Saturday, February 21, 2015

Granada, Thursday and Friday morning


We spent most of Thursday morning and early afternoon wandering through the neighbourhood of Albaicín (the original Moorish city) right up the hill to the top of the old city walls (the church and Abbey of San Miguel--that white building in the upper left)...

...and then down into the neighbourhood of Sacromonte, where there are fascinating cave homes.

 It was a delightful wander, pausing to check the map every now and then, but mainly being guided by our intuition, e.g. come to a corner and, "Shall we go up or down? That street looks interesting, or what's around that corner?" The graffiti is dramatic and seems to be an acceptable part of the urban landscape here. People appear to take lots of time in creating these complex images, making us think that these are not painted in the middle of the night in poor light.

We stumbled into the neighbourhood of Sacromonte when we walked down the hill from San Miguel, first seeing this dog enjoying the sun in this old chair...

We soon realized that this chair was about 20 m in front of a rudimentary cave house. In front was a table with a pan of water. We could see smoke coming from a stack, and the door was open...then out popped a man who waved at us. (No photos...too intrusive) We carried on down the path, and could see all sorts of other cave houses.
As we got lower down, the houses became more permanent looking, with whitewashed  fronts, paved paths, well established gardens, and obviously serviced with utilities.


Later in the day we went on another walking tour with a guide into the same neighbourhoods, and discovered that Sacromonte is a well established "Gitano" neighbourhood (a.k.a. Gypsy or Roma), and that the ancestors of many of the current residents started arriving here 500 years ago. The Gitano were originally from the Punjab in India...some are still nomadic, roaming as far as Ireland. Also settling in this area were Moriscos (Moors converted to Christian) who were no longer welcome to live in the original Arab neighbourhoods of Christian Grenada in the 1600s.  We learned that the rudimentary cave houses we saw higher up are occupied by "hippies", and others literally living on the margins of society, and yes, there are no services further up the hill. 

On Friday morning, we went back yet again to Sacromonte to visit the Museo Cuevos del Sacromonte, a nicely designed museum demonstrating traditional life in the area. Here's a typical home, 3 rooms cut into the hillside...

The kitchen was either the front room, closest to the door for light and ventilation, or in a separate cave, but in this example was now the sewing room, how perfect is that!

During the Thursday tour we also visited a "Carmen", which is a term used for a villa behind a wall with a garden. These are the gardens of the Carmen de la Victoria which belongs to the University of Granada and is accommodation for visiting scholars. A fabulous pergola of Cyprus trees trained over an iron frame:


Carmen gardens almost always include pyramidal cedars (so when looking at the Albaicín neighbourhood from a distance you can tell where the carmens are by the cedars)...

...fruit and nut trees, and a formal garden laid out with low hedges and paving stones...








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