The main draw in Granada, a city tucked into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, is the Alhambra, a palace and fortress complex built in the 13th and 14th century by the Moors. But we discovered another great reason to go there: free tapas! It’s not entirely unusual in Spain to go to a tapas bar and get a little something free with your first glass of wine. In Granada, though, you can pretty much count on getting something with every glass of wine you order. I mean, you can’t afford not to drink a lot.

And the free tapas aren’t just something cheap; they’re typically an item on the menu that you would otherwise order. Nor is the wine expensive; often glasses were in the $2.50 range and with pretty decent pours. So you go in, order wine, eat. Repeat. To be sure, we did buy some food, too, since I just can’t drink enough wine to satisfy my evening hunger. Even then, though, it’s practically free, often no more than $2.50 for a little plate of food. We’d end up spending maybe $35 or $40 for a really good meal. You wonder how they can make a living charging low prices for what they don’t give you for free. We weren’t complaining, though.

Oh yeah, back to the Alhambra. Fortunately – very fortunately – we’d learned from Mark’s parents that you pretty much have to get your tickets weeks in advance as it is a very popular tourist destination. So two weeks before our arrival in Granada we went online and even that far in advance, in mid-November, there was practically nothing available. We did get late afternoon tickets, though, and it was pretty spectacular.

Unlike most historic buildings we’ve been touring over these weeks in Spain, the Alhambra is unusual in that there are almost no signs telling you what anything is and there is no audio guide, either. So instead you wander around, just pretty much stunned at the Moorish design, the tiles, the ceilings, the elegant plasterwork with Islamic writing and all that. It really is the most stunning piece of architecture we’ve seen in a long time.

The other great part of the complex is the Generalife. At first I thought some big insurance company had bought naming rights to the gardens, but in fact its name comes from the Arabic jinan al-‘arif, or the overseer’s garden. Really beautiful gardens over an enormous area with fountains and pools and patios and pathways, just the sort of space I love. All that on a gorgeous fall day is about as good as it gets.

Of course, there’s more to Granada than just free tapas and the Alhambra. The city was the capital of the last caliphate in Spain after the Spanish had pushed the Moors down to the southeast corner of the peninsula. Even that ended, though, when in January 1492 (a big year) Ferdinand and Isabella finally dislodged them and marched into the city, ending any major Islamic presence in Europe. The Catholic Monarchs, as they are known, are buried in Granada’s royal chapel. As cameras weren’t allowed into the chapel, though, we have no pictures but trust me, their tombs are there.

Finally, the other big thing we focused on while in Granada was finalizing some travel planning. From Spain we’re crossing the Strait of Gibraltar to spend a couple weeks in Morocco. Then we’re going to hop down to Western Africa to go to Senegal and the Gambia and – if we can get a visa while in Morocco – Ghana. Just after Christmas, then, we’re going to make a very quick trip to Boston for a friend’s wedding before flying down to Mexico and then working our way through Guatemala and into South America. You might be surprised how much work is involved putting something like that together, but we have that much pretty much settled. In other words, there’s no slowing down for us yet!

So we’re walking to the train station in Cordoba as we’re leaving for Seville and I realize, damn, I just got my hair cut yesterday. Who gives up the chance to see a barber in Seville? What was I thinking?

Well, except for that blunder, Seville was great. Part of what we’ve been loving about Spain is how great the transportation has been. Trains are easy and comfy, buses have been anywhere from good to great, and the trip to Seville was no different. Such an easy way to move around when you can read, relax, look out the window, and just enjoy seeing the world go by. And by “world” I mean “olive trees.” Millions and millions of olive trees down this part of Spain. And then you get into the city and it’s all orange trees with tons of oranges sitting there. Gotta love that.

As we were thinking about spending the fall in Spain a few months ago, the hope was that as we moved south the weather would stay warm enough to enjoy things. Boy, has that worked out for us. Seville – one of the hottest places in Europe with average summer highs in the mid-90s – is fabulous in the late fall. Our days were typically in the upper-70s and even low-80s, which made afternoons in the park glorious.

The only downside is that a lot of hotels regulate their AC based on the calendar rather than the thermometer and in our hotel, at least, the AC was turned off. We had a big window that we could open, but then it was way too loud to sleep. Bars in Spain, you see, get going kind of late (like 1:00 AM or something) and keep going way not the morning. So even if you manage to go to sleep with the window open you’ll be awakened all through the night/morning as revelers work their way home. Basically too hot to sleep with the windows closed and too loud to sleep with the windows open. Not such great options.

The lack of sleep aside, though, we loved Seville. It’s definitely a city for having fun in – great bars, great tapas, and lots of happy people enjoying it all. At times I found myself wondering whether anyone in Seville actually works, as there were huge crowds of people at some of the popular watering holes all afternoon and evening. It turns out, of course, that Spain’s unemployment rate is around 25 percent so lots of people don’t work, though I wonder if the high unemployment causes the increased revelry or if it may be the other way around.

Why go to Seville? When the Conquistadors started shipping gold from the New World back to Spain, Seville had a royal monopoly on trans-Atlantic trade and thus the city became fabulously wealthy. And so there’s a lot of beautiful stuff to see; it’s really a great place to just wonder around. Among the things you have to see, though, are the Cathedral, the largest cathedral in the world. In fact, when it was completed in the early 16th century it displaced Hagia Sophia in Istanbul as the world’s largest cathedral, a spot it had held for a thousand years. A thousand years! Among the wonders to be seen in the cathedral is the tomb of none other than Christopher Columbus himself.

Otherwise my favorite was the Maria Luisa Park, a huge green space that makes for a perfect reading spot on warm late-fall days. That and wandering around, sampling tapas, and watching all the fun people seemingly enjoying themselves to the fullest in Seville’s thousands of sidewalk cafés and bars. Oh, and one more thing. While touring the cathedral and listening to the audio guide, I realized at some point that these civilians the guide was discussing were not just non-military people; they were in fact Sevillians. Imagine a whole city of civilians!

On to Granada!

Our sixth stop in Spain was Córdoba. Today it is a moderate-sized city of about 330,000 but in the 10th century, under Moslem rule, it was one of the largest cities in the world and capital of the Caliphate of Córdoba (most of the Iberian peninsula and a bit of North Africa). It was a major cultural and economic center and one of the world’s great centers of learning.

The main reason to come here, for us at least, was the Mezquita de Córdoba, a Cathedral inside a Mosque that’s one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen. It was originally a Christian church, until the Moslems conquered Córdoba in the late 8th century and convert it to a mosque. When Ferdinand III recaptured the city for the Christians in 1236, they start using it as a church again; apparently awed by the mosque’s, well, awesomeness, they initially just modified it for worship services.

In the 16th century, though, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (who was also, confusingly, King Carlos I of Spain) decided they needed a Renaissance cathedral in Córdoba so he had a big section in the middle of the mosque torn out and a big old cathedral just dropped into it. When he saw the finished product he is reported to have said “I have destroyed something unique to the world.”

Destroyed? Yeah, in a way. And yet what’s left is pretty amazing, a Cathedral inside a mosque. You walk into the building and it’s a dark, brooding mosque with hundreds of striped red-and-white arches under a comparatively low ceiling. Humbling and contemplative. Then there are interior walls within which is a bright, brilliant, soaring cathedral with all the gilding and majesty you’d expect from a Renaissance cathedral. Both are stunning. And together they’re, well, unique to the world.

It reminded me of walking around Paris not long after we’d been in Genoa. We loved Genoa in part because of the beautiful narrow winding medieval streets. We love Paris in part because of the beautiful and grand boulevards. Yet those boulevards exist because Emperor Napoleon III had the narrow winding medieval streets torn out. We’d be horrified today if someone ordered something similar, yet it’s what makes Paris Paris. And while destroying the Mosque by dropping a Cathedral in it would not win the votes of historic preservationists today, it created a strange and unique and beautiful piece of architecture.

One more thing about the Mezquita. The entrance fee is about $9, but between 8:30 and 9:30 AM, they let people in for free. Individuals, that is, but not tour groups. So every morning Mark & I would get up, have a quick breakfast, and go there to enjoy the beauty and strangeness without the hordes. The only downside of touring the space was that we were never allowed into the Cathedral itself. You could look in from a couple side areas, but you could never actually go into it or get a view of the whole length of the nave. I don’t know if that was just something closed off for the early morning crowd or what, but while we could walk all around it we could never get in or actually see it very well at all.

An unexpected highlight of Córdoba: the dental care! One night while enjoying tapas at a little place we came to love part of one of Mark’s teeth fell out. So the next morning (instead of a long hike in a nearby national park we’d planned) a woman at the front desk of the hotel recommended a dentist who made an appointment for that morning. After examining him she explained that a 1970s-era metal filling had expanded until it just broke the remaining tooth. So she filled him with novocaine, drilled it out, and put in a new filling. By lunch time he was good as new, and all for about $90. Try to do all that in one morning in the U.S.

Finally, it’s worth noting that we picked a good time to come here. In planning this pass through Spain we hoped it would stay warm long enough to enjoy it before crossing down to Morocco. Well, so far so good; the weather’s been cool but usually pleasant. What we didn’t realize is that Córdoba, it turns out, is the hottest place in all of Europe. Yup, number one. Average daily highs – average – are 98 degrees in July and August with the temperature regularly up in the 100s. The weather was delightfully cool while we were here, though, with intermittent rain. We weren’t complaining, to be sure; a little rain beats the heck out of 100-degree temperatures. And … with a little rain you can get a nice rainbow.