Granada and the Alhambra

Orgiva is about 45 minutes from Granada, and our plan was spend one day exploring Granada and taking the kids to visit the Alhambra, an ancient palace occupied by both the Moors and later Spanish kings.

We went past Lanjaron on the way, filled up our water bottles with "magic water", and made our way down to Granada.  We parked at the Alhambra, and walked down a long hill into own for lunch. The walk into down is really nice, as it's park-like, with streams running down both sides of the walkway. Bryce and Laurel were particularly interested in the streams.

Granada as a town is equally as charming as Sevilla, and it was clear from the moment we arrived here that we hadn't budgeted enough time here.  Like other Spanish towns, there are windy, narrow streets that hold a variety of surprises around every corner.  Sue found a jewelry shop, and bought a cute necklace with the "Hand of Fatima" on it. Much to our horror however, we found a lot of Moroccan shops selling things we had bought in Morocco for significantly less than we had paid. Oh well.

After lunch, we made our destined date with the Alhambra.  In order to visit the Nasrit Palace, you had to reserve a time several days in advance. It was worth the wait, as the Alhambra has some of the most ornate and beautiful carvings and tile work of any place we have seen so far.  Everything dates from the 14th century and beyond.  The kids were impressed, but at this point a little bit jaded since we had seen similar beauty in other places, specifically the Alcazar in Sevilla.

Sue snapped some cool photos:

A carving - the "W" with the nose on it is Arabic for Allah.

 

This is a ceiling. It's 3-d if you can't tell.

 

I love the stalactite style of this archway.

One of the cool things I learned about the Alhambra is that Washington Irving, the famous author of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkel fame, spend several months living in the Alhambra in the 1800s, and wrote about it extensively. The audio guides we rented were primarily excerpted from his writings. His biography is worth checking out.