the big boys – Barcelona and Real Madrid – and it is just a little local team.

Great lightly fried mixed seafood for dinner, a change from the black pudding I have been wolfing, especially when scrambled with eggs. My companions like a drink or three. I am trying restraint and sticking to two, maybe a sangria and a local red. It will be good to give it up for a few weeks. Have I become a purist?

The White Villages

If you look across the mountain, you can se a village nestled

The low mountains are dotted with white washed villages some tumbling down the hill, some resting on the plateaux. It’s like the goddess took a handful of pearls, tossed them in the air and they landed randomly across the ranges. The narrow streets sometimes follow the winding curves  of the earlier Moorish inhabitants although the strategic importance of the area was first the focus of Roman settlement.

Further up the hills the cave paintings are older than those at Lascaux.

 

Ronda

The bridge where the enemy were thrown off in their thousands

Yesterday we went to the famous Ronda, the town on a high plateau (744m) saddling a deep ravine; (remember, the one they tossed the enemy off only 80 years ago). Hemingway wrote loads of stuff when he was here – “For Whom the Bell Tolls”, “Fiesta”etc. Like Orson Welles he was a fan of the famous bullfighter Antonio Ordonez. Welles had his ashes buried on Ordonez’ property. Rilke visited the place as did Dumas and others.

But its fascination eludes me….it was interesting; the ravine and bridge dramatic, the odd Moorish remnant evocative, the notion of the uncorrupted hand of Theresa of Avila waiting in the church, weird and the 18th century streetscape, sometimes elegant.The bullring, said to be the oldest in Spain, was worth a visit in a gory kind of way but maybe it was the thought of those bodies hurling off the bridge into the chasm below that dampened my enthusiasm. Malaga ‘s most spectacular town and Hemingway’s muse didn’t float my boat.

          The unrest I saw earlier in Madrid resonates accross the country, even here in this mountain town a group  demonstrates.

Demonstrations resonate even in Ronda

 

The Village – Gaucin
Today we walked up to the fort with wide views over the Sierras. The castle was meant to guard a narrow pass and the name of the town is Arabic for just that.

The Holy Child in the Gaucin church will never go short of fresh clothes

 

Popped into a Mass on the way back down the hill and the Hermitage of the Holy Child up the road has on display a few dozen changes of outfits for him.

The village has about 2000 residents and about a quarter are British (updated below) though like the natives not here all the time.

The deserted feeling comes in part from a number of empty British holiday houses and houses where the Spanish can’t decide which member of the family is entitled.

I saw some “kitchen paintings” in a restaurant and we visited the home of the Englishwoman who painted them. Her house on the outskirts of the village was evocative of the time I spent living in the Italian village with my family and other older Australian women. The painter said there are three English book clubs in town. What have we wandered into?

Imagine not suspecting the extent of English occupation and turning into a shop advertising bread to find that an upper class English woman is running a take home dinner service with the latest range of gourmet options. The chap who followed us in was heard to mutter “super” when he saw the daily menu. Oh! she was selling the Sunday Times as well. I am going back there right now to buy the last one since she said she would keep it for me because the chap who usually bought it, seemed to be “on hols”.

I suppose Europeans have always drifted across borders although it must be easier for the masses now .

 

More on the village

The fountain in the main plaza

It is the next day and the others went for a drive around the countryside. I thought it would be nice to be alone and to try to understand the rhythm of the village. It’s a Monday and there are more women in the narrow Calles, carrying shopping. About half are English.

I go down to the English gourmet number and have a delicious little chicken and mushroom pie…gives me time to cross- examine the owner whom I have christened “Prue”. She tells me there are about 2000 expats in the  Commune area most hidden in houses in the country near the village. She reckons this is a third of the total population with about 4000 Spanish. Easy to see the 3 book clubs then. And it explains the few up-market fine food restaurants. The lovely water colours of birds that dot the Calles with their detailed descriptions of habits and migrations are in English and Spanish too.

Prue sometimes does catering for some of the big “villas” just outside where she has to sign a confidentiality agreement. Doesn’t stop her reporting that Kylie, Kiera Knightly and Tony Blair have all stayed.

So it’s 1 o’clock and getting steamy. The 2 – 5pm siesta makes a lot of sense making it easy not to eat until 9pm. Wonder what that does to the digestion? Anyway… That’s the rhythm; it’s obvious that what you do in the early evening is open a bottle.

Localism – It’s the Same the Whole World Over
An English complaint about the town is that the local Council is too conservative …stopping progress, not helping produce a thriving art market.
The only reason the tapa at one place didn’t win the 2010 Tapa Competition is because the wife of the winner was on the selection committee.

The Andalusian Junta Advisory Committee is having coffee in the sun. How do I know? They have white t shirts or sloppy Jo’s or dust jackets all marked with the insignia signifying their importance.

The charming streets of Cadiz

Cadiz is like the other Spanish cities in so far as it is clean and light with car movement minimized and good design showing through. It is a small town of about 120,000 yet it has different heritage walks clearly marked on the pavement like the trading one highlighting sites from when this city was the queen of the waves.

Students sit on the steps of the Cathedral using free Wifi

The same forward thinking Council is testing free Wifi in some plazas and has produced  “7 Hours in Cadiz” so that cruise linerettes can maximize their experience. Signs of anything before the largely 18th century makeover are hard to discern though.

It is said that Cadiz is the oldest city in Europe. IN THE 12th CENTURY BEFORE CHRIST (imagine that!) some of my favorites, the Phoenicians started to trade here with the local tribes. Wine, oil, dyes, and glass were traded for precious metal.

Later Hannibal took the region over and when he was defeated the Romans made this the SECOND MOST POPULOUS CITY AFTER ROME.

The Visigoths destroyed Gades (Cadiz) in the 5th century and then the Moors were here for 700 or so years before those right wing Catholics reconquistored. Isabel and Ferdie might have sent Columbus to America from here a few times but they presided over a bloody awful Inquisition. In Seville we saw the park where the executions were held and there are a few Museums of Torture about.

So there ……   history in a nutshell except for the bloody Spanish wars amongst themselves. I can understand why Goya and Velasquez were so dark.

Phonecian sarcophagi could be 12th century BC. Imagine that!

There’s not a lot of anyone left to see except for the Spanish and my hunt for the Phoenicians had to be satisfied with the  2 sarcophagi to be found in the excellent little museum. About 10000 years old!

My fascination with the Phoenicians goes back first to Jezebel who introduced the god Baal to the tribe and for her trouble the husband, lover of Hebrew gods, had her beheaded. She went to her grave in full makeup hence the connotations with the name. The woman would not be bowed.

Then there is Dido, or Elyssa, who was pissed her brother inherited the throne; she married a rich man; tricked her brother when her husband died and fled with her mates to found the city of Carthage. She is said to have loved Aeneas and killed herself when he left to found Rome.

Enough history…. Most tourists in Cadiz are Spanish speaking and the place isn’t full of the ubiquitous tapas bars. Food is therefore better.

Some of those steps led to the Cadiz Museum where there was such a fascinating exhibition I had to research it later. Post IT City is a series of  photographs and videos from all around the world of people who temporarily occupy city spaces for example, “an industrial estate that becomes an illegal race circuit at weekends, the use of the building-site city for the adventures of explorer nerds, variants of the squatter phenomenon, the use of different wastelands for occasional meetings (nomad camp, rave), the conversion of a daytime campus into an night-time area of sexual transactions”.

As a one time urbanista I was grabbed. Planning vacuum meets art meets humanity. The exhibition comes out of Barcelona; there’s a book and web references.

A rabbit goat? What planet are we on?

We visited the markets and amongst all the great food was this rabbit!

24000 steps on the last day in Cadiz.