Granada, Spain

We left Torremolinos mid-morning, caught a train and 1.5 hours later, we were in Granada, located in the foothills of the Andalucia Region. Looking at this map, Torremolinos is the bottom red circle, by the sea. Granada is the circle on the right, in the mountains. Seville is in the flat lands on the left. Our trip from Granada to Seville will be by bus.

We arrived too early to get into our apartment so we left our luggage in a pay locker and explored a bit.

We always use Google maps to get around but it doesn't matter, we seem to get lost at least once at every new location. Even in a big city, there were some well traveled multi-laned streets to orient ourselves, but everything else is the size of an alley, and it's a crazy labyrinth to try and navigate. We scoped out where our apartment was while waiting to check in, and found it was right off the main square. That looked easy, so off we went to grab lunch. Coming back with our luggage, we walked right past it several times before we realized we were actually there. Arghhh - so frustrating.

But, it didn't stop there. We got inside the building and carried our luggage up four flights of stairs. There was an elevator but it appeared to be out of order. We later learned it worked just fine. We arrived at our apartment but couldn't get the key box open. Keith fiddled with it, and it opened and we went inside. It hadn't been cleaned yet, bed unmade, garbage in the kitchen, etc. We thought this was odd, but they had given us an early check-in so we didn't think much about it. One problem, I didn't know where to take the garbage so I texted our host. After several messages, we learned we were in the wrong apartment. Our apartment was actually one floor below and that apartment was clean and ready. We laughed… we even get lost when we were in the building. 🤣 And, there was only one apartment per floor.

Finally settled, it was time to rest. Keith caught a chest cold in Morocco so he was running on a few less cylinders than normal. Gratefully, we planned downtime at each destination and he needed it. His naps also give me some quiet time to regroup and blog before a late evening dinner.

Yup, our body clocks have clearly changed to European time. We have a light breakfast, lunch about 2:00 and then dinner after 7:00. Keith chuckles at me… I can be converted. 😄

Granada means pomegranate and also grenade. When a pomegranate gets ripe, it explodes spewing seeds everywhere, similar to a granade. As we learned about the history of this city and all the wars it fought, we weren't surprised at the name.

This is the view from our apartment window. We're on the third floor and this road/alley is right in front of us. You can see it is only about ten feet wide. It is normally full of people, but it was early in the morning so no one was moving around yet.

There is a great town square just around the corner from us. Restaurants surround the square and is always busy with kids playing and people wandering, talking, and laughing.

We toured through the Cathedral of Granada, right in the center of town. This is an active church and was just huge. It was beautiful, but the opulance in these churches was overwhelming.

A must see is the AlHambra Palace, perched at the top of the hill overlooking the city. It was a good thirty minute walk up the hill, enough to get our hearts pumping.

The palace was huge. We spent almost three hours doing a self guided tour and still didn't see it all. A storm was rolling in and we could hear the thunder rumbling in the distance, and wanted to get off the mountain before the skys opened up. It looks like blue sky in the picture, but behind us was menacing black clouds. We had just sat down at a restaurant in the square for lunch and the skies opened with pouring rain and more thunder. Whew… that was close. Our apartment was just around the corner so we only got a little wet getting home.

But the afternoon wasn't done as a spectacular thunder and hail storm arrived to send everyone scurrying.

Our last day and we did a Segway ride to the top of the city. It was so much fun, truly the highlight of our time in Grenada. Our tour guide, on the bike in front, was so very good, explaining how all the communities were created, the history, and impact from the wars between the Catholics and Muslims.

This is the view of AlHambra from the top of the city. Now you can see why we didn't get to it all, even in three hours.

In this area, there are still cave homes which were built when the city was at war hundreds of years ago. It was amazing how people were so creative out of necessity… a home in a cave. I could stand up straight, but everyone else had to stoop.

This was our last day in Grenada - next stop is Seville.