Alhambra Alarm

Following our travails around the Portuguese coast, we returned to Spain and headed inland, this time tanned and with fully charged leisure batteries after a pristine week of southern sun. Seville was to be our first stop: a city famed for Flamenco, fine food, and forlorn foals – upon which eager tourists are carted around the city. We had become accustomed to navigating bustling city centres in search of needle-in-a-haystack parking spots, but nothing quite prepared us for Seville city centre on an international matchday. With the Spanish football team in town, hosting Sweden no less, driving from one side of the metropolis to the other was akin to circumnavigating the M25 during rush hour on Christmas Eve. However, we remained patient, and alert, and eventually snuck our way into an extremely tight spot by the municipal train station. After a couple of deep exhalations, we felt our only option was to join the raucous hordes and go in search of an Irish bar that was showing the evening’s game: The Merchant duly obliged.

The following four days involved an unusually high number of online classes for both of us, which allowed us very little time to leave the confines of the car park and explore our new surroundings. We did, however, manage to shoe-horn a four-hour window into our tight schedules with which to explore, renting scooters to whiz us around the city’s many attractions – starting with its magnificent cathedral.

The weather was glorious, ideal for exploration, and we quickly ascertained why Seville is so highly regarded by travellers and tourists alike. Grand gothic architecture, exotic foliage, and vibrant plazas all within an electric scooting distance, which the council has embraced, make for an extremely pleasant city break. The jewel in the crown being the Plaza de España, which was built to impress the globe at the 1929 World’s Fair. And it is still impressing throngs of tourists today although, being as large as it is, there remain plenty of quiet spots where one can catch a breath and a beer – as well as watch traditional Flamenco. This is exactly what we did before taking a relaxing promenade along the Guadalquivir River, apparently the only major navigable river in the whole of Spain, back to our portable home. Another few days like this would have been ideal but, alas, our ninety-day EU allowance was running short – another Brexit bonus.

We swiftly completed the two-hundred-and-fifty-kilometre hop eastwards to Granada and made camp at a rather precipitous parking spot down a narrow dirt track overlooking the elevated city. It became even more uncomfortable when van after van decided to join us, squeezing a mere inch apart, making a quick escape impossible. However, we decided to ignore the fact that we were just one handbrake failure away from bouncing headfirst into Granada and make the most of our marvellous mountainous surroundings.

We’d selected this spot as it was one of the few within walking distance of both the city centre and the fortress complex of Alhambra, which we had planned to enter on the weekend, in a couple of days’ time. In the interim, we set about wandering the slightly less glorious streets of the Andalusian city, at least in comparison to our previous destination, and consuming our fair share of Andalusian wine whilst preparing for our visit to one of the modern wonders of the world – which I had been looking forward to for months, if not years. Unfortunately, as I attempted to book our spots at the ticket office the evening prior, my bank card decided it was less excited about the visit and stopped functioning entirely. By the time we returned to the van and attempted to book our places online, all tickets for the following few days were sold.

Given the option of spending two more nights sandwiched on a Sierra Navadan mountainside waiting for another unlikely opportunity to acquire tickets or move on to our next destination, we stumped for the latter – which was easier said than done given our sardine-like parking situation. After a fifty-two-point turn which almost pushed a Swiss motorhome over a cliff, we re-joined the handsome Andalusian highway bound for another architectural and cultural wonder of the world: Benidorm (which we swiftly drove past). Valencia here we come.

J