Travel: Spain 2014 | Part 9 - Granada Day 2· yc.sg

Day 9 - June 16

We woke up at around 7am as we had booked our tickets for the Alhambra for 8.30am. We’ve heard so much about the Alhambra and have been looking forward to this visit! The cave was freezing cold in the early morning!

View of the Alhambra from our cave-house!

We had to walk down from our lodging, and again took some photos (as usual) along the way…

Going to the entrance of the Alhambra was mostly an uphill walk…

And a relatively long walk too!

Seems like there’s a picture of me yawning too! :(

Yeah, still walking :P.

After walking, and walking, and walking, we finally reached the Alhambra! We then had to exchange our confirmation slips for the tickets.

You can see in the background, there is a really long queue! You’d be part of this queue too if you do not pre-book your tickets. Thankfully we did so we managed to join a much shorter queue :)!

_You can buy your tickets for the Alhambra directly here._

Finally, it was time to enter the Alhambra!

Lovely path leading to one of the sections in the Alhambra…

I believe these are ruins…

We see the Renault Twizy again! They actually modded it so there’re windows :D.

We kept thinking of a dish in Sushi-Tei (the waffle with ice-cream) when we saw this, haha!

View of our lodging neighbourhood from the Alhambra! We’re in the bottom right part of the above picture, see the greenish-looking roof, just above the trees? (Tumblr resizes the pictures way too small… :()

My slight phobia of height kicked into full force while I was taking this picture!

Sheryl’s just mocking me by doing what I just did…

Decided to grab some breakfast!

I had booked the Nasrid Palaces for 12.30pm, as I’ve read online that you’d need about 4 hours to fully explore the Alhambra. I tried asking if we could change the timing to an earlier one, but was rejected. At this point in time (around 9.30am), we had covered most of the Alhambra, except for the Generalife gardens!

So we found a nice seat in little garden somewhere in the Alhambra, and sat down and just chatted… And both of us then fell asleep! It was really nice to be sleeping in the gardens, you could hear birds chirping, the air felt fresh, and when the wind blows you can hear leaves rustling. I think we slept a good 30 minutes at least!

We then headed for Generalife, and it’s really beautiful!

We then proceeded to enter the palace within the Generalife. This palace was the summer palace.

After Generalife and the summer palace, we decided to head for lunch. We still had about an hour to go before our allocated time slot for the Nasrid Palaces.

There is a restaurant in the Alhambra, so we just stopped by there.

The food was very good, but the coffee was quite bland :(. It was soon time to make our way to the Nasrid Palaces…

The Nasrid Palaces are very detailed, and it takes time as you’re standing there just to absorb in the details. We had already been to Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia and Cordoba’s Mezquita before this, and even then the Nasrid Palaces was still quite amazing. Frankly, we were a little exhausted from all the monuments we have been seeing before this and felt we did not make the best of this visit, but looking at the photos now made me realize just how amazing it was.

Tip: If you’re going to the Alhambra early like us, at 8.30am, book the Nasrid Palaces at the earliest possible time instead of at 12.30pm like we did. When we were outside the Nasrid Palaces around 9am, there was no queue and I believe it’s a lot emptier inside. As mentioned we weren’t allowed in before our allocated timing. When we went at 12.30pm, there was a long queue just to get into the Nasrid Palaces and it was very crowded inside :(.

After the Nasrid Palaces, we decided it was time to leave the Alhambra…

It was a long walk back down, and we decided to head back to our lodging for a nap. Along the way, we decided to check out Hammam Al Andalus, and signed up for a hammam session at 6pm. We also (finally) bought flamenco tickets! We’ve been trying to catch flamenco since Barcelona, haha.

Then it was back to the lodging, and we slept all the way till probably 5pm! Then, we headed to Hammam Al Andalus. Unfortunately there are no photos, but if you’re in Spain, do check out the hammam! The Arab baths are very relaxing, and the session we signed up for comes with a 15 minute massage too! You have about 1.5 hours inside the baths, and they will call you during that period for your 15 minute massage. There are also 3 different baths - one that is slightly warm, one that is much warmer, and one that is freezing cold!

We left the place relaxed and ready to sleep again. However, we had a flamenco show to catch, and we decided to first have some dinner…

And finally, the flamenco:

That about sums up our day! We felt like we achieved a lot for this day as we finally went to the Alhambra, tried out the hammam, and watched flamenco, all in one day!

We retired back to our lodging to pack our stuffs as we have a train to catch to Madrid at 9.10am the next day. Time really, really flies when you’re having fun. It felt like we were in Barcelona only yesterday, and without realizing it, 9 days had past and we already knew we were going to miss Spain a lot.

Sheryl mentioned to me today that I had stopped providing tips and instructions in my past few posts, apologies for that! Please tweet me @Wysie_Soh directly or leave me a comment if you have any questions :).

Other parts in this series: