Part 1 of this Diary was posted to Pieces to Share on 11 February, 2023 and Part 2 on 15 February, 2023
On the Wednesday, the day after our visit to The Alhambra, we relaxed at Corteja Santa Cecelia, and entertained Sheila to champagne and nibbles at high tea time. Then, on the Thursday, to Cordoba, about 120 kilometres and two hours away to the north-west.
With about 320000 inhabitants, Cordoba is larger than Granada, and it is another grand city. Wide and gracious boulevards, and well-established public gardens with huge trees.
We were aiming for the cathedral, and – mindful of the traffic and the likelihood of not being able to park in the heart of the city – we had intended to park on the near side of the river and to walk across the old Roman bridge; but we weren’t alert enough, and were across the river (Rio Guadalquivir) before we knew it ………and straight into a car park, one euro ($1.70) for unlimited time! We subsequently saw that the Roman bridge was closed for restoration anyway.
While we later did a very long walk, and saw some fine shopping precincts and places of interest, for us the whole point of Cordoba was the cathedral. It is equally known as the mosque; and, praise be to Allah, the conquering Christians didn’t destroy the mosque – they merely built their cathedral within it.
You can regard the despoliation of the old mosque as a travesty; or you can be thankful that so much of it remains. The buildings co-exist; more’s the pity that the faiths don’t. I wonder whether the Church has ever allowed the building to be used for an Islamic service – there must be some Muslims in Cordoba today, although clearly not 40000 Muslim men.
We shall have to tell Sheila, although we must break the news gently, that we think Corteja Santa Cecilia has a flea problem. [There were no screens on the windows, and the door from the kitchen to the terrace was always open. The flies were plentiful but, unlike Australian flies, not interested in hanging around your face. Blowflies were a rarity, and there were occasional mosquitos.] Early in the week Annie got a few bites on the arm; but later in the week she had numerous bites on her legs, in particular behind the knees. Those bites grew into large welts, and drove her mad with itchiness and soreness. On the terrace there are three cane lounge chairs, with hard cushions; and on arrival Sheila had asked us to stand up the cushions so the cats wouldn’t sleep on them. There are four timid cats (maybe five) that slink between Nicholas’s place 100 metres away and our place, on the make for food. We had a huge pot of dry food, and were constantly filling the cat dish, but once replete the cats would disappear. It’s a fact, is it not, that where there are cats there are fleas. Not for a moment did we think that there were fleas in the house but, on reflection, our suspicions focus on the cushions on the terrace. Anyway, it wasn’t until Gandia on the Friday following that Annie was able to get some anti-histamine cream and some relief.
In the pharmacy in Gandia we met an English couple. Jolly souls, broad regional accents; 60ish and presumably retired, because they come to Gandia four or five times a year. They love it. They have a place here. A cheap flight to Valencia, then a 40 minute train trip to Gandia – the train for 10 Euros only! Everything so much cheaper than at home in the UK, including pharmaceuticals. We chatted to them (about Australia and New Zealand’s respective defeats in the World Rugby quarter-finals) while they were stocking up on several months’ supply of drugs. No need for prescriptions. About 15 boxes, including antibiotics, for 40 euros. There is clearly massive pharmaceutical price rigging in Australia in which our Government is complicit. No doubt reinforced by the wretched USA/Australia Free Trade Agreement [into which the Howard Government were conned by the Americans, and in respect of which I wrote imploringly at the time to all 226 Federal Parliamentarians – to no avail, and scant response!].
According to the English couple Gandia hasn’t yet been discovered. As a location it is unknown to travel agents – British travel agents – so most of the tourists here are from within Spain. This is not to say it’s Sleepy Hollow. Where we’re staying is actually the port precinct of Gandia. There are horseshoe-shaped breakwaters and, inside, both a deep-water anchorage and a marina for pleasure craft. The left-hand arm of the breakwater is huge – half a kilometre long and about 60 feet through. If you imagine a cross-section from the harbour-side: first the sloping rock face, then a 10 feet wide walkway, then a roadway, then a huge wall in three sections of varying heights up to 40 feet, then on the Mediterranean side of the wall further rock fill sloping away to the water. In sheer engineering terms this comprises an almighty pile of stone and masonry. One interesting feature is that along both water frontages spaced about 20 feet apart are small concrete benches for the fishermen to sit. And sit they do – dozens of them on the day I strolled along, all with very long fishing rods, more than 30 feet, and none with any evidence of success.
For holidaymakers there is a three kilometre white sandy beach, edged by a long promenade, a narrow roadway, and three kilometres of accommodation and shopping.
Not too glitzy, and not too high-rise – up to 10 storeys. Our hotel, the Hotel San Luis, is six storeys.
The Spaniards come out for their evening stroll, from about 6.30 to 8.30 from what we can see. During the same time many are having light refreshments, drinks and ice creams and so on, but nobody is yet having an evening meal. That gets under way somewhat later. Consistent with this practice most shops close for siesta from 2.00 to 5.30, and they stay open till 10.00 at night. Not many shops open before 10.00 a.m.
Gandia proper is three or so kilometres inland from the port, and we spent a pleasant few hours there after a jam-packed bus ride, hilarious to us because everybody seemed to be talking at full pace and at full volume.
Gandia is a place quite unknown to us, and not much of a dot on our maps of Spain. It is a substantial centre though (population 74000) with a long history (Roman ruins under the Gothic church), a sophisticated shopping mall, and a beautiful central boulevard with a 30-foot wide ambulatory within its dual carriageway. Amble we did.
Our journey to Gandia was our longest day on the road. Sheila Batas had insisted that we were welcome to stay on at Corteja Santa Cecilia, and she refused to take additional rent from friends! Our official departure time was the Saturday morning, but enjoying the quietness and our time on the hillside so much, we stayed an extra two days. We set out on the Monday morning, with our only commitment to return the car at Barcelona on the Friday afternoon and to be at our Barcelona hotel that Friday night. There was no particular objective in the meantime. The more direct route was via Zaragoza, but this is a very large city and we decided that heading east to the coast then north to Barcelona would likely be more interesting.
One city of some size on the way east from Ermita Nueva was Lorca. I had thought it might be named after the Spanish poet, Garcia Lorca, but not so. Lorca (population 93000) has been there at least since Roman times. We relaxed for two hours: window shopping, a pleasant lunch, and used the internet café to access our in-box. As usual we couldn’t find any public lavatories, so we went into what we thought was some official building; lots of people coming and going. In what appeared to be a waiting room there was a disabled cubicle which Annie used without realising that there was a female cubicle beside it, and which I then used because there was no sign of a male lavatory. Nobody took any notice of us: on reflection we had probably been in the waiting room of a health clinic. The worst thing to relate is that the cistern wasn’t working, so we weren’t able to flush. The poor disabled do have to put up with a lot!
The scenery during our journey across southern Spain was some of the most spectacular. Great outcrops of mountains, and wide fertile valleys. And transition from the olive orchards to market gardens. Just as amazing as the topography is the human stain spreading like a plague across the landscape. The closer we came to the coast the more sprawling became the centres of population. And when we reached the coast, the Costa Blanca coast, we were literally shocked. What undoubtedly were once small fishing villages are now one seemingly continuous stretch of high-rise real estate exploitation. The old villages still exist, if only to create traffic jams. We struggled through a couple of places, despairing of finding the seashore; and we avoided others that - from the highway - looked totally gross. Alicante (from the highway) was unbelievable: as many towers as the Gold Coast, including one of about 50 storeys (Alicante population 330000). In 1987 we had veged out for a few days in the Italian coastal village of Alassio – well not exactly a village (population 10000), but we stayed in a small family-run hotel in the seaport, and it was quiet. Then eight years ago we stayed for a few days in Comillas, on the northern Basque coast of Spain (population 2000). Delightful, and also quiet. Could we find something similar along the Costa Blanca?
From our map it didn’t look as though Gandia was on the coast, but there was a nearby coastal resort, so we aimed for that. We never found it, but we did find Gandia’s port, and found it very pleasing.
One thing we never found was the “attractive” Andalusian man. It’s absurd to generalise, I know. So I shall. One time I observed to Sheila Batas that I hadn’t seen much evidence of the phenomenon – noted world-wide, albeit not yet in third world countries – of each generation being taller than the previous. Because of better nutrition. I thought Spanish people (Andalusian at least) were surprisingly short, and wondered why there hadn’t been a couple of generational step-ups since the Second World War. Sheila said the people definitely are getting taller, although I doubted it. Maybe my judgement is faulty because most of the people we’ve seen [reinforced now in Gandia and Gandia port] were in their 60s and above, and having grown up at the tail end of or just after WW2 they were unlikely to have had the best of nutrition. However, none of those we saw of later generations seemed to be any taller either. Even aside from height, the attractive Andalusian man……….well, he doesn’t exist – using Annie’s definition of attractive, and I agree. The young women, however, are most attractive. Oscar Wilde said that a woman’s tragedy is that she becomes like her mother and, if this is so, the young women of Spain have a lot to fear.
On our last day at Corteja Santa Cecilia, the Sunday, we had travelled again to Alcala la Real. Very little was doing, although the men still gathered in the square, and chatted on the seats outside the church (not the church within the fortress on the nearby hill). Annie wanted another look at the church, the church from which a few days earlier we’d scampered out so as not to get in the way of a wedding; but as we were about to cross the road the church was engulfed in a funeral. The hearse came around the corner with a couple of hundred people following on foot. Whether the body had been brought from the undertaker’s or had been lying in the deceased’s home we didn’t know, but the on-foot procession was a lovely tradition. We watched proceedings from the elevated square across from the church, and then went for a snack. Annie still wanted to visit the church; and when we returned it was clear that there was about to be a wedding. Well, we weren’t so diffident this time, and sat in the church through the whole ceremony. The bride, Mercedes (not pronounced Mer-say-dees, but Mercer-des) was gorgeous in white, and the dinner-suited groom, Antonio, was tall!
We were surprised by the casualness of everything even though it was a nuptial mass. Many guests arrived late, seemingly unconcerned. At the conclusion some people drifted out to wait for the bride and groom to emerge. No formal walk down the aisle, no wedding march. Lots of confetti and rice outside; and bride and groom departed in a horse-drawn carriage. The most enchanting feature of the entire proceedings – we stayed in the church for the whole of it – was the service. The mass was sung by a group in red costumes, guitars and about eight singers. The music sounded very “Spanish”, and we wondered whether it comprised extracts from the Missa Criolla.
Gary Andrews
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