The Idea
We came down with the idea of this travel on the day in which Pinar and I got married. Our wedding party created a very interesting mixture of nationality: Our Turkish relatives were dancing with the Italian ones with the music of a German ska band while our French friends were filling our glasses until 4 o’clock in the morning.
Before they left, each and every guest of our party said they had never experienced something so beautiful and unique and that they had felt very comfortable at our wedding. We knew that the reason relied upon the mixture itself: everybody brought something peculiar, like a mosaic in which every colour and every stone, despite their difference, completes and enriches the other ones.
We were so astonished by the result of our party that we decide to go on looking for mixtures of apparently disaccording ingredients. Our historic knowledge addressed us toward southern Spain: in Al-Andalus Spaniards (Christians) and Arabs (Muslims) met each other and gave birth to the same cultural mixture that makes our couple so unusual.
We wanted to discover ourselves and we wanted to do it slowly; that needs time. That’s why we decided to make this expedition in our own culture by bike: just if you are slow enough you have the time to see everything surrounding you, you are able to smell the proper odour of a land.
Our aims were to visit the cities of Sevilla, capital of the actual comunidad, Cordoba (capital of the caliphate) and to end up in Alhambra, the place where Mohammed XIII, last king of Granada, left Spain symbolically, forever, in the hands of the catholic kings.
After a sleepless night we arrive at Malaga’s airport at 7 o’clock. It’s the first time that we fly with our bikes and we worry a bit for them. I read somewhere that when you fly a part of your bike, it might get broken during the transport and for this reason we are really concerning about our cycles. We know that a break now will destroy the whole trip. Pinar’s saddle has a really bad cut, but she can still ride it. My rare wheel is not corresponding anymore to the shape it had in Germany. Hence we spend the first hours in Spain fixing the bikes, mounting the pedals, pumping the tyres etc. At 10 O’clock we are on the road, the temperature is really mild and a lot of cyclists are coming form the opposite direction. They greet us saying hola! and smiling. Car drivers are really polite here, nobody is honking at us and the ones who do it just want to show us their thumb up.
The first kms are flat and we really enjoy the idea of being there. We remind to each other that we should buy a cartridge for our stove (we couldn’t take it with us on the plane) and something to eat. We are too busy watching all around us and we forget to make shopping: it’s really amazing how similar is the landscape here to the ones we have seen in southern Turkey, the only difference we can notice here is the lack of minarets and mosques.
After few km we see the mountains and the road climb high. We are tired, it’s getting hot, we are hungry and the slopes are not really welcome. We climb high till Casarabonela, a pueblo blanco (white village) located on a steep hill, where we eat sandwiches and we notice that nobody works on Sunday. We get a rest in a small dirty bar in which one of its drunk patrons cannot stop talking and commanding to a small dog.
Casarabonela is just 20 km far away from El Burgo, but we first have to cross the Sierra de las Nieves that looks like a never ending slope. We arrive in El Burgo very tired and hungry. Unfortunately there is no open shop in this village and the only place where we can buy something to eat is a gas station. We have a really poor dinner sitting on a bench: peanuts and chips.
We left the village and we found an olive field where we pitch our tent. In a couple of minutes we are asleep.
1st October 2007 El Burgo – Cortijo Zapatero, 81 km
We cannot really say that we slept well, we pitched our tent slightly downhill but enough to wake up every hour in order to get a horizontal position. We wake up and we recognize immediately that all we have to get breakfast is some cereal bars. Anyway, at 9 o’clock we are already on the saddle toward Ronda, facing very aggressive slopes which are opening us a very enchanting landscape, made up of mountains, olive trees and hundreds of curves which are severely trying us. The sky is blue like on a postcard here, it’s getting hot and some very abrasive flies are attacking us. Above us three vultures are flying in circle: I suppose we look terribly tired…
We are already weary, but fortunately the pass of Puerto del Vento is just in front of us: just few meters and we can enjoy rolling 12 km downhill till Ronda.
Ronda is bigger than expected: industrial peripheries welcomes us and lead us directly in the centre of a very huge pueblo blanco. We arrive in Ronda and we are hungry, but it’s just 12:30 and in Spain you cannot pretend to have a warm lunch so early, you must wait at least until 2 p.m. The only option we have is to rush to the first supermarket, run to a bench where we eat like people who never saw bread before. Once we are full, we go looking for a gas cartridge for our stove, but we could not find anything appropriate in the whole city.
Ronda is a very beautiful town; build on a scarp with a traditional Moorish architecture and all the elements of every modern Spanish town: some baroque churches and a huge Plaza de Toros. But the most impressive thing of Ronda is the new bridge.
Everybody tries to describe Ronda always surrenders quoting Hemingway: “Imagine a long, narrow bridge, undulating; place on it little white houses, clustered among others more ancient; imagine that both sides of the mountain have been cut away, dropping downward sheer and straight; and at the foot of this wall a slow, silent river, its murky waters licking the yellowish stone, then going on its destructive course throughout the fields… and when you have imagined all this, you will have but a pale image of Arcos.”
We leave behind us Ronda and its thousand tourists while the road rolls downhill for about 15 km between nude rocks and centenary olive trees. Suddenly the mountains became sparse and a huge, calm, amazing emerald blue water basin appears in front of us. It’s getting really hot now and the vision of that big amount of water is enough to refresh us. Spaniards call it Embalse de Zanara Castor and it’s supposed to be a basin of drinkable water.
A nice breeze is chilling us out while we pedal along the basin. On the peak of a sheer mountain right above the basin the white village of Zahara is dominating the whole landscape.
Before the sunset we arrive in Algodones, a very small village in which every small corner smells of fried garlic. People are not really used to see foreigners here: they gaze upon us, but we don’t feel uncomfortable. We buy something to eat and we go on till a place that looks exactly like the middle of nowhere: the perfect place for pitching the tent and have some rest.
We stand up pretty soon, after a quick breakfast, we are in a good mood and enjoy the last mountains. The road is curvy, a continuous up and down, but we know these are the last mountains we would see except of the ones by Cordoba and we are really enjoying them. The road is getting flatter and flatter and in a couple of hours we are already in Moron de la Frontera, looking for something to eat and for the bloody cartridge for our stove.
The sky is grey and few raindrops are already falling down, but this is Spain, the country of sun, and we don’t want to take it so seriously. We enter a tourist office, whose officer has probably seen nobody for the last couple of months. We are just looking for a city map, but the officer wants to know where we are coming from and where we are going, hence how I can speak Spanish and so on. He’s trying to solve all our doubts and troubles, so I tell him about our stove and I ask him a couple of questions concerning the best road to take to Sevilla. He makes a couple of calls, but no one knows where we can find our gas cartridge.
Moron de la Frontera is a quiet big village and was build up by the Moors in different periods and there is no street which is parallel to any other. As soon as we climb the small city hill and reach the castle, we realize that Moron is probably the biggest pueblo blanco we saw till now and that everything looks from here not so far away as it had to look during the Moorish domination. The weather is getting worse and from the peak of this hill we can see that it’s not getting better also in the northward, the direction that we take to Sevilla.
After we drank a terrible coffee in a dirty bar in which everybody is shocked by the news that some Catalan youngsters burned the photo of the king. We leave the city. Our map shows there are just two ways to reach Sevilla: a huge road in which we suppose to find any possible kind of vehicle and a small path that is crossing the olive fields. We decide to take the latter, although it takes a while before we can find it. We stop by the police station to ask for info and they suggest us to avoid the path, because it’s not asphalted and it’s very irregular. Exactly for this reason we decide to take the dusty path.
The sky is still grey, but at least it’s not raining anymore. In the first five km we really enjoy being alone on the road, hence it’s getting difficult to follow the direction shown in the map: we arrive at a private oil press with no way out and we are forced to go back till the last crossroad where the only alternative does not look good either, but it is better than go back again to Moron. After a couple of km we arrive in front of an old farm, a big white one, with an arch at the entrance, some palms around it and three awful, angry, gigantic black dogs that start running and barking at us. I just shout “QUICK!” and in few seconds we are too fast and too far away for the dogs that just decided to give up running after us.
We are safe and out of the path now. In order to get again on the path, we have either to come back to the dogs or to cross a pretty big ploughed field pushing our bikes. I refuse to see the dogs again and so the choice is taken! When we arrive at the path again it’s almost 5 p.m., it’s getting windy, the air smells like rain and Sevilla is still far away. We doubt on the path we are pedalling on, but it’s excluded to go back now. After few km more the path ends on the main road we were trying to avoid, but at least we are on a certain road and now everything looks easier. Sevilla lay in front of us and we want to spend the night there.
We start pushing very hard on our pedals while hundreds of cars are dashing not far away from our panniers. The land is totally flat here and the wind is helping us. The road we are on is not crossing any city and the travel is now amazingly boring: the only diversions are the wild rabbits running and jumping on the fields along the road. Finally the A360 is over and we arrive in Alcalá de Guadaira, we are really close to Sevilla and we feel more relaxed, but the map is showing just one road going from here to the capital and that’s the highway.
Wind is increasing now and it’s also getting dark. We ask for the direction to an old round woman, who says there should be the old road somewhere eastwards. We take the road she meant and we go through the city centre and further till the entry of the highway. We realize that we are circumbicycling Sevilla just when we reach another entrance of the highway in Dos Hermanas where we finally see a policeman. It starts raining and I ask him how to go to Sevilla. He says there is a service path along the highway and it goes directly to the stadium. Finally good news. The bad news is that the path is converting itself in something similar to a river of mud. It’s really dark and the rain is getting stronger and stronger. We are totally wet, but at least we are finally approaching Sevilla and our warm and soft bed. Suddenly our path disappears and we have to cycle on the highway trying to keep the right. The cars passing by generate proper waves of waters which are hitting us. Finally we see a traffic light and a gas station: the highway is over and we have to be in Sevilla now!
While we cycle under an amazingly violent rain through a particularly ugly suburb I stop a guy just to ask him how to get to the city centre. He looks nervous and his answer is quick and sharp: “go till the bridge and turn right! In any case, get lost quickly: this is a bad quarter and you’ll get easily robbed…” I think that probably it’s a luck that it’s raining now, by the whether we are the only ones on the street and we are safe.
After the bridge, on the right and than straight for a couple of km. Sevilla welcomes us with the beauty of Plaza de España and the Alcazar. Finally we arrive at our pension. The owner – an old gipsy woman – looks at us and I’m sure she thinks there is something wrong with us, cycling in bad weather… She tells us that some km southward from Sevilla there has been a small hurricane and several people died. It happened in Alcalá de Guadaira and before we go to bed we say that if we were a bit late on our route, there could have been two victims more of that hurricane.
It has been a long, hard day; our muscles are cold and painful. All we need is some rest and we fall asleep immediately.
We stand up quiet early especially because our legs are really hurting and we cannot go on sleeping, hence we just have to enjoy this day off in the capital of Andalusia. We first try to go to the tourist office, but we have to fight against the structure of the city: the old Jewish quarter looks like a spider web, with small and narrow lanes which are never perpendicular nor parallel to each other.
The city looks beautiful from the very first sight. Every small corner is telling stories of different culture living together and when we visit the Alcazar we are really dazed by the beauty of the Moorish architecture. The Alcazar is the old royal palace which has been extended many times both by the Moorish sultans as well as by the Spanish kings. The difference between the two dynasties and between the Moslem and Christian culture is pretty clear here: the Arabic part of the palace is a hymn to harmony and equilibrium; we are really astonished by the arabesques on every single column, on every single arch. On the other hand, the Spanish-Christian part is dominated mostly by the themes of death, pain, blood, violence.
It is just architecture, but is it possible to extend these considerations also to other spheres?
After the Alcazar we go to visit the cathedral that was built on a spoiled Mosque. I’ve seen thousands of church in my life, but this is the very first time that I see Christian symbols mixed with Moslem ones. Seeing crosses surrounded by beautiful arabesques reporting the Koran’s suras gives a strange feeling although I think that a fusion of cultures and religions is necessary, it makes me terribly angry because, instead of building their cathedral somewhere else and preserve the centenarian beauty of one of the biggest mosque in the Mediterranean basin, the Catholics decided to rape the old monument with pictures of suffering people, statues of dieing persons…
After the last homage at the astonishing grave of Christopher Columbus, father and master of all the big travellers, we leave the cathedral saying that, instead of making pay an entrance ticket to the visitors, they’d better make pay a fine to all those who take photos using flash even if it’s strictly forbidden.
But the main aim of our day is still to find a cartridge of our stove. At the tourist office, they told us we would find it in a huge shopping centre very close to the highway. Probably we misunderstood the direction, but we ended up again on the highway exactly at the same time it started to rain. Finally we park our bikes in a traffic divider in order to cross the way on foot. We reach the shopping centre where we discover that they are selling different kinds of camping equipments, but none of the cartridges available are compatible with our stove.
We cross again the highway thinking that it’s particular difficult being a cyclist in Spain …
As soon as we leave the highway the rain cease and the clouds disappear. We cycle to the river Guadalquivir where we have a small rest on a bench looking at the beautiful colours of this warm and wet Andalusian sunset.
Just the time to stand up and to pack our stuffs and we are already on the road. Some of our cloths are still wet, but we have to leave and it does not really matter. The next aim now is to get out of the city avoiding the highway: first we pass through a suburb made up of high buildings very similar to the ones built by the soviets in East Berlin, then the architecture changes radically and we find ourselves in a kind of slum where people live in roofless huts in front of a huge dump. Skinny dogs are wandering around looking for something to eat whereas shoeless children seem to have something better to do than going to school.
People are watching and laughing at us and we don’t really feel comfortable here. There are lots of cars parked here, all of them are new all of them are pimped up… We want to get out of this slum as soon as possible and we push hardly on our pedals till we find some garbage collectors who are chatting with each other behind their trucks. We ask for the direction and they are really kind to us as they tell us to leave this place as soon as possible: with the thumb on their throat they also make us clear the reason.
The road to Carmona is flat and boring. We avoided the highway but we have now a 10 km longer route diversion. Along the road we still see some other huts. In Carmona we give a fast look to the city and we go further. At the tourist office, they make us clear that there is no short way to go to Ecija avoiding the highway; hence we have to modify our route and we go to Lora del Rio where there is really nothing interesting apart from the road going to Cordoba.
In 25 km we are there. The landscape is amazingly boring: the road crosses never-ending acres of cotton fields burnt by the sun. The village welcomes us with the usual smell of fried garlic, but soon we notice that this village is different by the others: the houses are not white anymore and everything looks particularly dirty and greasy. The sidewalk in front of the supermarket is sticky and all people walking on it are clearly overweight. The main exceptions are two skinny dogs resting in front of the doors of the supermarket and waiting for something to eat. Even the bar next to the supermarket is perfect: the tables are covered by a layer of flies and all the customers are coughing. One of them looks particularly drunk and decides to approach me: he does not introduce himself and begins directly to tease us because we are slow. In this very moment I’m missing the nice people and the landscapes seen on the mountains near Ronda.
We are happy to leave Lora del Rio, we cycle some km more but we are quiet tired and soon we decided to pitch our tent in a free forgotten field between the railroad and the river Guadalquivir.
After an awful night we stand up, still tired and nervous for the night just gone. It’s not been a good idea to camp beside the railroad: if during the day just a train per hour was travelling on that line, during the night transport of big cargos has been even more frequent…
The day is foggy and cold, and everything around us is wet. Cycling in this weather is not that fun, mostly because I promised to myself to take some good pictures of the castle of Almodovar del Rio, but today is so foggy that we cannot even see it.
Cordoba is not far away anymore, hence we decide to have a good breakfast in a bar downtown in Almodovar. All people here are old, smoking and coughing. Those who are not in the bar are hanging around outside. In particular I notice an old man dressed like an old fashioned barber smoking and watching around. He talks to every single woman walking in that small square and he’s visibly disappointed that he cannot say anything to Pinar.
During the coffee I give a look at the newspaper: it seems that in Almodovar is actually taking place the traditional village’s festival and the press is covering the event with an 8 pages long dossier. A very interesting article states that Muslims made the greatness of the village and of the whole region. I found really astonishing that in 2007 a European newspaper has the cultural honesty to go beyond the idea of the clash of civilisation and admit that the Muslims (neither the Arabs, nor the Moors) can do something good.
Pinar is reading her guide to Andalusia and she informs me that Cordoba was the third biggest city in the world during middle age. One million population, just after Constantinople and Baghdad… At this point we can’t really wait to see Cordoba and we have to look really in hurry when we climb in the saddle and leave that village…
It’s almost noon and fog and clouds are far away when we arrive at Medinat Al-zahra. Even if we want to be in Cordoba as soon as possible, we cannot avoid visiting the ruins of the old medina. We really get lost try to imagine how should have been the life at the time of the caliphs in Al-andalus.
Soon we are in the city, moving in a crazy traffic jam and fortunately our camping is not far away from the city centre. At the reception they explained the philosophy of the camping: the first means of travel is for free, but you have to pay extra for the second one. It does not matter if you have two buses or two bikes. I try to discuss with the manager that there is something wrong with it, but all what we get is to be sent to the sunniest place, quiet far away from the toilets.
After washing our cloths, we wait impatiently for the opening of the mini market within the camping just to know if it is possible to find in Spain gas cartridge compatible with our stoves. The answer is clear. NO!
Now it is obvious that we will eat cheese and chorizo 3 days more, but it does not really matter. The real problem now is that the frame of my bike has a small crack just below the seat post and we wonder if we can still go on with such a problem. In any case, all we want now is to explore the once-biggest city in Europe.
We stand up really early in order to be among the first ones visiting the Mezquita, another miracle of the Moorish architecture that has been raped by the dogmatism of Christianity. The mosque of Cordoba has been built with 800 columns that had to give a feeling of infinity to the observer located in the middle of it. A guide near to us explains that the first Christians who visited the mosque just after the reconquista were scared of that feeling and decided to build a chapel in the middle of that beautiful building. The chapel is really impressing, but it’s nothing compared with the mosque itself. Albeit its simplicity, you just need to watch in any direction in order to feel as big as a grain of sand in comparison with the rest of the universe.
On the northern part of the building we see a mosaic so beautiful that we cannot really take our eyes off of it. It’s called Mirhab and a guide beside us says that in order to make it, the sultan expressly asked for some artists from byzantine: Arabs in middle age were able to appreciate other cultures even if they belonged to other religions. Why the Christians who succeed them did not do the same?
Since we are in Andalusia, I’m thinking a lot at Huntington’s clash of civilizations and Cordoba is in my eyes now the biggest example of its real meaning. While walking through the Jewish quarter we find some people visiting a small house. We stop and we decide to enter: it is the synagogue. The only synagogue that did not get destroyed after the reconquista and one of the three remained all over Spain. Just before Muslims left Spain, the Catholics decided to start a real fight against all other religions and for this reason they decided to create that nice institution called Inquisition. Thousands of Jews were forced to leave the country and around 3000 people were executed in the name of god.
Cordoba offers us many other beautiful corners, but personally I’m too busy with such thoughts and I cannot really enjoy all those amazing patios and the mixture of totally different styles.
We stand up quiet early and leaving Cordoba is really a pain: our first aim is avoiding the highway, but somehow we have the feeling that it’s not easy since every small road is driving us there.
It’s Sunday again and the quarter around the stadium is full of people: all the fùtbol sustainers are ready to watch the match. We move through a jungle of always uglier buildings where we are spectators of the Spanish poverty, made of unfinished buildings, not asphalted roads, garbage forgotten everywhere and lot and lot of grey mud everywhere.
While we are crossing the countryside facing the first hills towards the Sierra Nevada, hundreds of motorbikes overtake us. We will find them all few km later in Espejo, a very nice village where we decide to have a break and eat something during the celebration of the noisy rally.
The road to Castro del Rio is really enchanting and we are surrounded by perfect rounded hills covered by thousands of olive trees. Finally the joy to watch us around is back!! Just before Baena the road starts to get physically demanding and the temperature quiet hot. The frame of my bike is getting worse and worse: now it’s making noises and the crack got clearly bigger.
In few km we arrive to Zuheros, a minuscule village that looks like a white triangle hidden between two mountains crossed by the road. It’s very beautiful and looks almost desert, just a couple of old shepherds are walking around. Probably all young people exchanged their easy life in the village with a modern, stressing one in the city.
The last efforts today are to reach Luque where we pitch our tent on an olive field. While we prepare a salad, we get aware that the oil we are using was produced in Luque and we laugh thinking that the olives came directly from the cultivation which is hosting us. We laugh, but we are sad. The frame of my bike seams to be definitely out of games and thinking to reach Granada with my bike is merely an illusion. The only option we have is to cycle till Priego de Cordoba, where we could take a bus to Granada.
For the first time we have a lie-in: there is no pressure to leave. After a good breakfast we cycle slowly like to Priego de Cordoba having frequent breaks to take pictures of the landscape. Soon we arrive in Priego and we are very happy to discover that we have to wait 5 hours to take the first bus to Granada: we are in an unexpected lovely village and we want to spend some time visiting it.
We start with the usual café con leche in the usual bar full of usual coughing old men. The main difference is that this bar is particularly dirty: people are not using the bin, they are just throwing their garbage directly on the ground. We are wearing sandals and we are not really pleased by all that rubbish, but the bartender is funny enough to make us forget about it. He sings a song about love and bull fighting, like the perfect caricature of a Spaniards would do. He’s interrupted just by an old man who is asking for somebody else. He’s not pleased to know that the mentioned guy died suddenly a couple of weeks ago, but the barkeeper goes on to sing his song of love and bull fighting.
We leave the bar and we are lost in a labyrinth of white streets framed by red geraniums, green windows and old fashioned street lamps. Each of these lanes are a real surprise: first the usual church-mosque, then a fortress, a small Arabian garden and an old man riding a donkey bringing home his harvest.
We finish our sightseeing in front of a huge marble fountain in a square full of cyclists having some rest. They come from England and Canada and they just arrive from Granada, after climbing the Sierra Nevada. All of them are really sympathetic with me because of the frame, but we just have the time for a small talk about the road and they leave toward Cordoba.
At 15:30 we are at the bus station, loading our bikes on the bus. We are a bit sad because the cycling holiday is over, but Al-hambra is waiting for us and we are waiting for this moment for so many years that we almost forgot the trouble of my bike.
Our alarm clock ring at 6 o’clock and we are so excited that we stand up immediately and we start to pack our stuffs. The sunrise is still far away and we ride in the dark night through the street of a not yet awaken Granada. The city is not awake yet, but the tourists are: the only vehicles we see on the road are buses full of people going in the same direction like us. It’s very early for us, but we know there are just 2000 tickets available and we cannot afford to wait one day more for visiting Al-Hambra.
The most difficult thing is to find the right way to get to the entrance: Granada has no easy plan and following our map we find ourselves forced to run over stairs and go through the smallest lanes. When we arrive at the entrance we cannot believe our eyes: in front of us there is already a queue of 500 people speaking every possible language. All we need now is a lot of patience. We wait 3 hours and a half before we get our tickets and we really feel more like pilgrims than like tourists.
At 10:30 we can finally leave the queue, but we still may not get in: our tickets are not valid before 16:30. We climb the hills around and for the first time we can see the Moorish fortress in all its beauty. All the roads are populated just by tourists, students and gipsies and the smell of garlic is replaced by the smell of marijuana.
After a couple of hours in which we visit nervously the city, we approach the Alhambra and we finally get in: we are at the end of our travel and we are just about to discover what is acknowledged as the masterpiece of Islamic art in the Mediterranean basin. As soon as we get in, we find a group of Italians led by a well prepared guide. He tells us about the story of the monument, but what he mostly stresses is the poetry of every single chamber, arch and capital. And he is right: there is no word that can describe properly the court of lions or the hall of Abencerrajes, but I can say that as soon as I see it I feel happy and afraid of getting blinded by such beauty and symmetry. The perfection of every single detail is like a drug that forces us to look for more and avoid us to feel the neck pain for spending hours with our nose up.
After visiting the Generalife and the renaissance palace of Carlo V, we ride quickly to the Mirador de San Nicola in order to see the fortress at the sunset. The four hours spent visiting Alhambra regenerated us and at the mirador we don’t speak but laugh of all those people around us who pretend to illuminate the whole fortress with the flash of their camera.
A couple of Gipsies with guitar are singing while some jugglers entertain the people around. It’s not that bad to leave Granada and to finish our tour with the image of Alhambra surrounded by the Sierra Nevada, a well played rumba as soundtrack, after 584 km and one broken frame!!
Now we finally understand why people say: “There is no pain in life so cruel as to be blind in Granada”
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