Today was the day our Country Walkers tour started. Mark and I took our baggage down to the lobby, and since the hotel was the tour’s rendezvous, we soon met our sixteen cowalkers and our two guides, Nick Law and Bruno Lernout. The day’s schedule was to go walking up to the Alhambra, where we would have a specialist guide telling us about the various palaces, and then come back down the hill, stopping for lunch at a restaurant along the way, and pick up a bus that would take us to Bubión, prehaps eighty miles to the south and west of Granada.

We walked to the Alhambra along a path that very much overlapped the way Mark and I had taken two days earlier, through the Albayzín. And some of the sights we took in this day were just the same as what we had seen on Saturday, so I did not take many pictures again of the Generalife and the Alcazaba.

What was different was that through our tour and tour guide, we gained access to the palaces. And here, we had a completely different experience than two days earlier. Our guide, a Granadino named Geraldo, was wonderfully informative and interesting. I said to Mark later on that day that I had not realized until I got there how much I had always been wanting to see the Alhambra. The marvelous subtlety and elegance of design were things that I simply did not expect, even though I had always read, in mathematical sources, of the variety and sophistication exhibited in the Alhambra.

Many of the interiors were rather ill-lit, and flash was no real help, because of the natural flatness of on-camera flash illumination. Too bad, really, because many of those interiors were absolutely breathtaking. But my camera fell in love with one particular part of the Alhambra palaces: the Lion Court, and there are several pictures of it to the right. It’s named for the fountain in the courtyard, supported by twelve lions, each with a spout in its mouth. The fountain no longer works at all, but this hardly matters. It's not the lions but what surrounds them, the amazingly delicate colonnade all around, and especially the little pavilion that projects out into the courtyard. You can see it from without in the righthand picture in the second row.

I want to point out that when you’re there and also when you look at the pictures, you see that the architecture is completely right, but yet from any classical Greek or Roman standpoint, completely wrong. The columns are too thin for classical design — in fact they are not structural, and don’t hold anything up but themselves. And their placement is wrong by all classical standards: notice how the intervals between them are all different, even though preserving the right-left symmetry.

Three of the four pictures at the left are representatives of the only satisfactory interior snapshots that I could get, and the reason is that I used available light rather than flash. The top left picture (small image; large) has the advantage that it shows some of our group: from the left, Shelton Bank, Judy Weisman, Caroline Legette, Teague Gilliland, and our guide for the day Geraldo. YOu can also see the back of Joyce Hirsch’s head. The top right picture is a close-up of the pilaster that Teague is leaning aginst in the previous picture (small image; large). The left picture in the second row shows the detail of one of the arches above our heads here, and as I recall, that’s some of the original blue paint remaining (small image; large). The last shot is of that nice arched gateway that I’ve been using at the top of most of these pages (not this one), but showing again some of our group: Harvey Mazer, Mark grabbing a snapshot, and Nick Law, our Country Walkers guide (small image; large).

After this terrific visit to the Alhambra, we stopped at a restaurant on the way back to the Santa Paula, and had a nice lunch; once we got to the hotel, we piled onto a bus that took us to Bubión. I got a little motion sickness on the bus-ride, and took no more pictures this day. But on the next day we would have a wonderful and strenuous walk, which presented us with lots of opportunities for good pictures.