We’re in the same campsite as yesterday. The weather is: for the first time in about a month we’ve seen rain. Not bad enough to keep us in the van mind.<\/p>\n
Our 1995 copy of The Rough Guide Spain, which has prices in\u00a0pesetas\u00a0(hey, it was cheap), tells us ‘If you only see one town in Spain, it should be Granada. For here, extraordinarily well preserved and in a tremendous natural setting, stands the Alhambra – the most exciting, sensual and romantic of all European monuments’. Get in! We’re not usually big on coughing up the euros to see historical attractions, usually churches or castles, but The Rough Guide pulled us in.<\/p>\n
A quick bit of background:<\/p>\n
Did we like it? Yup. For the princely sum of \u20ac13 each, we spent four hours wandering the palaces, towers, gardens, squares and baths. It reminded us of Morocco, but was cleaner, more expensive, and had less beggars. Without bashing out a load of superlatives it’s hard to explain the place, best to come look for yourself, I’ll just say some of the detail is jaw dropping in its complexity.<\/p>\n
As an aside, we’re staying at the Reina Isabel campsite, about 15 mins on the bus from Granada in La Zubia. It’s a nice place and costs \u20ac16 a night with an ACSI card. For some reason though, they will only sell you Alhambra tickets 2 days in advance, so you have to stay at least 2, probably 3 nights if you buy tickets from them. We just turned up at the ticket office at the Alhambra and got a ticket for immediate entry, so if you arrive early you only have to stay one night. Maybe we were lucky, but the place was hardly dead. I think if we’d have had to queue for 2 hours to get in I may have liked it rather less…<\/p>\n