Let's Climb a Mountain: Granada and the Sierra Nevadas

This past weekend I hopped on a bus with my friend Alex to visit the Southern Spanish town of Granada and take a hike in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

We arrived bright and early Friday morning (like 6:30 am early), we had to take the night bus since there is currently a bus strike in Spain (Major Bummer), so we learned right off the bat that Granada is not a morning town. We finally found a coffee shop in a small hotel to settle into until our day really started.

Once the day started, it started strong. We visited the Alhambra for the majority of the morning taking in all the beautiful architecture. The Alhambra is an old fortress turned palace that was built under the moorish rule, therefor it is filled with traditional tiling and decorations of the Islamic culture. All of the buildings are as was and are in phenomenal state for being ten centuries old.
We explored both the Alhambra and Generalife and their gardens. It was absolutely beautiful. The pictures don't do it any justice.

We then made our way down the mountain, yeah the Alhambra is way up on a mountain, to the city center. We explored the several different plazas, the Cathedral, the Monastery and their main street of Gran Via before breaking for lunch. Since Granada isn't particularly known for a certain dish, we took this break to revert back to American food with barbeque pizza and diet coke.
After lunch we took it upon ourselves to explore the Albaicin neighborhood which houses a lot of great look out points and buildings as it too is built on another mountain. We walked through a bunch of local shops that we popped in and out of, sine Granada is in the southern part of Spain it has a lot of African, mainly Moroccan, influences, so the shops are filled with rich colors, fabrics, and lights that are breathtaking. We visited the Palacio de los Cordova on our way to Mirador de San Nicolas (the Saint Nick lookout spot), it offered great views of the Alhambra as well as the town.
We spent the rest of the night exploring the streets of Granada before settling on a pre-dinner snack of chocolate and churros that was so big it became dinner.

MIrador San Nicolas

Monestary

Palacio de las Cordovas

The next morning we woke up bright and early to catch a bus to Guejer Sierra, a small town just outside of Granada that is really up in the mountains. We had looked into some hiking paths and decided on a moderate level hike that promised great views and a neat break spot. What we got instead was a trek at a 70 degree angle up the side of a mountain on a small sometimes barely there path. But it was well worth it, they didn't let down on the views aspect of it, we arrived at the top of the mountain to get breathtaking panoramics of the city, lake, and Sierra Nevadas. We also to a little bit of time to rest in the old civil war trenches, the same exact ones I've been studying in my poli sci class (considering it was southern Spain, I'm guessing they were for the Republic but who knows, either way it was cool).

Civil War Trenches

We returned to Granada that evening absolutely exhausted, we took showers and grabbed dinner before literally passing out for the night.

Sunday morning we bid our farewell to the beautiful, vibrant town of Granada and went back on to the bus to return to home sweet Madrid.