Granada
Granada is the epicenter of old Spain. The tomb of Ferdinand and Isabella in the Capella Real is as much a political mausoleum as Lenin’s tomb in Moscow for the Russians or Ho Chi Minh’s in Hanoi for the Vietnamese. For Spain in its modern formation began in this city in 1492 when Boabdil, the last of the Moors was expelled, bringing the Reconquista to a glorious climax. The Moors had crossed the strait of Gibraltar at the beginning of the eighth century bringing Islam to the Iberian Peninsula; now seven centuries later, the combined military strength of Aragon and Castile triumphantly expelled the Muslims and the Jews, inaugurating an enduring feature of Spanish cuisine the tapas combination of ham with wine that ensures that no Muslim or Jew is present around the table.
The civilization of Al-Andalus had been a beacon of progress in mediaeval Europe. The Arabs had the advanced mathematical and scientific knowledge. They had utilized the concept of place value to develop algebra and trigonometry, their religion propelling them in scientific advance as their civilization spread east and west from the Arabian Peninsula while maintaining the requirement to pray five times a day facing Mecca. Arabs became notable astronomers and skilled navigators. In Al Andalus - a name that derives from an earlier invasion of the territory by the Vandals in the post-Roman period – this civilization flourished, with toleration offered to the other two “peoples of the book” even as the rest of medieval Europe clawed its way out of the ruins of an imploded Pax Romana.
The architectural legacy of that Andalusian civilization was the object of our excursion for the first full day of this voyage. Docking in Motril, we drove the new super highway up into the spectacular foothills of the Sierra Nevada, whose snow-peaked mountains provide the year-round water supply for the Generalife, the gardens of the Alhambra Palace. It is often forgotten that Spain is a land of mountains, the third highest country in Europe after Switzerland and Norway. After Boabdil departed in disgrace from Granada back to North Africa, his Alhambra Place lay abandoned, the Christian monarchs building a new city adjacent to it with a new Cathedral. It was Washington Irving who rediscovered the ruins in the early nineteenth century, inaugurating the incorporation of an Arabesque style into the European Romantic Movement. Most of the landscape gardening that has created today’s Generalife derives from the Arabesque but it preserves essential features of the Islamic garden. In Arabic, the word of garden and the word for paradise are identical. Inside the palace, we delighted in the Islamic tradition of cool, airy interior spaces, decorated with abstract ceramics and stuccoed calligraphy.
A late Spanish lunch – fino sherry and ham to start - at the Alhambra Palace hotel rounded off the morning, followed by a digestive stroll down past the Capella Real and the cathedral before rejoining our coaches to return to the ship in time for the Captain’s Welcome Dinner.
