Getting to Cordoba was tricky. I hadn't realised it was a public holiday here, May Day and there's not many buses. I have to get a train and then a taxi to the bus station and on the way, the taxi breaks down with a very short time for the connection. The driver stands out in the traffic and flags me down another taxi and I arrive just in time for the bus.
I arrive in Cordoba after the three hour bus trip to 30 degree heat and a Moroccan styled hotel with an inner courtyard and a myriad of wonderful colours: ochres and lapis blue predominant. My room has wonderful old Moroccan style tables and a corner cupboard with wooden fretwork, all the gorgeous rich colours of the room find their motherload in the deep plum brocade quilt. I am surrounded by colours, textures and warmth. I open my carved shutters onto the street. People are out and about to celebrate May Day.
I walk out to a square surrounded by orange porticoes, passing by a cross made of flowers, with flower pots, gorgeous colourful tiles and baskets of fruit outside a church. Wonderful Spanish music is belting out and scarves with fringes are draped across balconies. What a culture shock from stoned and treeless Toledo. The square is full. It houses a variety of wine bars and cafes all slightly worn looking and tacky but made wonderful by the human presence.
I choose a bar where I can sit obscured slightly by a column, and where another single woman is sitting at the other column so I don't feel so out of place. I order a Sangria which seems to have no alcohol in it until I decide to leave and then realise I’m going to have to stay seated at the bar stool for a while longer. I consume all the inebriated fruit in the sangria to try and sober up. I realise I’m not going to so I walk slowly and carefully down to the river, gaze at a softly lit landscape of flowing water and delicate European trees and find a restaurant just across from it where I order a large bottle of water and fried eggplant sticks drizzled in honey and crumbled manchego cheese ! Divine; a popular tapas of the area. I start to sober up. The night is noisy with people, there are tents in the squares serving drinks and playing Spanish music. I'm feeling more at home here than in Toledo.
I awake the next morning to warmth and Cordoba colours and head off for a healthy breakfast of fruit, muesli and yoghurt that comes in a jug, with berry jam on the side. I’ve booked the Alcazar of Cordoba and take my time making my way there via lovely alleyways with white houses, deep azure blue window frames, bougainvillea and geraniums. I have a great cortado coffee and a coconut and custard cake in a lovely little cafe with Arabic ruins under glass, under foot. I walk to find the Alcazar. I show a man at the outside of an enormous complex my ticket and he tells me to go inside the gates. I am looking for someone with an orange umbrella, my tour guide. I wait but there are no orange umbrellas. I ask again and they point elsewhere. Meantime I finally decide to ring the company and they tell me I’m in the wrong location entirely and by the time I walk another ten minutes I’ve missed half the tour and also realise I’ve booked it in Spanish! Such is life.
So I take myself off and wander the Palace of Queen Isabella of Spain who was responsible for the Spanish Inquisition and the funding of Christopher Colombus’s trip to the New World. It’s very spartan but the gardens are stunning. I walk past the pools and beautiful Seville orange trees cut like a solid fringe with the occasional orange peeping out. Flowers everywhere, the wild red poppies and the real floppy, fringed big pink ones. Every now and then a portion of a roman column or capital jut out of the soft grasses sprinkled with daisies, and all around me is the sound of water. I finally make it back into the centre for a lunch of spinach and chickpeas tapas and the fried eggplant strips, this time with a dark molasses sugarcane syrup and the obligatory Sangria because it’s my fruit intake for the day.
I walk back to my Moroccan oasis ( every now and then sneaking into one of the doorways into a verdant courtyard of tiles and plants ), to have a rest and listen to the
the horse and carts clip clopping past my window. I’ve sadly missed out on the famous mosque but I decide to go to the Palacio de Viana not far from me with it’s 12 Arabic courtyards and as I go via the squares, I can hear the music from the wine tents.
The house is stunning, the Spanish know how to live with long, hot summers. Courtyard after courtyard open up, all differently arranged, some with fountains, some without. Beautiful coloured tiles adorn the windows; tubs of trees and geraniums; tall gangly orange trees crown the balconies; lemon trees are draped over doorways, it’s fecund with promise and the smell of mock orange.
After that I visit the Julio Romero de Torres art gallery, stunning Spanish women, half naked with oranges and fruit, wonderful art nouveau advertisement paintings. I dream of somehow creating courtyards with orange trees to my home in Australia but I don't think it's possible.
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