Granada, Spain

Wednesday, October 23 – Saturday, October 26

A short bus ride from Sevilla brought me to a neighboring city in the Andalusian region of southern Spain, beautiful Granada. The Moorish Kingdom was based out of this ancient city, so the spectacular influence of their architecture and history is everywhere.

My Airbnb was located in the UNESCO area of Albaycin, which is now known as the Arabic neighborhood. It offers lots of delicious kebab options as a nice alternative to tapas. My host here was so wonderful, too! She made the stay even better with her charming personality and giving spirit.

How cute is this building! It’s only accessible by foot, no cars in this area at all!

Ani has 3 rooms she has decorated in different themes, I was in the Baroque room!

Unbelievable views of this cute neighborhood out the Parisian style doors.

Let’s talk tapas, my favorite thing about Spain! My host from Bilbao, David, is from Granada so he told me not to miss Los Manueles. Lucky for me, it was about 2 minutes from my place, so I went here every day I was in Granada! I never paid for dinner!

Glass 1

Glass 2 (this was my favorite tapa!)

Glass 3

Glass 4

Then, I went home and find Ani and her friend hanging out in the kitchen. We all get to talking and then Ani offers to heat up some Sri Lankan curry she made the previous night. What a treat! She really is so kind! PS, kitters also joined in (she has 4!)

THE thing to see in Granada is the beautiful Alhambra Palace complex. It’s massive, but the real show-stopper is the Nasrid Palace. You have to get tickets way in advance and even then, on the day of it is absolute madness! I had a ticket for 9:30am access to Nasrid. Me and about 100 other people. We queued up in the rain and slowly shuffled our way to the entry and were all jammed into the first couple of rooms before the pace kind of thinned out and we all had a bit more room. There were large Chinese tour groups and loads of French families with young children in my same time-group, so I had to just be patient. Unfortunately, I was really cold the entire time. The palace was damp and chilly with the rainy weather and I found it impossible to get warm. That said, I think I rushed through a bit faster than I would have on a nicer day.

Later that day it turned sunny and gorgeous! I was able to get this shot from Albaycin looking back at the castle, but it shows how huge this palace is!

Unbelievable views of Granada from the military portion of the castle complex

Next I forged on to the other large attraction, the Granada Cathedral. My mood can really depend on the atmosphere when I’m visiting and I got stuck entering at the same time as a large group of senior Spaniards and they were so rude. I kept telling myself to not let them get to me, but I was in a sour mood. This was a beautiful space, but I did a brief tour, took some pictures, and moved on. The highlight for me was the ceiling over the alter. It was spectacular!

I decided that these major tourist attractions were not doing it for me. I saw the two major ones, and then I really just stuck to walking around the beautiful historic neighborhoods and enjoying the views of the palace that kept popping up everywhere you turned!

Granada is another city that isn’t easy on the legs! A day of walking around here can really wipe you out! I even got a cramp in my quad on my right leg that felt crazy! I’ve never had this happen before but I must have been doing some serious walking because it seized up and I had to stop to stretch it out and attempt to massage out the cramp. It was so painful!

My flight was out of Malaga, which is about an hour and a half away so I hopped on the handy dandy Alsa bus again! I can’t say enough about how clean and wonderful the bus system is in Spain. I loved taking buses from city to city and highly recommend it to any other traveler! The average price was around $15-20 per ticket too!