'A good traveller has no fixed plans.' Tao Te Chiang
La Mezquita simply takes possession of old Cordoba: vast, sprawling, the Christian cathedral emerging from the ribs of the Moorish Mosque, its bulk and presence are unignorable. It's a good idea to circumnavigate before you enter: wander the surrounding streets, catch glimpses of the spire from narrow alleyways or see it from up high, from [...]
Small-town Andalucia - those slightly run-down settlements you find on the road from Granada to Cordoba, for instance, places that are not on the tourist route, that are a little hard-scrabble, impoverished - still surprise, with their Moorish keeps, their sense of history. But it is a pre-democracy Spain you sense here - the Spain [...]
In Sevilla we heard, live on stage, in a modern, airy, wood-panelled auditorium, the fabulous flamenco guitarist Paco Jarana: a wonderful masterclass that blew us both away. To see flamenco dancing, however, we went to Ronda, to the Restaurant Cinque on the Paseo Blas Infante - a small, dark stage, with three red chairs for the [...]
Back, then, from Paternoster, and back to Spain: Ronda, to be precise. Retracing our steps for the next couple of posts, to pick up on these images from our hotel rooftop before - in an upcoming post - sitting down in a small tapas bar for some foot-stomping flamenco.
Olvera and the surrounding countryside - a view over the rooftops and from the streets below....
The Moorish Keep in Olvera, Andalucia stands on a high promontory across the way from the Iglesia de la Encarnacion. I like the black-and-white images, but the image in colour works best in colour. I hope you enjoy!
Olvera, one of the 'white towns' or pueblos blancos of Andalucia, is dominated, as you will have seen in my earlier post, by a massive church-on-a-hill, the Iglesia de la Encarnacion. The building itself is in need of some maintenance, but its setting is magnificent, and its brooding presence over the white town below it [...]
We drove up the steep hill into Olvera, one of the 'white towns' or pueblos blancos of Andalucia; parked, climbed higher, to the monumental bulk of the Iglesia de la Encarnacion from where we could look across to the Moorish Keep on a rocky outcrop opposite; looked out over the roofs into the streets below [...]
We took the road via Setenil from Ronda before joining up with the A384 en route to Granada. The back roads took us through rugged, heat-seared, spectacular country, dotted with little white towns with Olvera, pictured, offering dramatic views as we approached. Needless to say, we drove up into the town, parked, and explored. We [...]
