No Rain in Spain
Our overnight AirEuropa flight delivered us to Madrid at noon on Thursday, October 15, 2009. We checked into the Hotel Paseo del Arte, near the three main fine art museums of the city, and napped before making a quick tour of the Museo Reina Sofia. Our goal there was a brief revisit of Picasso’s dramatic depiction of the Guernica bombing. We had last seen it over thirty years ago when it was still in New York. The collection of studies that Picasso did for the painting made me understand how carefully Picasso crafted the work’s stunning impression.
By the time we left and walked to the neighboring Botanical Garden, it was already closing for the evening. Nevertheless, it gave us a seductive invitation to return with the fresh green scent that the cool breeze brought through its iron fence as we strolled along the Paseo del Prado.
Back at our hotel, we changed into the required more formal clothing and caught a taxi to bring us to the Terrazza del Cassino, a Michelin-starred restaurant located apparently in a businessmen’s club. As in all the other dinner places we would visit, we were among the first two or three tables served. All the other diners in the room, of course, were also Americans—the Spanish don’t get around to their last meal of the evening until 11:00 or later. With little else to do, the waiter and service people (there were a lot of them) took attentive care of us, carefully introducing multiple starting treats like a foamed cocktail and gnocci stuffed with liquefied pesto sauce that had to be eaten in one swallow to avoid spraying the table with its contents.
We hurried back to the hotel in order to catch up on lost sleep and give us a chance to begin Friday early. The first agenda item was to try the much recommended local breakfast favorite of churros con chocolate at the Café Brillante. The deep fat fried fingers of bread batter made good dipping tools for the cups of thick hot chocolate; however, Sue found the meal to be a bit too greasy and rich.
A short walk along the Botanical Garden brought us again to the Museo del Prado that we entered in anticipation of miles of galleries, a thousand or more fine medieval to 19th Century paintings, and crowds of tourists. Fortunately, we were wrong about the latter, even though visiting the country’s cultural heritage sites in October is apparently very popular. We spent about 3½ hours in the museum, but only one of us had the strength to use the time fully and view the works of Velazquez, Goya, El Greco, Dali, Dutch and Italian masters. It would take a week to allow sufficient opportunities for resting on gallery benches to extend the wandering attention of one of our minds. Besides, it sometimes seemed that most of the paintings depicted murders or burials. How many of these can you look at in one day and still muster a bright outlook for the rest of Madrid’s attractions?
After a quick lunch at the Prado cafeteria, we crossed town to the Royal Palace for a tour of its ornate ceremonial and family rooms. Spain had just celebrated its national Columbus Day holiday--much of the wealth displayed at the Royal Palace was due to the conquest of the Americas that Columbus’s discoveries had set in motion. Our English-speaking guide was amused when I pointed out to him that in New York Columbus Day honors his Italian heritage more than his Spanish sponsors. The guide seemed to take more pleasure, however, in pointing out how much of the palace’s silver, gold, crystal and china did not survive the demands of the national treasury when resources were needed to fight Napoleon’s invasion or civil war rebels.
We next wandered to where we should have eaten lunch, the gorgeous collection of fresh food counters and bars in the Mercado Miguel. Madrid is really compact; so a walk of only a few more blocks under the late afternoon’s blue skies brought us into the neo-classically designed Plaza Major, a grand motor-vehicle-free square surrounded by stucco-clad five-storey apartment and office buildings with cafes and shops on the ground floors of all four sides. A comforting hum of conversation filled the air, as patrons appeared to move from one café to the next following the warmth of the sun as it set behind the Plaza’s rooftops. We were later told that the square was used for bull fights, autos-da-fe, and assorted other “festivals” that well-healed residents could enjoy in the comfort of their balconies.
The next treat in store for us was our tapas tour, replacing dinner that night with a guided sampling of popular bars in the center of town where the custom to eat a variety of small cooked foods with drinks began as compliance with the decree of a bygone drunkard-infuriated King. We met our leader, Danny the Hispanic-Celt, in the center of Madrid’s social scene, the Puerto del Sol. Our rendezvous place, a statue of an extinct type of bear munching on the leaves of an extinct type of tree, is a popular site for visitors to have their pictures taken, below Madrilenos’ sentimental favorite neon Tio Pepe sign, as iconic as Boston’s CITGO sign.
Danny began the evening at a franchise of the Museo de Jamon chain, where the many kinds of ham that the Spanish savor are served to, in our case, imbibers of red Rioja wine. The most prized of those hams comes from pigs that are actually raised in Spain under oak trees, limiting their diet to acorns. There we met the rest of our bar tour group, Irina, Olivia, and Andrea. The three of them were in Madrid on business trips and took the occasion to enrich their time in Madrid with the company of people they wouldn’t ordinarily meet at work. Danny certainly fit that bill; the entire group was a convivial traveling party for all of us. And travel we did, culinarily, to Asturia (northwestern Spain above Portugal) where the tapas are washed down with apple cider poured into the glass from a bottle held as far above it as one’s confidence allows, Extremadura (Southwestern Spain where oak forests feed swine herds), Castilla y Leon (north of Madrid) and Galicia (on the very Northwestern corner of the Iberian peninsula, from which the octopus and shrimp finished off our meal). Earlier delectibles included baked chicken, hot and mild green peppers, chorizo sausage, and a sweet spread made from Cabrales blue cheese.
We took Saturday breakfast at a café near our hotel, then walked up the Paseo to the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum while the streets started to echo with well-rehearsed chants of youth groups carrying banners and wearing T-shirts espousing the values of the Spanish Family Forum. In fact, all Saturday we would witness the gathering in Madrid of thousands (it was claimed in the news that the number exceeded a million) of demonstrators who would mass at around 4:00 PM in the Puerto del Sol to protest the EU’s and the Spanish Socialist Party’s pro-choice policy. (The Catholic conservatives must have put a large sum of money into organizing the rally.) Conveniently for them, the reconstruction of the Puerto del Sol had just been completed; conveniently for us, we had taken in the sights of that square the evening before.
It was easy to ignore the busloads of well-behaved pro-lifers when we entered what has to be one of my all-time favorite art museums. The Thyssen-Bornemisza displays in a chronological sequence of rooms its comprehensive survey of paintings that span the 13th through the 20th Centuries. The collection has been characterized as minor works by major masters, especially Impressionists. But some of its possessions will have a lasting impact, such as its inclusion of three striking paintings by Edward Hopper, and the Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin portraits of kittens mesmerized by tempting feasts.
A sandwich in the museum’s café prepared us for visiting several of Madrid’s fountains and joining anti-abortion demonstrators for a siesta in the Parque del Retiro and the Botanical Garden. From there, they were headed for the rally at the Puerta del Sol, which was covered on CNN when we returned to our hotel room. Saturday evening was devoted to the Michelin-starred (this time two) Restaurante La Broche. (Leaving little to chance, Sue had made the reservations before we left New York by email for this and two other dinners we ate in Spain.)
An early start on Sunday put us on a sardine-can Iberia Airbus flight southward that was mercifully short before gliding between hilltops before landing in Granada. We grabbed a taxi at the airport, and the driver let us off at the foot of a cobblestone street that climbed up to our hotel, Room Mate Migueletes. Our room was not yet ready, so we left our bags and headed back to the nearby center of town for breakfast at a café. We wandered into the Plaza Nueva and walked alongside the Rio Darro in the direction of Alhambra, and returned to our conveniently located hotel in time to meet our guide in the lobby.
Ann is an independent tour operator who with her husband found their ideal retirement location in the Albayzin (old Jewish and Moorish) quarter of this provincial capital of Andalucia. She’s happy not to be in her native Kansas anymore. Ann took us to the Alhambra by taxi (she had given up her own car years ago) so we arrived at the gate during our assigned half-hour entry window.
Granada was the last redoubt of the ultimately expelled Islamic rulers of Spain, the Nasrid dynasty, who had built a complex overlooking town including a fortress, palaces and gardens. Its Arabic name means “the red one,” referring to the color of the hill’s clay. A succession of formal rooms, fountains and pools are exquisitely finished in molded stucco, carved wood, and colored ceramic tiles. All the water features are fed by aqueducts that bring snow melt down from the Sierra Nevada Mountains that overlook Granada on the south.
The designs, following Islamic custom, consist of Arabic phrases (not all are from the Koran) and geometric puzzles, a few of which inspired M.C. Escher to create his drawings of interlocking figures. Also following Moorish custom, the Alhambra’s rooms were not richly furnished; its residents and visitors commonly sat on rugs and pillows on the floors. Unfortunately, the carpets have not survived. (Because of the destruction caused by fires and explosions over the centuries, much of the woodwork in Alhambra has had to be redone, and the painted details have disappeared or faded.)
The palaces’ rooms are wonders of balance and grace, with galleries of tapered marble columns merging into ceilings made of stucco cupolas reminiscent of stalactites, called “mocarabes.” (Alas, the lions were on leave from their Courtyard for refurbishment.) We’re no architectural critics, and Ann made no pretensions in that direction either. However, the memory the design leaves is one of great space, despite the limited geographic area that Alhambra occupies on its elevated narrow island of land set above Granada. It was supremely defensible--they say that the towers and walls of its citadel, Alcazar, were built to allow the easy use of boiling oil and molten lead to beat back besiegers.
Granada was finally “liberated” from Moorish rule in 1492, and the Catholic kings, Ferdinand and Isabella, commissioned Columbus’s journey to the Indies in Alhambra’s grand Hall of the Ambassadors. Their grandson, Charles V (who was really a Hapsburg emperor and barely spoke Spanish) built his own palace right next to Alhambra, a cubical structure surrounding a circular courtyard. Alas, it was closed for refurbishment, but we got the idea that the re-entrenched Christian rulers of Spain built it to demonstrate their possession and dominance of the cultural heritage left behind by the Nasrid kings.
The Moors also left behind a beautiful botanical and leisure garden, the Generalife. It occupies another corner of the hill on which Alhambra sits. Walking through it gives a cooling and colorful respite to visitors, as it is said it did to the courtesans of the Nasrid and the Hapsburg rulers. The driver of the minibus that took us from Alhambra down through the Albaizin to the Plaza Nueva was obviously experienced in negotiating its narrow streets—I imagined he had shopped for that vehicle with a tape measure in hand. All three of us then quenched our thirst with the local brew at an outdoor café in the square.
We finally checked into our room after walking up to our hotel and taxied up to the Mirador de San Nicolas for a view of the Alhambra across the river valley under the setting sun. This park was filled with families and couples enjoying the day’s end and the romantic view of the palaces, city and distant mountains. When darkness closed in, colorful lights illuminated Alhambra, making a picturesque backdrop. Sue had perfectly anticipated this dramatic setting by reserving a table for us at El Huerto de Juan Ranas restaurant located just under the Mirador. It was almost embarrassing to be seated in front of a large window filled with a view of the lighted Alhambra. If that wasn’t enough, the dinner was fabulous.
Following an early breakfast at the hotel, we walked to the Arab Baths for soaking in its variety of different-temperature-water pools and a massage. It had been only a five-day October holiday, so we were not really in need of recuperating. Still, the Arab Baths prepared our bodies for the cramped flight back to Madrid and the long transoceanic voyage to New York.
Now that I think about it, Spain seems to be in love with pork products, including dozens of kinds of ham and chorizo sausage, not to mention with shellfish. The national diet might have been quite different if the Catholics had not reconquered the whole peninsula and the Inquisition had not expelled, converted or executed nearly all the Muslims and Jews. The consequences of two other events have impacted Spanish culture just as much—the acquisition of territories in the Americas and Asia, and the dynastic coalition with Hapsburg Austria. It all results in the rich Hispanic heritage that I often insolently ignore.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
No Rain in Spain
Our overnight AirEuropa flight delivered us to Madrid at noon on Thursday, October 15, 2009. We checked into the Hotel Paseo del Arte, near the three main fine art museums of the city, and napped before making a quick tour of the Museo Reina Sofia. Our goal there was a brief revisit of Picasso’s dramatic depiction of the Guernica bombing. We had last seen it over thirty years ago when it was still in New York. The collection of studies that Picasso did for the painting made me understand how carefully Picasso crafted the work’s stunning impression.
By the time we left and walked to the neighboring Botanical Garden, it was already closing for the evening. Nevertheless, it gave us a seductive invitation to return with the fresh green scent that the cool breeze brought through its iron fence as we strolled along the Paseo del Prado.
Back at our hotel, we changed into the required more formal clothing and caught a taxi to bring us to the Terrazza del Cassino, a Michelin-starred restaurant located apparently in a businessmen’s club. As in all the other dinner places we would visit, we were among the first two or three tables served. All the other diners in the room, of course, were also Americans—the Spanish don’t get around to their last meal of the evening until 11:00 or later. With little else to do, the waiter and service people (there were a lot of them) took attentive care of us, carefully introducing multiple starting treats like a foamed cocktail and gnocci stuffed with liquefied pesto sauce that had to be eaten in one swallow to avoid spraying the table with its contents.
We hurried back to the hotel in order to catch up on lost sleep and give us a chance to begin Friday early. The first agenda item was to try the much recommended local breakfast favorite of churros con chocolate at the Café Brillante. The deep fat fried fingers of bread batter made good dipping tools for the cups of thick hot chocolate; however, Sue found the meal to be a bit too greasy and rich.
A short walk along the Botanical Garden brought us again to the Museo del Prado that we entered in anticipation of miles of galleries, a thousand or more fine medieval to 19th Century paintings, and crowds of tourists. Fortunately, we were wrong about the latter, even though visiting the country’s cultural heritage sites in October is apparently very popular. We spent about 3½ hours in the museum, but only one of us had the strength to use the time fully and view the works of Velazquez, Goya, El Greco, Dali, Dutch and Italian masters. It would take a week to allow sufficient opportunities for resting on gallery benches to extend the wandering attention of one of our minds. Besides, it sometimes seemed that most of the paintings depicted murders or burials. How many of these can you look at in one day and still muster a bright outlook for the rest of Madrid’s attractions?
After a quick lunch at the Prado cafeteria, we crossed town to the Royal Palace for a tour of its ornate ceremonial and family rooms. Spain had just celebrated its national Columbus Day holiday--much of the wealth displayed at the Royal Palace was due to the conquest of the Americas that Columbus’s discoveries had set in motion. Our English-speaking guide was amused when I pointed out to him that in New York Columbus Day honors his Italian heritage more than his Spanish sponsors. The guide seemed to take more pleasure, however, in pointing out how much of the palace’s silver, gold, crystal and china did not survive the demands of the national treasury when resources were needed to fight Napoleon’s invasion or civil war rebels.
We next wandered to where we should have eaten lunch, the gorgeous collection of fresh food counters and bars in the Mercado Miguel. Madrid is really compact; so a walk of only a few more blocks under the late afternoon’s blue skies brought us into the neo-classically designed Plaza Major, a grand motor-vehicle-free square surrounded by stucco-clad five-storey apartment and office buildings with cafes and shops on the ground floors of all four sides. A comforting hum of conversation filled the air, as patrons appeared to move from one café to the next following the warmth of the sun as it set behind the Plaza’s rooftops. We were later told that the square was used for bull fights, autos-da-fe, and assorted other “festivals” that well-healed residents could enjoy in the comfort of their balconies.
The next treat in store for us was our tapas tour, replacing dinner that night with a guided sampling of popular bars in the center of town where the custom to eat a variety of small cooked foods with drinks began as compliance with the decree of a bygone drunkard-infuriated King. We met our leader, Danny the Hispanic-Celt, in the center of Madrid’s social scene, the Puerto del Sol. Our rendezvous place, a statue of an extinct type of bear munching on the leaves of an extinct type of tree, is a popular site for visitors to have their pictures taken, below Madrilenos’ sentimental favorite neon Tio Pepe sign, as iconic as Boston’s CITGO sign.
Danny began the evening at a franchise of the Museo de Jamon chain, where the many kinds of ham that the Spanish savor are served to, in our case, imbibers of red Rioja wine. The most prized of those hams comes from pigs that are actually raised in Spain under oak trees, limiting their diet to acorns. There we met the rest of our bar tour group, Irina, Olivia, and Andrea. The three of them were in Madrid on business trips and took the occasion to enrich their time in Madrid with the company of people they wouldn’t ordinarily meet at work. Danny certainly fit that bill; the entire group was a convivial traveling party for all of us. And travel we did, culinarily, to Asturia (northwestern Spain above Portugal) where the tapas are washed down with apple cider poured into the glass from a bottle held as far above it as one’s confidence allows, Extremadura (Southwestern Spain where oak forests feed swine herds), Castilla y Leon (north of Madrid) and Galicia (on the very Northwestern corner of the Iberian peninsula, from which the octopus and shrimp finished off our meal). Earlier delectibles included baked chicken, hot and mild green peppers, chorizo sausage, and a sweet spread made from Cabrales blue cheese.
We took Saturday breakfast at a café near our hotel, then walked up the Paseo to the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum while the streets started to echo with well-rehearsed chants of youth groups carrying banners and wearing T-shirts espousing the values of the Spanish Family Forum. In fact, all Saturday we would witness the gathering in Madrid of thousands (it was claimed in the news that the number exceeded a million) of demonstrators who would mass at around 4:00 PM in the Puerto del Sol to protest the EU’s and the Spanish Socialist Party’s pro-choice policy. (The Catholic conservatives must have put a large sum of money into organizing the rally.) Conveniently for them, the reconstruction of the Puerto del Sol had just been completed; conveniently for us, we had taken in the sights of that square the evening before.
It was easy to ignore the busloads of well-behaved pro-lifers when we entered what has to be one of my all-time favorite art museums. The Thyssen-Bornemisza displays in a chronological sequence of rooms its comprehensive survey of paintings that span the 13th through the 20th Centuries. The collection has been characterized as minor works by major masters, especially Impressionists. But some of its possessions will have a lasting impact, such as its inclusion of three striking paintings by Edward Hopper, and the Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin portraits of kittens mesmerized by tempting feasts.
A sandwich in the museum’s café prepared us for visiting several of Madrid’s fountains and joining anti-abortion demonstrators for a siesta in the Parque del Retiro and the Botanical Garden. From there, they were headed for the rally at the Puerta del Sol, which was covered on CNN when we returned to our hotel room. Saturday evening was devoted to the Michelin-starred (this time two) Restaurante La Broche. (Leaving little to chance, Sue had made the reservations before we left New York by email for this and two other dinners we ate in Spain.)
An early start on Sunday put us on a sardine-can Iberia Airbus flight southward that was mercifully short before gliding between hilltops before landing in Granada. We grabbed a taxi at the airport, and the driver let us off at the foot of a cobblestone street that climbed up to our hotel, Room Mate Migueletes. Our room was not yet ready, so we left our bags and headed back to the nearby center of town for breakfast at a café. We wandered into the Plaza Nueva and walked alongside the Rio Darro in the direction of Alhambra, and returned to our conveniently located hotel in time to meet our guide in the lobby.
Ann is an independent tour operator who with her husband found their ideal retirement location in the Albayzin (old Jewish and Moorish) quarter of this provincial capital of Andalucia. She’s happy not to be in her native Kansas anymore. Ann took us to the Alhambra by taxi (she had given up her own car years ago) so we arrived at the gate during our assigned half-hour entry window.
Granada was the last redoubt of the ultimately expelled Islamic rulers of Spain, the Nasrid dynasty, who had built a complex overlooking town including a fortress, palaces and gardens. Its Arabic name means “the red one,” referring to the color of the hill’s clay. A succession of formal rooms, fountains and pools are exquisitely finished in molded stucco, carved wood, and colored ceramic tiles. All the water features are fed by aqueducts that bring snow melt down from the Sierra Nevada Mountains that overlook Granada on the south.
The designs, following Islamic custom, consist of Arabic phrases (not all are from the Koran) and geometric puzzles, a few of which inspired M.C. Escher to create his drawings of interlocking figures. Also following Moorish custom, the Alhambra’s rooms were not richly furnished; its residents and visitors commonly sat on rugs and pillows on the floors. Unfortunately, the carpets have not survived. (Because of the destruction caused by fires and explosions over the centuries, much of the woodwork in Alhambra has had to be redone, and the painted details have disappeared or faded.)
The places’ rooms are wonders of balance and grace, with galleries of tapered marble columns merging into ceilings made of stucco cupolas reminiscent of stalactites, called “mocarabes.” (Alas the lions were on leave from their Courtyard for refurbishment.) We’re no architectural critics, and Ann made no pretensions in that direction either. However, the memory the design leaves is one of great space, despite the limited geographic area that Alhambra occupies on its elevated narrow island of land set above Granada. It was supremely defensible--they say that the towers and walls of its citadel, Alcazar, were built to allow the easy use of boiling oil and molten lead to beat back besiegers.
Granada was finally “liberated” from Moorish rule in 1492, and the Catholic kings, Ferdinand and Isabella, commissioned Columbus’s journey to the Indies in Alhambra’s grand Hall of the Ambassadors. Their grandson, Charles V (who was really a Hapsburg emperor and barely spoke Spanish) built his own palace right next to Alhambra, a cubical structure surrounding a circular courtyard. Alas, it was closed for refurbishment, but we got the idea that the re-entrenched Christian rulers of Spain built it to demonstrate their possession and dominance of the cultural heritage left behind by the Nasrid kings.
The Moors also left behind a beautiful botanical and leisure garden, the Generalife. It occupies another corner of the hill on which Alhambra sits. Walking through it gives a cooling and colorful respite to visitors, as it is said it did to the courtesans of the Nasrid and the Hapsburg rulers. The driver of the minibus that took us from Alhambra down through the Albaizin to the Plaza Nueva was obviously experienced in negotiating its narrow streets—I imagined he had shopped for that vehicle with a tape measure in hand. All three of us then quenched our thirst with the local brew at an outdoor café in the square.
We finally checked into our room after walking up to our hotel and taxied up to the Mirador de San Nicolas for a view of the Alhambra across the river valley under the setting sun. This park was filled with families and couples enjoying the day’s end and the romantic view of the palaces, city and distant mountains. When darkness closed in, colorful lights illuminated Alhambra, making a picturesque backdrop. Sue had perfectly anticipated this dramatic setting by reserving a table for us at El Huerto de Juan Ranas restaurant located just under the Mirador. It was almost embarrassing to be seated in front of a large window filled with a view of the lighted Alhambra. If that wasn’t enough, the dinner was fabulous.
Following an early breakfast at the hotel, we walked to the Arab Baths for soaking in its variety of different-temperature-water pools and a massage. It had been only a five-day October holiday, so we were not really in need of recuperating. Still, the Arab Baths prepared our bodies for the cramped flight back to Madrid and the long transoceanic voyage to New York.
Now that I think about it, Spain seems to be in love with pork products, including dozens of kinds of ham and chorizo sausage, not to mention with shellfish. The national diet might have been quite different if the Catholics had not reconquered the whole peninsula and the Inquisition had not expelled, converted or executed nearly all the Muslims and Jews. The consequences of two other events have impacted Spanish culture just as much—the acquisition of territories in the Americas and Asia, and the dynastic coalition with Hapsburg Austria. It all results in the rich Hispanic heritage that I often insolently ignore.
Our overnight AirEuropa flight delivered us to Madrid at noon on Thursday, October 15, 2009. We checked into the Hotel Paseo del Arte, near the three main fine art museums of the city, and napped before making a quick tour of the Museo Reina Sofia. Our goal there was a brief revisit of Picasso’s dramatic depiction of the Guernica bombing. We had last seen it over thirty years ago when it was still in New York. The collection of studies that Picasso did for the painting made me understand how carefully Picasso crafted the work’s stunning impression.
By the time we left and walked to the neighboring Botanical Garden, it was already closing for the evening. Nevertheless, it gave us a seductive invitation to return with the fresh green scent that the cool breeze brought through its iron fence as we strolled along the Paseo del Prado.
Back at our hotel, we changed into the required more formal clothing and caught a taxi to bring us to the Terrazza del Cassino, a Michelin-starred restaurant located apparently in a businessmen’s club. As in all the other dinner places we would visit, we were among the first two or three tables served. All the other diners in the room, of course, were also Americans—the Spanish don’t get around to their last meal of the evening until 11:00 or later. With little else to do, the waiter and service people (there were a lot of them) took attentive care of us, carefully introducing multiple starting treats like a foamed cocktail and gnocci stuffed with liquefied pesto sauce that had to be eaten in one swallow to avoid spraying the table with its contents.
We hurried back to the hotel in order to catch up on lost sleep and give us a chance to begin Friday early. The first agenda item was to try the much recommended local breakfast favorite of churros con chocolate at the Café Brillante. The deep fat fried fingers of bread batter made good dipping tools for the cups of thick hot chocolate; however, Sue found the meal to be a bit too greasy and rich.
A short walk along the Botanical Garden brought us again to the Museo del Prado that we entered in anticipation of miles of galleries, a thousand or more fine medieval to 19th Century paintings, and crowds of tourists. Fortunately, we were wrong about the latter, even though visiting the country’s cultural heritage sites in October is apparently very popular. We spent about 3½ hours in the museum, but only one of us had the strength to use the time fully and view the works of Velazquez, Goya, El Greco, Dali, Dutch and Italian masters. It would take a week to allow sufficient opportunities for resting on gallery benches to extend the wandering attention of one of our minds. Besides, it sometimes seemed that most of the paintings depicted murders or burials. How many of these can you look at in one day and still muster a bright outlook for the rest of Madrid’s attractions?
After a quick lunch at the Prado cafeteria, we crossed town to the Royal Palace for a tour of its ornate ceremonial and family rooms. Spain had just celebrated its national Columbus Day holiday--much of the wealth displayed at the Royal Palace was due to the conquest of the Americas that Columbus’s discoveries had set in motion. Our English-speaking guide was amused when I pointed out to him that in New York Columbus Day honors his Italian heritage more than his Spanish sponsors. The guide seemed to take more pleasure, however, in pointing out how much of the palace’s silver, gold, crystal and china did not survive the demands of the national treasury when resources were needed to fight Napoleon’s invasion or civil war rebels.
We next wandered to where we should have eaten lunch, the gorgeous collection of fresh food counters and bars in the Mercado Miguel. Madrid is really compact; so a walk of only a few more blocks under the late afternoon’s blue skies brought us into the neo-classically designed Plaza Major, a grand motor-vehicle-free square surrounded by stucco-clad five-storey apartment and office buildings with cafes and shops on the ground floors of all four sides. A comforting hum of conversation filled the air, as patrons appeared to move from one café to the next following the warmth of the sun as it set behind the Plaza’s rooftops. We were later told that the square was used for bull fights, autos-da-fe, and assorted other “festivals” that well-healed residents could enjoy in the comfort of their balconies.
The next treat in store for us was our tapas tour, replacing dinner that night with a guided sampling of popular bars in the center of town where the custom to eat a variety of small cooked foods with drinks began as compliance with the decree of a bygone drunkard-infuriated King. We met our leader, Danny the Hispanic-Celt, in the center of Madrid’s social scene, the Puerto del Sol. Our rendezvous place, a statue of an extinct type of bear munching on the leaves of an extinct type of tree, is a popular site for visitors to have their pictures taken, below Madrilenos’ sentimental favorite neon Tio Pepe sign, as iconic as Boston’s CITGO sign.
Danny began the evening at a franchise of the Museo de Jamon chain, where the many kinds of ham that the Spanish savor are served to, in our case, imbibers of red Rioja wine. The most prized of those hams comes from pigs that are actually raised in Spain under oak trees, limiting their diet to acorns. There we met the rest of our bar tour group, Irina, Olivia, and Andrea. The three of them were in Madrid on business trips and took the occasion to enrich their time in Madrid with the company of people they wouldn’t ordinarily meet at work. Danny certainly fit that bill; the entire group was a convivial traveling party for all of us. And travel we did, culinarily, to Asturia (northwestern Spain above Portugal) where the tapas are washed down with apple cider poured into the glass from a bottle held as far above it as one’s confidence allows, Extremadura (Southwestern Spain where oak forests feed swine herds), Castilla y Leon (north of Madrid) and Galicia (on the very Northwestern corner of the Iberian peninsula, from which the octopus and shrimp finished off our meal). Earlier delectibles included baked chicken, hot and mild green peppers, chorizo sausage, and a sweet spread made from Cabrales blue cheese.
We took Saturday breakfast at a café near our hotel, then walked up the Paseo to the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum while the streets started to echo with well-rehearsed chants of youth groups carrying banners and wearing T-shirts espousing the values of the Spanish Family Forum. In fact, all Saturday we would witness the gathering in Madrid of thousands (it was claimed in the news that the number exceeded a million) of demonstrators who would mass at around 4:00 PM in the Puerto del Sol to protest the EU’s and the Spanish Socialist Party’s pro-choice policy. (The Catholic conservatives must have put a large sum of money into organizing the rally.) Conveniently for them, the reconstruction of the Puerto del Sol had just been completed; conveniently for us, we had taken in the sights of that square the evening before.
It was easy to ignore the busloads of well-behaved pro-lifers when we entered what has to be one of my all-time favorite art museums. The Thyssen-Bornemisza displays in a chronological sequence of rooms its comprehensive survey of paintings that span the 13th through the 20th Centuries. The collection has been characterized as minor works by major masters, especially Impressionists. But some of its possessions will have a lasting impact, such as its inclusion of three striking paintings by Edward Hopper, and the Jean Baptiste Simeon Chardin portraits of kittens mesmerized by tempting feasts.
A sandwich in the museum’s café prepared us for visiting several of Madrid’s fountains and joining anti-abortion demonstrators for a siesta in the Parque del Retiro and the Botanical Garden. From there, they were headed for the rally at the Puerta del Sol, which was covered on CNN when we returned to our hotel room. Saturday evening was devoted to the Michelin-starred (this time two) Restaurante La Broche. (Leaving little to chance, Sue had made the reservations before we left New York by email for this and two other dinners we ate in Spain.)
An early start on Sunday put us on a sardine-can Iberia Airbus flight southward that was mercifully short before gliding between hilltops before landing in Granada. We grabbed a taxi at the airport, and the driver let us off at the foot of a cobblestone street that climbed up to our hotel, Room Mate Migueletes. Our room was not yet ready, so we left our bags and headed back to the nearby center of town for breakfast at a café. We wandered into the Plaza Nueva and walked alongside the Rio Darro in the direction of Alhambra, and returned to our conveniently located hotel in time to meet our guide in the lobby.
Ann is an independent tour operator who with her husband found their ideal retirement location in the Albayzin (old Jewish and Moorish) quarter of this provincial capital of Andalucia. She’s happy not to be in her native Kansas anymore. Ann took us to the Alhambra by taxi (she had given up her own car years ago) so we arrived at the gate during our assigned half-hour entry window.
Granada was the last redoubt of the ultimately expelled Islamic rulers of Spain, the Nasrid dynasty, who had built a complex overlooking town including a fortress, palaces and gardens. Its Arabic name means “the red one,” referring to the color of the hill’s clay. A succession of formal rooms, fountains and pools are exquisitely finished in molded stucco, carved wood, and colored ceramic tiles. All the water features are fed by aqueducts that bring snow melt down from the Sierra Nevada Mountains that overlook Granada on the south.
The designs, following Islamic custom, consist of Arabic phrases (not all are from the Koran) and geometric puzzles, a few of which inspired M.C. Escher to create his drawings of interlocking figures. Also following Moorish custom, the Alhambra’s rooms were not richly furnished; its residents and visitors commonly sat on rugs and pillows on the floors. Unfortunately, the carpets have not survived. (Because of the destruction caused by fires and explosions over the centuries, much of the woodwork in Alhambra has had to be redone, and the painted details have disappeared or faded.)
The places’ rooms are wonders of balance and grace, with galleries of tapered marble columns merging into ceilings made of stucco cupolas reminiscent of stalactites, called “mocarabes.” (Alas the lions were on leave from their Courtyard for refurbishment.) We’re no architectural critics, and Ann made no pretensions in that direction either. However, the memory the design leaves is one of great space, despite the limited geographic area that Alhambra occupies on its elevated narrow island of land set above Granada. It was supremely defensible--they say that the towers and walls of its citadel, Alcazar, were built to allow the easy use of boiling oil and molten lead to beat back besiegers.
Granada was finally “liberated” from Moorish rule in 1492, and the Catholic kings, Ferdinand and Isabella, commissioned Columbus’s journey to the Indies in Alhambra’s grand Hall of the Ambassadors. Their grandson, Charles V (who was really a Hapsburg emperor and barely spoke Spanish) built his own palace right next to Alhambra, a cubical structure surrounding a circular courtyard. Alas, it was closed for refurbishment, but we got the idea that the re-entrenched Christian rulers of Spain built it to demonstrate their possession and dominance of the cultural heritage left behind by the Nasrid kings.
The Moors also left behind a beautiful botanical and leisure garden, the Generalife. It occupies another corner of the hill on which Alhambra sits. Walking through it gives a cooling and colorful respite to visitors, as it is said it did to the courtesans of the Nasrid and the Hapsburg rulers. The driver of the minibus that took us from Alhambra down through the Albaizin to the Plaza Nueva was obviously experienced in negotiating its narrow streets—I imagined he had shopped for that vehicle with a tape measure in hand. All three of us then quenched our thirst with the local brew at an outdoor café in the square.
We finally checked into our room after walking up to our hotel and taxied up to the Mirador de San Nicolas for a view of the Alhambra across the river valley under the setting sun. This park was filled with families and couples enjoying the day’s end and the romantic view of the palaces, city and distant mountains. When darkness closed in, colorful lights illuminated Alhambra, making a picturesque backdrop. Sue had perfectly anticipated this dramatic setting by reserving a table for us at El Huerto de Juan Ranas restaurant located just under the Mirador. It was almost embarrassing to be seated in front of a large window filled with a view of the lighted Alhambra. If that wasn’t enough, the dinner was fabulous.
Following an early breakfast at the hotel, we walked to the Arab Baths for soaking in its variety of different-temperature-water pools and a massage. It had been only a five-day October holiday, so we were not really in need of recuperating. Still, the Arab Baths prepared our bodies for the cramped flight back to Madrid and the long transoceanic voyage to New York.
Now that I think about it, Spain seems to be in love with pork products, including dozens of kinds of ham and chorizo sausage, not to mention with shellfish. The national diet might have been quite different if the Catholics had not reconquered the whole peninsula and the Inquisition had not expelled, converted or executed nearly all the Muslims and Jews. The consequences of two other events have impacted Spanish culture just as much—the acquisition of territories in the Americas and Asia, and the dynastic coalition with Hapsburg Austria. It all results in the rich Hispanic heritage that I often insolently ignore.
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