Granada and Madrid enchant

Leaving the rather lovely apartment in Puerto Banus was hard to do. However, our mood perked up once we were in Granada quite a lot. We were staying at an OK hotel (bar the rather high temperature in the room - no aircon gets switched on during the winter!) with a great bus service into town from close by. All good.

Granada treated us to more stunning buildings, like the monastery of San Jeronimo which was impressive from the outside but truly amazing internally:

We, together with other visitors, walked around with our jaws sagging and eyeballs unable to handle the visual overload of the interior decorations:

As you can see, the altar area was rather overdone:

 - a small symphony of golden detail in reality.

We did the right thing and walked up the rather steep hill to the world famous Alhambra but all the tickets were sold out well in advance so we didn't get to see the inside areas. However, we felt very good about ourselves after the walk up there and consoled ourselves with views like these:

The locals had a few signs translated for the benefit of toursity types like us, sometimes quite literally as below:

No comment needed.

Some more sightseeing and some excellent food rounded off our couple of very full days there very nicely. Next trip, we will spend longer and make sure we have pre-booked the most popular tourist attractions if we want to see inside. Actually, we didn't feel as though we had missed out on anything, just walking around the place and soaking up the views and atmosphere was enough.

The next stopover was to be Madrid. Our longest daily drive of the entire trip along the wonderfully quiet Spanish motorways was so much simpler than an equivalent 300 mile trip along the UK's horribly congested and potholed main motorways. Apart from the expected madness of the ring road around Madrid it was stress free. The next day we got busy, starting off by getting a very cheap tourist metro / bus pass, using the metro to get into the city centre and then taking the crew to the Plaza de Espana - kind of a must do thing when in Madrid. The Captain had visited before on work trips, being shown around the city with the expert help of "native guides" from BMW Spain. This time, we had to manage ourselves.

The square had the regulation mounted police in attendance to allow the visitors to take lots of photos for their albums. We resisted and only took a couple: .  

The city is another overload of awesome buildings, sensory experiences and the opportunity to hop from landmark to landmark. The Cathedral was a must and we managed to time our walk around when a small service was underway. The music and singing fitted to the grand building so well and tempted us to linger inside longer than intended:

Next door is the royal palace - we opted to just gawp from the outside rather than join the masses queuing to get inside:

Purely by chance once more, we were around for the changing of the guard thing. They so looked like the apocryphal chocolate soldiers:

To keep the horses from getting bored, they did a lap of the grounds. This short video is evidence. You could tell the route they followed each time was very consistent by the trail of horse poo:

which we guess they have to clear up regularly. A job for the newest recruit perhaps?

We did break our normal "getting culture" routine by having a walk around the shopping area which was suitably busy with the weekend hordes. Madrid has what must be one of the biggest and poshest Primark stores going:

Compare it to the one in Cardiff shopping centre:

Sorry Cardiff, you lose hands down. The stuff in Madrid was cheaper too, despite the grand surroundings.

We had a great walk around the park near the palace where you get good views back to the rather imposing building:

and then down the river for a while, joining the locals who were getting their exercise too. One of the stranger things to do is to visit the main train station and see the indoor garden area:

Again, just so like the interior of Cardiff central station:

where the plant life is usually growing in the guttering. 

Being careful (mean?) souls, we had read that after a particular time in the evening, you can visit the renowned Prado museum / gallery for free. So, we arranged our walk around there to fit with freebie entrance time only it went very wrong - there was a queue of monster proportions waiting for the magical hour. We opted not to join it, next time we are in the city we will just go earlier with the normal paying public:

You can see a small part of the enormous queue in that picture.

On the way back to the hotel, we decided - with the help of Mr Google, to frequent a local restaurant that was reported as having good food, local clientele and only spanish speakers on the staff. The message was that struggling through the language issue was well worth it. Only when we walked in the owner treated us to the rudest "can't be bothered to serve you" approach we'd had during our entire stay. Such a contrast to all of the other  "purely local" places we had eaten in. So different to the rather wonderful "Mr Carrot Cake"  (have a look at weblink) which was close to the hotel and very handy for breakfast or a cheeky evening coffee and cake. Yes, their speciality cake was very good. We had to test it. Twice.