After unsuccessfully trying to find our way to a hotel in Granada some years back, we had opted for one that promised to be simple to locate. Hotel Alixares is just above the Alhambra, opposite its car park in fact, and the great bonus of this is that all you have to do to get here is to follow the lurid, pink "Alhambra" signs around the Granada ring road, and then on the spur that leads straight here!
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A short walk downhill from the hotel leads round to the Puerta de los Carros
which leads into the Alhambra |
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| A few decorative cannon |
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| Looking north towards the Albaicin, one of the Alcazaba towers on the left |
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| The Nasrid palaces area - the bit you have to pay to get into, on a timed ticket. |
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| Alcazaba - the defensive area of the Alhambra |
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| Conglomerate pillars in Carlos V's palace |
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| Close up of the conglomerate, with pebbles of black schist and white marble |
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| The Wine Gate, probably one of the oldest buildings in the Alhambra |
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The east side of the Wine Gate has lovely tiles and carved
stonework. |
After a wander around the Alhambra we decided to check out the facilities at the hotel and, on ordering a coffee, were pleasantly surprised to find that two croissants turned up as well, and all for €1.20 a head! There's a spacious bar area, so plenty of room for our group to relax in.
I can't resist building stones and stonework generally, so enjoyed seeing paving and walls on the way back.
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Edge on black schist pebbles are a traditional type of cobble in the area. With
the green moss in between this is reminiscent of Harris Tweed! |
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| I was intrigued to see some Moorish carving in a piece of stone reused in a later wall |
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Mix of river cobbles and bricks in the Alhambra wall. The cobbles include igneous
and metamorphic rocks, presumably brought down by rivers from the Sierra Nevada |
From the Alhambra the plan was to go for a drive up the Sierra Nevada: we wanted to see what was at the Dornajo Visitor Centre these days... not a lot - vast barn of a building with next to nothing rattling around inside it .... and grab some lunch. At this point we began to reach chilly, rather dirty heaps of snow and couldn't summon up any enthusiasm to drive further up. We had a feeling there might be more of the same, and the cloud and mist was getting thicker!
Picked a restaurant at random - El Mirador - we liked the look of the log fires, but on a wet and chilly day they didn't go far to warm the rooms. Thought a bowl of soup would be nice but when it turned up it was a a thinnish soup with chopped up ham and egg in it, and a slice of toasted bread floating on the top, not quite the hearty comfort food we had in mind.
The restaurant is famous for it's dried ham - jamon serrano - so presumably that is what we had. And we were entertained as we ate by the two man ham hanging team suspending a new delivery of hams from the ceiling.
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| The view from El Mirador some 1660 m up in the Sierra Nevada, with a nice big cloud full of sleet over head |
The black cloud looked full of something and it was - sleet - which it threw at us all the way back down. Yuck.
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