Monkeys, Englishmen with Andalusian accents, duty-free shops, tea sets, English breakfasts, pints instead of cañas, sunburns in December, the curry you’ve been craving, and English bookshops… the Rock is something different for everyone. This Mediterranean protuberance has been a thorn in the Spanish conscience ever since the Berber commander Tariq Ibn Ziyad stepped ashore and…
Sometime ago they built a tramline up here, hoping that it would bring tourists up from the beach… it didn’t work. The imposing castle tower, once clustered around for protection, long ago lost its luster to the inviting sea that shines in the distance. Back in 1350, Ibn Battutah spoke of a mighty mosque (whose…
Imagine the Caliph’s entire army hot on your tail and you with around a hundred guys on your side. Where would you want to hole up? The answer is here. High atop a mountain smack in the middle of one of Spain’s most productive wine regions lies the ruins of a castle where, back in…
Des(s)ert in Canada isn’t only Nanaimo bars and maple taffy at the cabane a sucre. Up here in the notoriously cold Great White North, the very tip of the long tongue of the Great Basin Desert sneakily licks up across the border from its birthplace down in the Sonoran Desert in Mexico. The town with…
Mention Marbella and what automatically comes to mind are gaudy images of Saudi princes, building-sized yachts, Ferraris, and the sweet smell of… corruption. This is the poster child of the infamous concrete Spanish coast where, according to who you believe, more than 30,000 buildings lack the proper permits. Golf courses grow where it rarely rains,…
Just when you thought you were getting the hang of the way Spaniards lisp their Cs, they go and change the language on you. More discreet than their more famous Catalan, Basque, and Galician cousins, speakers of Mañego in this hidden green valley have been ‘falaing’ (falar=hablar=to speak) their curious mix of Spanish, Latin, Gallego,…
Somewhere in this “bride of Andalusian cities,” one of the greatest travel-story meeting of minds took place. A rendezvous that seven years and a different continent later would give fruit to one of the best travel books ever written, Rihla (also know as A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels…
Early spring and an entire valley looks to the sky and prays. However this isn’t one of the many religious festivals in Spain, but a delicate dance between the weather and the calendar. Snowcapped mountains descend into green terracing where two million trees await their cue from Mother Nature before exploding into one of nature’s…
For many this was the end of the line, a place at the end of Africa to get lost in purple hazes and naked lunches. But long before Burroughs and Hendrix added their hipness, a local boy took the Tangerine brand far beyond the Levant. A medieval gap-year wanderer who saw it as a beginning…
Perched high above a patchwork of olive groves and cork forests, a holy mountain juts 758 meters (2486 feet) from the surrounding plain. It’s a sacred playground overlooking neighboring villages where naughty gods once used huge granite boulders as their croquet pieces, and left them scattered, forgetting to clean up after themselves. Over the centuries…