Seville pictures

Seville, Spain

Goodbye Spain

My month in Spain has flown by! Seville, like Barçelona, Granada, and Córdoba, has been relaxed and happy. It’s well into spring now - sprinklers are on, soaking the grass before the arrival of the punishing Sevillian summer sun. The sky is a piercing Mediterranean blue and the thermometer has reached 27-30 degrees several times this week. The scent of blossoms perfumes the air. Songbirds fill it with their melodies - and I have even spotted parakeets in the trees of Parque Maria Luisa. Because the summer temperatures are brutal, now is when the town is filled with tourists. 

Spain has been a good transition from the Muslim areas I’ve visited to the more secular ones of Europe. It has afforded me a last chance to appreciate Islamic art and architecture. The grand Mudéjar architecture, a combination of Islamic and Christian Romanesque styles, has eased me into a re-appreciation of European buildings. There is a strong Christian flavour to Spain with its violent history, beautiful religious tiles and plaques on buildings, magnificent museums of religious art, immense churches, and church bells still ringing the angelus daily. 

For Semana Santa (Holy Week), the lead up to Easter, there will be huge parades of religious floats and I’ve seen men testing their strength as they rehearse the lifting of these heavy burdens. This is also necessary because when they carry the floats, (now on display in churches and other public buildings) they will, in effect, be blind with the covering cloth flowing to the ground. Crowds will press all around them. They must test their strength and practice their response to purely auditory signals. And when I saw them executing turns in narrow stone paved lanes, I understood thoroughly how difficult this can be. I’ve been told it is a devotion to culture, not religion, that fuels these ceremonies now but it’s hard for me to separate out the religious implications.

I’ve heard a lot of street music here. In Seville, just today, I heard the following: a beat box/rapper; accordion; a brass quintet (playing from the soundtrack to Life is Beautiful); blues guitar and harmonica; Simon and Garfunkel songs with guitar; a pure flamenco male voice singing with his guitar; the smoothest saxophone ever; two girls, one with a haunting voice, the other playing guitar - not for money, simply for their own pleasure; pan flute (the Americas theme is big here - he wears a First Nations headdress); castanets; accompanists for flamenco dancers; and best of all, two men without any instruments, who clapped and stamped and sang soaring, soulful flamenco melodies. 

You can’t have too strong a startle reflex here because there are actually a lot of sudden noises - clapping and stamping, body percussionists, castanets, dancers’ heels, rhythm machines, actual drum kits, and horses clopping as they pull carriages on the cobblestone. 

Spain is a sociable place. In the early evening, people take the air in plazas before dinner. A happy hum rises as children play, and adults drink and take an opportunity to visit. When you join people on a park bench, you make eye contact and exchange greetings. When you enter a store, you do the same. Beggars approach you with a volley of words, no doubt explaining their circumstances, if only I understood. 

Progress walking can be slow and cooperation with others is essential. I’ve grown accustomed to standing sideways on a narrow 8 to 18 inches of sidewalk, to let a car pass in the lane that is only a bit wider than the car itself. The Canadian concept of personal space is a foreign one here. On the sidewalk, you avoid head on collisions only because both you and an oncoming pedestrian have turned sideways, at the last moment, to pass one another. Patience is a must, as groups of friends and family spread across the sidewalk with no thought of anything outside their conversation. Cyclists maneuver without a wobble through pedestrian crowds. Those motorized scooters I saw in Israel are here too, sharing the sidewalk with Segways and the rest of us. 

Sorry as I am to leave Spain, I am looking forward to the next adventure. I fly to Lisbon this weekend, where I’ll meet up with Liz again. I’ve spent a month hardly talking at all, so my vocal chords are a little rusty and when I do speak my voice is rather hoarse. I’m sure that’ll last about two minutes! 

Granada and Córdoba pictures

Córdoba lane leading to a courtyard. Roman column in wall where it narrows. 

Alhambra 

Mezquita-Catedral, Córdoba 

Alhambra 

Alhambra, palace of Car

los V

Alhambra

Minaret turned bell tower, Granada

Mezquita-Catedral, Córdoba 

These  plaques are all over Córdoba 

These oranges are sour and used only for marmalade

Mezquita-Catedral - some of  the church 

Alhambra 

Córdoba, middle of the city 

Alhambra 

Granada, Sacromonte 

Alhambra 

Alhambra 

Alhambra 

Mezquita-Catedral, Córdoba 

Alhambra 

Alhambra 

Mezquita-Catedral, church 

Granada

Alhambra 

Granada and Córdoba

I love Granada with its blend of past and present. In Barçelona’s old city centre, I imagine furtive strangers dressed in black, whisking down shadowy, lamplit streets, dangerous books tucked under their arms. The curving roads mean that if you step a bit right or left, you no longer have a clear sight line of what lies ahead, even when it’s a spacious, sun drenched plaça. In my mind’s eye, I see confused pursuers in the lanes, their quarry disappearing as they lose their footing on the slippery cobblestone. I do in Granada too. 

The old city has different sections, and long ago Albaicin was the Muslim working class neighbourhood at the base of Alhambra, and you can still see the mosque (now a church) and the hammam (now a museum). It is lively with tourist shops today and features, among other things, a plaça of the Inquisition. There is no escape from the past in Spain. 

From Albaicín you walk up to Sacromonte, with whitewashed cave homes built right into the mountain by gypsies. They arrived with Isabella and Ferdinand, who defeated the Muslim Nasrid dynasty in 1492 (busy year, that). It is prime real estate today, with a dramatic panorama of the Darro valley and the Sierra Nevada mountains. Not to mention spectacular views of Alhambra. Gypsies still live in these homes and I heard their guitars through the walls and in the public squares. 

The crowning glory of Granada, the Alhambra itself, was beyond my expectations, although I didn’t realize it right away. I’ve seen a lot of amazing Islamic architecture, gardens, carving, plaster and tile work. At first I thought well, this is more of the same. (Not that I was complaining!)

Maybe it’s partly a function of being able to spend as long as I wanted there. On a tour, you’re whisked through a site to make sure you see it all in a limited time. But I had the luxury of spending 9 hours at my own exceedingly slow pace, soaking up the atmosphere and the sunshine, taking in the landscape views, listening to the running water and birdsong in the gardens, admiring the buildings inside and out. I was awed by the balance between its art and architecture, its scale, its grace, its beauty. 

I wish I’d stayed in Grenada longer; just when it was starting to feel familiar, it was time to leave for Córdoba where flowers flourish, grass is greener, the air softer, and the temperature warmer. The streets of The Juderia, hard by the old mosque, while still narrow and cobblestoned, are somewhat wider and sunnier, the houses whitewashed and trimmed with mustard yellow. Without letting go of the past, Córdoba is brighter somehow.

Evidence of Andalucía’s Islamic (Moorish) past is everywhere - even the ubiquitous orange trees were brought by the Arabs. Indeed, an entire church has been incongruously inserted into a previously existing mosque. (Which was built on a Visigoth church, which was built on a Roman temple - and which uses Roman columns in its prayer halls.) It is an uneasy union, and I think I agree with the Spanish monarch Charles V who reproved the priests, saying, “You have built what you or others might have built anywhere, but you have destroyed something that was unique in the world."

I’ve been reading historical novels of the Spanish, and Catalan, blood-soaked past. The church is no longer one of the main impetuses for bloodshed but shrines, statues, and church bells call to mind those days. The recent past may hold the prospect of a bloody qfuture as well. In Andalucía, right-wing Spanish nationalism is on the rise, evoking the ghost of Franco. The Catalan independence protests in Barçelona were mild when I was there, as was the police response, but the problem persists. Some say, “Yesterday is gone,” but I wonder if that is ever true.