That's where myself and three friends stayed - two to a bed - for a four day weekend, leading off our Semana Santa trip. The views from the hippie-crammed hills are breathtaking, a mere 2-minute walk in any direction to an open vista of the Alhambra. The walk to the center of town is down a riverside path dotted with cafés and hippies selling all kinds of hand-made junk. The women are beautiful and impeccably well-dressed, reinforcing the Andaclucían stereotype and making all onlookers feel contemptuously ugly in comparison. The tapas in Granada are free and come with every drink. The more time you spend at any given location affects the quality of the tapas you receive - by the third or fourth drink, plates tower with seafood, charcuterie and cheeses. We rarely purchased food outright, save late-night kebabs, which were, incidentally, the best I'd ever had. Granada, in case you hadn't picked up on it by now, is the promised land.
I serendipitously ran into an old caddying co-worker, with whom we spent much of the weekend. He was visiting Granada for the month to see his sister, who'd lived there for the past two years. The meeting was as accidental as it gets - the bar we were looking to go to was closed, so we ducked into the place across the street where we ran into him. As a result, we saw a side of Granada rarely offered to tourists - parties in the mountains, botellónes with local friends and recommendations for tapas bars that have been staked out and sampled over years.
No matter where we went, the air was pungent with incense either from mystic hippies or church processions, and heavy with marijuana smoke. I was feeling all sorts of vibes, and as a result, Alhambra and the Semana Santa processions were...spiritually significant, and I'm not one to use that term lightly. Waiting in the springtime sun to watch a human-carried float of Jesus emerge from the cathedral seems like a pain in the ass, but it was truly one of the more breath-taking phenomena I've ever seen - I was almost moved to tears, actually.
I went to Granada once before in 2012, but did it all wrong. It rained, we picked shitty bars and ate shittier food (hell, I don't think we even had tapas once...). This time, we were firing on all cylinders and it was one of the best trips of my life, hands down.
