The end of the holiday! :(

Well, it's my last day in Spain!! I'm flying out of Jerez de la Fronteria, so drove to the town to have a look around. They have a Alcazbar there as well, from about 1000 years ago. It had a small mosque.....
After the Arabs were defeated in Spain, the local aristocrats took over the site and built a big pink palace and some lovely gardens......
This is the view from the top of the palace.....
I used the last few hours with my beloved Kia Picante to drive inland from Jerez, to another small town, built on a hill with an old Arab Alcazbar! I can't remember the name but it was really pretty and quite dramatic, as it was very hilly and had lots of tiny winding streets.
Well, sadly that's the end of my Spain trip!! I will go back a few months to the summer trip next, and start again where i left off..... in Poland!

Roman stuff...

So the place I was staying (Bolonia) used to be a Roman town of about 2000 people! The site doesn't have anything particularly enormous or impressive, but i really liked it because it was sort of like a complete town, and you could really imagine people living and working there! Also, of course, I loved that it was so close to the beach!
The area was famous in ancient times for its salted fish and garum, which was like a fermented fish sauce that they all loved back then (basically put all the nasty bits of the fish along with its blood and guts in a sealed pot for ages and ages and you'll have garum!) The town was called Belo Claudio, and had a part they was the industrial section where you could see the big carved out pans where they used to extract salt, and a warehouse with a doorway and windows still intact......
Of course it also had the essential ampitheatre.......
and forum......
It was a great place to have a wander around. While staying in Bolonia I also drove to Tarifa a few times, which was close by. The town has a really funky feel to it, and its the only place i saw surfing, and also some kite surfing! It used to be walled, and some parts remain, including the city gate.....

Well, we are almost at the end of my Spanish adventure, just one day left now!

more lovely beaches!!

So after Granada I drove along the coast to the west, heading for the part of SPain that is closest to Morocco. You can catch ferries from places like Algericas, Tarifa and Gibraltar to Morocco, although the coast of Africa is so close in these places it looks like you could swim over! I had a bit of a sticky beak at Gibraltar....the rock is quite a sight! much bigger than i expected, and sort of rises out of the flat land around it really suddenly and unexpectedly....
I stayed at a gorgeous tiny beach town called Bolonia for 3 nights.... I loved it there!! Not only a beautiful beach but the ruins of a Roman town right beside the beach!! (more on that in the next entry...). The beaches in this part of Spain really reminded me of the beaches at home....

I spent my time in this area driving around and exploring other little towns. Another one of my favourites was Cano las Meca......

Granada

After the desert I drove along the Costa Del Sol on my way to Granada. The Costa del Sol is not very nice at all.... covered by tourist settlements and ugly buildings designed to fit as many ex pats in as cheaply as possible! Any land that wasn't covered like this had massive rectangular greenhouses for growing fruit and veg to be exported! A shame really, because the coastline itself it quite nice.... all rugged cliffs and little coves.
I stayed outside of Granada and went for a drive in the surrounding towns and villages on my first day there. There were lots of old Arab castles, most of them fairly ruined, but this one at La Calahorra was pretty impressive!

The largest toen in the area, apart from Granada, is Guadix. I spent the afternoon there looking around the Arab Alcazbar and the cathedral. The town itself is pretty interesting, as there is a district where the people live in houses that are built into the rock, so essentially they are living in a cave!! It reminded me a little bit of the houses in the Atlas mountains in Morocco, except these Spanish ones were mostly white...

Next day I went to Granada to see the Alhambra. It was the palace of many Muslim kings, and is very well preserved. It is situated on a hill overlooking the whole town and surrounding areas, and is on the UNESCO world hertiage list. The Arabic name meand red castle, because of the reddish walls. The main attraction there is the Nasrid palace, which really was very very beautiful. You can almost imagine royalty living there today!
The whole place is filled with water- fountains and rectangular ponds with water trickling through them, so you can hear the sound of trickling water almost everywhere you go!! Another large part of the Alhambra complex is the Generalife (means Architect's garden), which is filled with manicured gardens, beautiful buildings and veranda's for observing the gardens and city from above.

Next on the agenda is, surprise surprise, more beaches!! I set off for Cadiz province, which is the one closest to Morocco and where you can catch ferries to a few Moroccan cities.

snakes don't like it when you attempt to wee on them....

So, after the coastal loveliness of the Cabo de Gata, I headed inland to the only desert in continental Europe, called Tabernas desert. It was very picturesque, and reminded me of the Flinders ranges and the breakaways in South Australia. A part of it is called 'mini Hollywood', as they used to make lots of films here, mainly spaghetti westerns. The main town there is called Tabernas, and there is a ruined Arab castle there, so of course i set out for a look. It was quite cool.... very ruined and not a whole lot left, but worth seeing nonetheless, and had some great views over the desert. Unfortunately, by this time I was absolutely busting to go to the loo. As there was absolutely no-one else around and the castle was up high enough so that no-one could see me, i decided to go for a bush wee. After finding a suitably protected spot where i thought no-one could see me, I proceeded to unbutton and unzip, and had managed to get my shorts halfway down my bum when i heard a slithery noise behind me. I turned around to find, of course, a snake very close to my bottom, slithering slowly backwards and sort of half reared up ready to get me!! well, I haven't run that fast in a long long time, but got away from it pretty damn sharpish!! Here is a photo of the scene of the crime......

After that experience i left the desert and drove to an area called Las Alpajurras, still inland and on the way to Granada. They have lots of cute little villages where all the buildings are whitewashed and quaint, like this one called Bubion....

In one of the towns, Orgiva, I was lucky enough to run into a Flamenco festival!! It was fantastic!! The streets were absolutely brimming with people and there was lots of music, dancing and food, including this giant paella....

It was lovely to see most of the women were dressed in Flamenco type costume, and there was a very happy vibe in the air!! The queen of Orgiva even posed for a photo for me...

Back to the beach at last!!

After leaving Cordoba I headed for the Cabo De Gata National Park area, which is to the east of Cordoba, at the very edge of Andulacia. It was quite remote and didn't have many tourists which was a nice change! I stayed near a village called Las Negras......

and went swimming every day!
I had 3 days in the Cabo de Gata area, and spent the time driving around the coastal towns, which were very pretty, and mostly looked like this one called Agua Amarga with whitewashed perfect looking little houses crowded on the edge of a cliff or beach....
and going for a swim at different beaches in the area, such as Muertos beach......I loved it and really felt properly relaxed by the time my 3 days were up! Next was a drive through the only desert in Continental Europe.....

Cordoba

So after Seville I got in my little bruum bruum and motored over to Cordoba! (I´m in love with my hire car... a Kia Picant that takes 27 euros to fill it up and it goes for ages!!) First stop was of course something old and ruined.... the Medina Azahara...















This was where a Muslim caliph built the capital of his new empire with the Muslims conquered spain. Only one tenth of the city has been excavated, and only a quarter of that is open to visitors!!
I really liked Cordoba, even more than Seville I think!! Its got an amazing blend of Islamic buildings that have been incorporated into later European ones, even more so than Seville. The cathedral was absolutely stunning......













Just wandering around the streets getting lost is great fun... you stumble across so much, like this old gateway to the city...

The Roman bridge was beautiful as well...... I found it on my first day in Cordoba, just as the sun was going down......

Well, its Adios to Cordoba now, as I head towards the coast to find some beaches to chill out on.....

Seville

Well, this is going to get a bit confusing now.... this blog will only let me put 1 enty and 5 photos on per day, so i´ve been trying to catch up on the summer trip stuff. i´ve still got lots to go, but in the meantime am going to start writing about the trip i´m on at the moment.... in Spain!
Well, it all starts in Seville. It´s a beautiful city with many many things to explore! One of the main sights is the cathedral, which is very very Spainsh!! It´s not at all like a traditional English style cathedral.. They have all kinds of rooms and little altars plonked in the middle of it! They also incorporated a part of the mosque that used to be there into the cathedral.... Its the Giralda, the tower where the call to prayer was made when the area was under Islamic rule. I climbed to the top and took this photo from inside the tower, looking over the top of the cathedral...












Right next to the cathedral is the Alcazar, which was started in the 9th century by the Spanish king, and added to in the 11th century when the Muslims took over. It is absolutely gorgeous inside- its amazing how many Islamic buildings survived and were kept in good condition by the Spanish! Quite often they built European/Christian monuments and/or buildings which incoroprated the previous Islamic ones...... something which I haven´t seen anywhere else in the world!This is the part of the inside of the Alcazar...

This is the garden and the remains of the wall which used to surround the Alcazar in Islamic times....

There are so many beautiful sites in Seville, I can´t show you all of them here, but here is just one more from Seville, the Plaza de España. It is really breathtaking.....