There is No Victor But God, … And Very Good Taste
We were standing in the Real Alcázar of Seville, in a palace built by a Christian king, staring up at a wall of exquisite carved plaster, when someone who reads Arabic quietly pointed out what it actually said. Wa la ghalib illa Allah. There is no victor but God. It is written there over and over, hundreds upon hundreds of times, threaded through the stucco of a Catholic monarch's throne room. And a little further along, in the same beautiful Arabic script, the wall praises the Christian king himself and calls him, of all things, a sultan. We stood there for a while working through the pleasant confusion of it, and out of that confusion comes one of the best stories in all of southern Spain.
What Southern Spain Knows About Living
One of the great joys of travel is the discovery that other places have arrived at different answers to the same questions we all ask.
Southern Spain is full of these discoveries. Some are obvious from the first afternoon… the architecture, the layered history, the food that tastes like the place it comes from. This blog post attempts to cover a few of these observations and related thoughts.
We Came for a Week. Andalusia Had Other Plans.
We arrived for the first time in Marbella on a June morning when the light was doing something specific and irreplaceable: not the sharp Mediterranean glare of noon, but the softer, amber-angled light of a southern Spanish morning, landing on whitewashed walls and orange trees and the ancient stones of a 15th-century plaza. We had come expecting the Costa del Sol of the brochures. We found something more interesting.
June is the correct month for this journey. Not the version of that sentence that sounds like a travel cliché, not “go in shoulder season to avoid crowds”, but the specific observation that June in Andalusia is when the wildflowers are still holding in the sierras, the heat is real but not yet punishing, the evenings are the longest of the year, and the cities have not yet reached their summer saturation. Ronda is extraordinary in June. The Alhambra at 6pm in June is extraordinary. The drive from Marbella up to Zahara de la Sierra, with the Grazalema peaks still snow-capped above the lower slopes, is extraordinary.