Sun, snow, and a new job
3 comments January 17th, 2012
Whilst the rest of Europe has been inundated with snow and ice, Granada has enjoyed the kind of winter that makes a lie of the word. Day after day of blissful sunshine, so strong one can sit on the terrace in short sleeves quite comfortably, whilst incongruously gazing at the white capped peaks of the Sierra Nevada.
It’s been a dire snow season for the resort so far. In the evening the lights of the Kasborahs are visible from my balcony, as they track across the slopes moving snow from one place to another. Major echoes of a ski season on Mt Buller, actually.
But finally, after a month of sublime sunshine and crystal clear nights, snow is falling again, to tourist operators’ relief.
And my own, I confess, since I’m about to have a few days up on the mountain. To my vast surprise – and utter delight – I’ve just been offered a job teaching Grade Two at a school on the coast, half an hour from Granada. The job is a maternity leave cover and suits me perfectly, not least because one of the first requests was for me to accompany the students on a couple of days’ skiing trip to the Sierra Nevada. Oh, gee – let me think about that. For all of one second.
So it looks like I not only get to go skiing, but then also enjoy several months
in one of the most delightful small towns I can imagine. I admit to a definite reluctance to leave Granada, which has become home in a very short space of time, but I can always come back. And I will, after I’ve walked the Camino in summer.
That is perhaps the one downside – I’d hoped to walk in March and April, when the weather is lovely and cool, and the flowers are blooming. But a full time job in a bad economy is nothing to be sniffed at, and besides, I’m really looking forward to teaching for a while again. So a summer time walk it will be, and I guess the upside of that is all the ‘interesting’ characters will be walking the camino at that time – which can only make for a more diverting book.
Granada itself has been endlessly fascinating to me. The Christmas period
was a time of discovery in itself. I’d never been familiar with Spanish traditions, and was astounded at how they differed from the Christmas I grew up with. Firstly, Christmas trees are almost nowhere to be seen. The real fuss is reserved for the Portal de Belen – the tableaus depicting the birth of Jesus in a stable. Shops and street stalls sell every imaginable figurine and prop for these displays, and they range from a simple arrangement in the corner of a room to entire shop windows complete with miniature houses, whole villages, and complex depictions of life in biblical times. The one thing that all the displays – no matter how modest – feature, are the Three Wise Kings – Los Tres Reyes. And this is where Christmas becomes really different.
Christmas day itself is a bit of a non-event in Spain. I was amazed to wander out in the afternoon to discover that the entire city was out enjoying a lazy stroll in the afternoon sun, and stopping for tapas at the restaurants – all of which were open. It pretty much looked like any other Sunday in Granada, with friends meeting up, and children out with their parents. There wasn’t a new toy or screaming child in sight, much less the scenes of awkward once-a-year family gatherings where everyone surreptitiously checks their watch beneath the table wondering when they can politely escape. It felt entirely un-Christmassy, and very refreshing.
Which is because Christmas isn’t the big day here. Instead, that honour falls to the 5th and 6th of January. The 5th is the Noche de Magica – the night of magic, when the three kings saw the star in the sky and rode to Jerusalem to bless the Christ child, as the bible has it. The evening is one of tremendous celebration in Spain. Parades are held everywhere, which involve elaborate floats bearing people dressed in costume as the kings, who throw sweets out to the throng of people. It is a proper Carnivale, with dancers, marching 
bands – even camels, since that was the preferred mode of transport back in the biblical day. Although it was extraordinarily difficult to take photos of anything given the enormous crowd, I did manage to get one of the camel. Even if it was a fake camel. I had me a bit of a moment when I saw it.
The 6th is the day presents are exchanged, and has very much more the completely deserted feel of Christmas day in other countries. What makes me laugh – let’s face it, Spain is truly the King of holidays – is that the festive season runs from a good week before Christmas until after the 6th. The entire country goes on holiday around about the 16th, and stays that way until after the 6th of January. Boxing Day sales begin on the 7th.
New Year’s Eve was also a new experience for me. Long accustomed to 
sitting at home with a good bottle of wine and a DVD, when I was invited out for the night I went with the enthusiasm to experience a New Year’s Eve in another country, but low expectations. But this is Spain, of course, and so everything is a joy and done well. We did a tapas tour of the town, scoffing delicious Iberico ham and lovely cheeses as well as octopus, calamari, spiced meatballs and flavoured cous cous – amongst other things. The centre of the action at midnight was in a plaza in the centre of town. As we left the final restaurant, the owner was kind enough to provide us with a complimentary bottle of champagne to take with us, and plastic champagne flutes. But here’s the thing. The flutes were filled with grapes.
Twelve, to be exact.
Because this is what one does in Spain at midnight – and forgive me all of those worldly travellers who know all about it, but even though I spent a New Year’s eve here once before, this is a tradition that completely passed me by: they eat a grape at every stroke of the midnight bell. So instead of a plaza full of wildly drunk folk trying to grope each other, it is instead full of people stuffing grapes into their mouths with studied intent. You see, if you miss a grape, or don’t eat the full twelve, you will have a bad year. Given the state of the Spanish economy one can see why everyone was determined to chew every grape properly.
What I really found charming was the fact that the restaurant happily handed out a bottle of champagne, free of charge, as well as the glasses and grapes. In the plaza itself a mobile wagon handed out complimentary bags of grapes, along with party bags for the kids. No-one was drunk. Families gathered around the stage to hear the band and dance, kids dancing alongside their parents. It was a delightful evening, and the only police presence consisted of a couple of genial blokes blocking the road to traffic, and looking remarkably unconcerned as all around them kids set of firecrackers and people in general had a terrific time having fun in ways that have long been outlawed in Australia and other places I can think of. And guess what – no-one got hurt, no-one was drunk in a gutter, and no-one fought.
Makes you think, really, doesn’t it?
The party went on until dawn, as it does in Spain, and yet there wasn’t an incident of any kind to speak of. I could hear people walking home in the early hours from my bedroom window. They were having nice conversations about the night, civilised chats. Not a loud drunken argument to be heard.
Maybe none of this strikes you as remarkable, but it did me. Perhaps I’ve seen too many late nights in King Street after the clubs have closed, or maybe the media in Australia and the UK just enjoy sensationalising drunken violence – but normally a night where the entire populous of a city crams into one tiny plaza, carrying glass bottles of complimentary champagne and setting off firecrackers, would be considered something of a recipe for disaster. Not in Spain. It was wonderfully refreshing.
But that laid back attitude is not even the tip of the iceberg regarding my love affair with this country. Always intrigued by history, I’ve found myself in a place so layered in cultural heritage that I barely know where to begin.
Its historical importance was one of the reasons I chose Granada as the place to study. Yes, ok, and the fact that it has a ski resort an hour in one direction, the Mediterranean an hour in the other, the Alhambra looking down over it
all and an internationally renowned university in the centre. But all of that aside – given that Granada was the last bastion of the Moorish kings, and the Alhambra perhaps the best preserved living monument from the golden era of Arabic occupation of Al Andalus, I’d been fascinated long before I ever arrived.
But I’d no idea, before I began digging around here, of just how rich the history is – nor how far back it goes. In caves in the mountains around Granada archaeologists are digging up remains that date back, at a conservative estimate, at least 400,000 years. Statues unearthed from tombs in the mountains pre-date the Roman occupation of Iberia four centuries before Christ, and would appear to suggest trading links as far afield as Egypt and Greece. In the vicinity of Huelva, near the Portuguese border, ceramic fragments are being unearthed that suggest a manufacturing plant on a grand scale – and products made here have been found all across what was the Byzantine empire.
Writers such as Herodotus refer to an ancient kingdom in Andalucia called Tartessos. The Romans reported, when they arrived, that the people of Tartessos were highly sophisticated, with a written language, complex agricultural practices, and wealthy economy that traded widely. Regardless of who occupied Andalucia in the ensuing centuries – and that included the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, and Visigoths, to name a few, prior to the Arabic incursion in the early 8th century – Andalucia remained quietly prosperous, and highly adaptable.
Granada was called Iliberis by the Romans, a name it held well into the early centuries after Christ. One of the first synods of the Catholic church was held here in the 4th century. The town was by then known as Elvira, and the Synod of Elvira such gems of wisdom as the enlightened Canon 81, which dictated that ‘A woman may not write to other lay Christians without her husband’s consent. A woman may not receive letters of friendship addressed to her only and not to her husband as well.’
Interestingly Elvira was primarily occupied by Sephardic Jews at that time, who lived on the Albaicin hill, and called their settlement ‘Garnata’ – from where modern Granada takes its name. Interesting since one of the other gems of wisdom to come out of the Synod of Elvira dictated that ‘If any cleric or layperson eats with Jews, he or she shall be kept from communion as a way of correction.’
Jewish people had existed peaceably in Andalucia for the duration of Roman rule. It was only under the harsh dogma of the Visigoths that laws were first enacted in Spain to harass and victimise them, a process that initially ceased under Arabic rule, then returned with a vengeance in the eleventh century, and continued most cruelly with the Catholic Reconquista.
In Granada, evidence of all the cultures that have occupied the region exist to this day. The Moorish heritage, of course, is everywhere – from the beauty of the Alhambra sitting mysteriously on the mountain above the town, to the subterranean passage of the River Darro as it winds its way beneath the city streets. Lie with your head to the tarmac on a quiet night and the sound of the river is easily distinguished, testament to irrigation works begun by the Arabs. But high up on the hill behind the Alhambra, guarded loosely by a wire fence (which is easily crawled under, not that I told you so) lie ruins that predate even the Moorish era.
This is one of those extraordinary things about Andalucia – the ruins are just there. No fanfare, no major archeological works – not even a sign. Just amazing ruins lying about peacefully, high up on a mountain from which one can see miles in every direction, undoubtedly useful to Roman soldiers fearing attack from the sea. I poked about for hours, fascinated by the clear boundaries of each room, and the evidence still remaining of water sources and a bathhouse. I’m no archaeologist and so obviously run the risk here of being pertly contradicted by some scathing academic who will tell me that the ruins are in fact those of an aristocratic manor built a century ago. But I don’t think so. The stone and methods used resemble other Roman ruins in the vicinity, and the layout seems pretty textbook Roman.
What really fascinates me is that if you ask around in Granada, even people who’ve lived here all their life don’t know that the ruins are there. I’ve no doubt there are historical experts in the town and at the university who do, 
but my Spanish is not yet up to the task of asking them. I have spoken to quite a few people, however, none of whom had even visited the ruins. For an Australian starved of architectural history, this is nothing short of mindblowing – but when one grows up literally wrapped in every era of Western European history, I guess one ruin more or less makes little difference.
And that’s the thing. History here just piles up, layer upon layer. In the Albaicin there is one church in particular that has a sign dating it to the 16th century. Scratch a little deeper, however, and you realise that like most of the churches here, it was a mosque before that. Before the mosque, it was a church again – quite possibly, in fact, the very location of the Synod of Elvira all those centuries ago. And before that – most probably a pagan Roman temple, until the Visigoths firmly stamped out those nasty heathen rituals. And in amongst that, who knows? It might have been a synagogue.
Fountains flow outside churches here, remnants from the time when Muslims
ritually bathed before entering the mosques for prayers. The bells of cathedrals are often housed in minarets adorned with Moorish zellij tile work, giving them a very Arabic appearance. On the Sacromonte hill the gypsies who arrived in the 15th century, just the latest wave of immigration to this part of Spain, now dance flamenco – an artform directly derived from the Moors. If there is another part of the world more characteristic of Western civilization’s 
collective heritage, I’d be amazed to find it.
I’ve barely scratched the surface of history here and feel as if I’ve a hundred years of research to go before I do. But in the meantime, my love affair with the Iberian peninsular in general, and magnificent Granada in particular, grows every day. If I can spend the rest of my days poking about unearthing strange fragments of the past, I will die a happy woman. And to my delight, I’ve just discovered a company running underground tours of Granada, following the passages of the rivers, and the hidden tunnels that run in and around the Alhambra.
No prize for guessing what I’m doing next weekend.
I know it’s been a long time between posts, and I apologise – big on history Granada might be, but in-house internet connections aren’t quite as popular. And besides….there’s just so much exploring to be done.
Cheers until next time.