tapas | Southern European Sojourn

We’re spending a few days in the city which is described as ‘quintessentially Spanish’, and is the home of Carmen and Don Juan. Seville was founded by the Romans, but only really began to flourish during the Moorish period which began in the 11th Century. After Columbus discovered the Americas, Seville was awarded an official monopoly on Spanish trade with the New World and it quickly became one of the biggest, richest and most cosmopolitan cities on earth.

We did another short drive to get here on Wednesday, calling into Ikea at Jerez de la Frontera for lunch. Swedish meatballs for Greg, an assortment of tapas for me. The Ikea carpark has an immense solar panel array, which doubles as shade for the cars parked underneath. Jerez is a grape growing area and one of its main industries is sherry production – ‘Jerez’ means ‘sherry’! Jerez is also regarded as the ‘cradle of flamenco’, although Cadiz and Seville also like to make that claim. We didn’t stay in Jerez long enough to do any sherry-tasting or flamenco dancing, but we did visit the Avis desk at Jerez airport to try and sort out our rental car contract.

Avis in Europe has this weird rule that a car can’t be rented for more than 30 days, although it is possible to do it via a third party. Because of Avis’s rule, when we rent a car for longer than 30 days, they have to write 2 separate contracts. When we travelled in Central Europe last year, the guy at the Munich airport desk just did 2 contracts for us when we collected the car. This time, the guy at the Barcelona desk only did the 30 day contract and told us the subsequent contract would be emailed to Greg later. Greg has emailed Avis several times and got no reply. Well, the Avis person at Jerez airport wasn’t much help, the 30 days expires today, and now Greg is emailing again to try and sort it out. Yeah, Spanish (lack of) customer service bites us again.

We’re staying in an Airbnb house on the outskirts of Seville, at Alcalá de Guadaíra. It’s huge – 2 storeys, 4 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms and about a mile of marble floor tiles. It’s the first place we’ve stayed at on this trip that is actually someone’s place. I’d know that even if there weren’t photos on the walls and toothbrushes in the bathrooms, because this is also one of the few places where there have been hooks to hang bath towels and tea towels on, and it’s the first kitchen that actually has chopping boards! Sometimes it really is the little things. We haven’t ventured into Seville yet, but we went to the local shops here yesterday. Nice shopping streets with a large plaza pedestrian mall. It was very busy in the morning, with lots of people out and about, but Greg went back in the afternoon at around 5.30 and it was almost completely deserted. Apparently everyone here takes siesta time seriously!

Traditional spanish food – Swedish meatballs at Ikea

All the shade for cars at ikea is solar panels

After our epic morning at Alhambra, we headed back to the apartment, walked up to one of the nearby supermarkets to get some stuff & noticed a little stall selling churros & coffee just around the corner from us. It wasn’t open until later, so we went back intending to ‘eat dessert first’, but the serve of churros & chocolate was so huge that it ended up being dinner. These churros were cooked differently from others we’ve had, in that a continuous spiral of batter was poured into the deep fryer until the entire surface was full, then when it was cooked it was chopped into lengths of about 15cm. Every other churro we’ve had has been piped, usually through a star-shaped nozzle, and cooked individually. However they are cooked, though, they are all delicious!

Yesterday morning we packed up to leave Granada, met our Airbnb host at the apartment, then drove into the city centre to have a bit more of a look. Greg picked out a parking station not far from the cathedral and the food market but we ended up on one of those city streets that are only accessible to buses, taxis and cars with special permission between 0730 – 2230 … aargghh! So we did a few quick right turns to get away from there and found another parking station which was a bit further away, but we got to walk along more of the streets in town. We found the cathedral but didn’t go inside, then the food market which was … erm … unimpressive after Valencia’s gorgeous Central Market. At least half the stalls were closed, and most of the ones that were open were selling seafood which looked great but not what we wanted to buy. I did have a nice glass of wine which included some tapas – prawns and some kind of squid thing on bread. Cost about $2. Bargain.

Then we headed to the streets below the Alhambra, to see what it looked like perched up there on its hill. We found a tapas bar that seemed to be aimed at locals rather than tourists, wandered in and had lunch … tortilla espanol, patatas a lo pobre (poor man’s potatoes), croquettes, artichokes with anchovies. And then, just in case we hadn’t had enough potatoes, the waiter brought us a plate of chips, on the house. Plus orange juice for Greg and a fino jerez sherry for me. I’ve gotta say, that sherry didn’t taste anything like the cream sherry my nanna used to consume by the flagon. I might need to do some more ‘research’ into Spanish sherry.

Campgrounds are not all that common on the Costa del Sol, but there seems to be an over-abundance of apartments and resorts. It’s a bit early, ie hot, in the season for the major influx of tourists, most of whom come during the Northern Hemisphere winter to get away from whichever cold country they live in, for weeks or months. Greg did a Google search and found Camping Tropical at Almuñécar, on the coast about 80kms south of Granada, so we just had a short drive to get to it. Run by a German guy, it is one of the best campgrounds we’ve stayed at. As Greg pointed out – the 2 places we’ve liked the best have both been run by non-Spanish people. Anyway, this one had some extra little bonuses like a really good washing up area with scourers and dishwashing liquid, and nicely decorated bathrooms with toilet seats, toilet paper and hand towels. Most of the trees in the grounds were fruit and nut trees; I picked a pomegranate and a couple of avocadoes this morning.

And now we’re in La Linea de la Conception, which is the town on the Spanish border with Gibraltar. We can see The Rock from the front of the building. We’re spending a couple of nights in this Airbnb and will walk across to Gibraltar tomorrow. Wow, that’s another of those mythical places I never imagined I’d ever see in my lifetime.