| Recommended days | 5 |
| Budget | £ |
| Difficulty | Easy |
This is an area of Spain we have since visited many times but this was our first road trip in Andalucia. As such we wanted to cram in all the highlights of the glorious Moorish civilisation there and did quite a lot of motorway driving. We spent a few nights near Marbella before taking a road trip to four beautiful destinations.
Andalucia Road Trip Advice
One thing to be aware of road trips in Spain is that the road tolls can make a journey very pricey. There’s a nice guide here and the tolls can be avoided if you take slower roads, it’s all down to choice. Also the medieval centres of a lot of Spanish cities are, well, medieval. Streets are narrow and parking limited so don’t expect easy travel in an S class Merc, go for something smaller!
Granada Alhambra
After a few days R&R acclimatising ourselves and getting used to driving on the right, for me a novelty at that time, we headed off on the three hour drive to Granada. The roads in this area are superb and the bridges and tunnels made the route very quick although vertigo doesn’t help when driving across some of the huge bridges over chasms!
Being a UNESCO World Heritage site and probably the most famous attraction in Spain the site was well signposted and had a huge car park. We arrived at about 1 and got a ticket for 2PM but the timed entrance to the palaces wasn’t until 7PM so we had a 6 hour visit overall. So there’s another lesson, book tickets in advance!
I won’t complain about the heat but it was damned hot! Luckily there were ice cream vendors inside but it was quite enlightening to be baking in April! The site is split into various areas but the star attraction – the Nasrid Palaces – is the part with the timed ticket. In some ways it was good to have such a long wait as it made us take our time visiting the other sections.
The place is amazing, the fortress side has very impressive defences and the palaces are real works of beauty. Once the Catholics captured it they built a palace of their own inside and the contrast between that and the Moorish ones is very marked. The Moorish ones are light, airy delicate and beautiful – the catholic one, well, it isn’t any of those things. Big and imposing yes but not pretty. It is easy to see why they regarded us and the uncivilized brutes 600 years ago.
I have trimmed the original 252 photos down to a more manageable 52 although I do cringe looking at the quality of the photos compared to more recent ones. I guess a revisit is in order! It was finally time to see the Nasrid Palace and this was gorgeous. You can actually take a night time tour here and that must be magical.
Next time we visit I’d like to stay somewhere with views over the Alhambra at sunrise or sunset and also go into the city itself. Again, hindsight is a wonderful thing. Next on the tour was Gibraltar , a little bit of Britain but with sunshine.
Gibraltar
Due to the joys of bureaucracy and Spanish/British pettiness we spent the first hour sat in a traffic jam. I guess it really is like a little England! The queue was actually was worse coming out of the place though. We then drove straight to a car park to dump the car.
The roads were, not surprisingly, narrow and windy and I was nervous enough about driving anyway. We went to the main square and then took a Rock tour – which saved walking like some mad fools were doing! We left the driver at the top and ambled down the rest of the way so we could spend more time at the sights.
The caves were impressive and obviously there are plenty of WW2 and Napoleonic era fortifications too. It was also nice to see the Moorish castle and learn a bit about the history of the place without jingoistic flag waving.
Gibraltar is quite an incredible place and I’m so glad we visited. WE had dinner on the main square with the surreal sight of British bobbies, red postboxes and blue sky! Tomorrow, Cadiz.
Cadiz
I didn’t really know much about Cadiz other than the singeing of the King of Spain’s beard incident. It turns out to be a beautiful and fascinating place, made rich by the looted wealth of the Aztec and Incan empires. It was a nice drive to get there and lovely views of the coastline although it took a while to find the ferry port at Puerto de Santa Maria. We eventually parked up and took the passenger ferry across to the old city.
The crossing to Cadiz was calm, luckily, and it is a beautiful city to wander round. Lovely weather (of course!) and very much a cafe culture, pedestrian friendly city. The camera obscura was damned impressive, far more modern than the one in Clifton!
There were no real ‘must see’ sights but it was just a very pleasant city to relax in. The number of towers, built by merchants to watch for trade fleets, was fascinating and the cathedral was obviously a huge and imposing building.
Ronda
Our final stop on this road trip was the town of Ronda. Originally a Roman town it was conquered by the Moors, reconquered by the Spanish and saw one of the final Morisco rebellions against Catholic persecution. It is most famous for the bridge linking two parts of the town and the gorge that it spans.
Ronda is about an hours drive up a windy mountain road from the AP7. There were apparently amazing views but I wasn’t looking anywhere other than 20ft in front of the car!
The town itself was one of the last to be captured from the Moors and it isn’t hard to see why. It is on a rocky outcrop surrounded by a 600ft drop and with, now, 3 stone bridges connecting it to the rest of the hillside. The old town has beautiful houses, leafy squares, stark church towers and cobbled streets.
The new town has the famous Bullring – like a modern collieseum. We had a lovely meal at a scary cafe, perched on the edge of the gorge and spent longer just ambling around than we intended. Sunburn onto sunburn …..
The bull fighting ring was also impressive. I won’t pretend I understand but Ronda is apparently the place where bull fighting was turned into an art form.
So, a brief road trip through Andalucia, in fact our first of many. A gorgeous region and beautiful contrasts between the mountains and the coast with some stunning scenery and incredible buildings. Like MacArthur, we will be back!
2013