has anyone on here evr been to this city - i'm hopefully going for a few days at the beginning of november :)

any hints or tips? warnings :unsure: ?

the one in Spain? Oooh it's lovely. Go, of course, to Alhambra but check before you go as sometimes you need to book a few weeks in advance. Great for wandering the streets, drinking beer, eating tapas. Nice people too. Not snotty like the sevillanos. You'll love it.

yeah thats the one, i can't wait. i'm all about the tapas......

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KJGJRd8pGE

Damn.

I read this topic title as Grandad. :huh:

I had loads of stuff to post, but never been there :D

I've been to the Alhambra. Not a bad gaff.

Great service, great sets, that's what you get...

And like most (nay ALL) Spanish cities, it's perfectly safe. Just watch out for bagsnatchers/pickpockets in main squares.

Happily true in my experience; in Madrid we encountered some situations that looked a bit hairy from the outside, but turned out to be great fun and very friendly.

Gone right downhill since the yanks invaded in the 1980's

yeah i hear it's fairly nicely done up.

Make sure you can get tickets. don't just turn up on the day and be disappointed. :(

It's also the home of Federico Garcia Lorca :wub: .

yeah will be booking the tickets this week. apparently they don't do night visits in november which is a bit of a shame - we'll just have to head down to the tapas bars and gorge ourselves stupid... :wub:

The Alhambra's wonderful, but I thought the mosque in Cordoba was even better. It's a few hours away by bus.

Had a good stay in Granada, and the Alhambra is a must-see. If you've got a car, there's a hairy drive up the Sierra Nevada - worth it for the experience of going from bright hot sunshine at the bottom to ski territory at the top (at the right time of year I guess).

and you can go to his house. it used to be on the outskirts, but like graceland, the town has grown to envelope it over the years. i also think i found the copse where he was shot. there are some great - very late night bars - up by the top of the old wall of alhambra - which is now best known as where the spice girls launched the 'spice world' tour, of course...

Cordoba is unlikely on this trip but it's hopefully not the last time i'll be in andalusia.

so when are you going fritter - i'm going on nov 7th for a week :D

make sure you book your alhambra tickets.

GAH! I knew I seen the place being discussed somewhere - I've been looking all over the BNP Forum....thanks anyway for bumping my memory.

I think it might be sometime in the next three weeks - the plan was only hatched this lunchtime.

The main object is to climb some of the Sierra Nevada but I'm sure we will take a day off to see the Alhambra (I'm studiously avoiding photos of it to maximise the impact)

Do you mean book tickets for the Alhambra before leaving Britain, or doing it in advance once there?

do it before you leave britain would be my advice - if you go in october it's still the tail end of high season and tickets are limited. a good thing if you're in there because it won't be overcrowded, but not so good if you turn up without a ticket and they're all gone.

the risk of not getting a ticket might have been exaggerated in the stuff i've read, but absolutely everyone has said book in advance.

would love to climb or trek in the sierra nevada myself but this particular trip is more about tapas...

www.alhambra.org

Nope. Book in advance.

we booked this week.

one day visit and one night visit. woohoo :D

I'm going next week for a week - got my tickets for the Alhambra (excited as I don't think I've even seen a photo of it). Off to Stanford's Map Shop for my favourite bit of any holiday preparation: finding a map closest to the O.S.!

I've been looking into car rental - there's a company called Auto-Europe that does them for half the price of most of the big names, but on looking up reviews it looks like a Watchdog/Which? nightmare. Not wishing to turn up at 10 pm and find car hassle to greet us, I thought I'd play safe, pay more and go with Avis, who have never let me down, I thought that while I'm here I'd look up reviews of them on the same site, and guess what? Nothing but horror stories!!

Is this because people only bother to write reviews when it goes wrong, or is there something special about Spain? :unsure:

I hate Lucy Meacock off Granada News.

I thought this thread was going to be about the Ford Granada. :(

That's the model I've rented, as a conceptual joke. And a TV set from Granada.

Well, I got back at 0230 this morning and my head is filled with a combination of three of the most jaw-droppingly amazing things I've ever experienced: one man-made, one natural and one a combo of the two. Although the Shell petrol station that had nothing but 2 DVDs of animal sex ("Muy Caliente!") on display behind the counter was certainly a talking point.

I won't say too much about it or post photos until you get back, Autotech, but I would recommend taking a fleece for the evenings if you're going in November - the first snowfalls hit the Sierra Nevada on our last day, so we were incredibly lucky. Oh, and if you have a car, Mini-Hollywood on the road to Almeria is worth a visit, honest, the drive there and back is worth the price of admission alone.

The Alhambra is stunning.

Built by blood-thirsty, warmongering religious types I believe

No, that's the Cathedral I think you mean (!) but still well worth a visit to see how the Catholics responded to Allah's efforts.

Well, certainly my knowledge of Spain's history is sketchy, and yes, from what I remember the Alhambra had a defensive function at different points in its history - but how do you think the Moors came to be in Spain :blink:

I'm ready to be humiliated by others who know much more than me about this ...

Sorry I was just trying to make a joke out of the "bloodthirsty, warmongering religious types" comment. Still getting used to the lower altitude and sitting down for more than 10 minutes at a time :)

Easyjet?

thanks fritter :)

glad you seem to have had an excellent time. i have at this stage developed a bona fide obsession with granada, having decided i'm in love with the place before i set foot there. i must have read up on every bar and place of interest there is.

i'm assuming the man-made amazing thing is the alhambra?

we'll be staying in the albaicin, the moorish neighbourhood on the facing hill. i cannot bleedin wait.

we won't have a car for the week, but we might pick one up for a day - that'll be a last minute thing if we do.

anyway, thank christ you didn't come back calling the place a dump.

i'm way too excited about this, still a full two weeks to go :cry:

Watch the driving there autotech. The road to Almeria is one of the most dangerous in Europe. :unsure:

Brilliant - it'll be exciting to compare notes as we spent a lot of time wandering round the Albaicin on days off from the mountains, and did eat wonderful food there, but we certainly didn't get the best of the nighttime action as we were too knackered to stay up much past 10 and had early starts to get the best light in the morning.

If you only have a car for a day - I'd really recommend taking the A395 east (signposted Sierra Nevada) as far as you can - a brand new road packed with incredible views; drive slowly and ignore tailgaters though.

the moors first hit spain around 711 in the form of a berber army, only recently converted to islam so probably all pumped up. they started at the southern tip and eventually conquered all of spain and portugal with the exception of some pockets in the north west and north east.

moors is just a collective term for islamic types. the army as i said would have been mainly berber but under the authority of the caliph of baghdad.

as far as being bloodthirsty goes i imagine some of them enjoyed a good scrap, but they seem in many ways to have been quite a bit more civilised than our christian forebears. put it this way, christians and jews fared a lot better under their rule than jews and muslims did under christian rule.

al andaluz, the term which gave the modern southern region of andalusia its name, originall referred to all of spain.

so endeth the lesson..

And "Granada" means "pomegranite" - what a great thing to call a city!

Allah did come with the sword though, didn't he? And Cervantes worked on a slave ship? And the Christians were trying to reclaim land they saw as theirs?

And are you sure al-andalus referred to ALL of the Iberian peninsula?