Above all else - and there is plenty - it's the great Moorish
monuments that compete for your attention in Andalucía .
The Moors, a mixed race of Berbers and Arabs who crossed into Spain
from Morocco and North Africa, occupied al-Andalus for over
seven centuries. Their first forces landed at Tarifa in 710 AD and
within four years they had conquered virtually the entire country;
their last kingdom, Granada, fell to the Christian Reconquest in
1492. Between these dates they developed the most sophisticated
civilization of the Middle Ages, centred in turn on the three major
cities of Córdoba, Sevilla and Granada . Each one
preserves extraordinarily brilliant and beautiful monuments, of
which the most perfect is Granada's Alhambra palace ,
arguably the most sensual building in all of Europe. Sevilla
, not to be outdone, has a fabulously ornamented Alcázar and the
greatest of all Gothic cathedrals. Today, Andalucía's capital and
seat of the region's autonomous parliament is a vibrant
contemporary metropolis that's impossible to resist. Córdoba's
exquisite Mezquita , the grandest and most beautiful mosque
constructed by the Moors, is a landmark building in world
architecture and also not to be missed.
These three cities have, of course, become major tourist
destinations, but the smaller inland towns of Andalucía are
often totally unspoiled. These offer amazing potential; Renaissance
towns such as Úbeda, Baeza and Osuna, Guadix with its
cave suburb, Moorish Carmona and the stark white hill towns
around Ronda , are all easily accessible by local buses.
Travelling for some time here you'll also get a feel for the
landscape of Andalucía: occasionally spectacularly beautiful but
more often impressive on a huge, unyielding scale, distinguished by
a patchwork of colours and the interaction of land and buildings,
or the gradual appearance of villages grouped beneath a castle and
church.
The province also takes in mountains - including the Sierra
Nevada , Spain's highest range. You can ski here in February,
and then drive down to the coast to swim the same day. Perhaps more
compelling, though, are the opportunities for walking in the lower
slopes, Las Alpujarras . Alternatively, there's good
trekking amongst the gentler (and much less-known) hills of the
Sierra Morena , north of Sevilla.
On the coast it's easy to despair. Extending to either
side of Málaga is the Costa del Sol , Europe's most
heavily developed resort area, with its beaches hidden behind a
remorseless density of concrete hotels and apartment complexes.
However, the province takes in two alternatives, much less
developed and with some of the best beaches in all Spain. These are
the villages between Tarifa and Cádiz on the Atlantic, and
those around Almería on the southeast corner of the
Mediterranean. The Almerian beaches allow warm swimming through all
but the winter months; those near Cádiz, more easily accessible,
are fine from about June to September. Near Cádiz, too, is the
Coto de Doñana national park, Spain's largest and most
important nature reserve, which is home to a spectacular range of
flora and fauna.
The realities of life in contemporary Andalucía can be
stark. Unemployment in the region is the highest in Spain -
over twenty percent in many areas - and an even larger proportion
of the population is still engaged in agriculture. Rural life is
bleak; you soon begin to notice the appalling economic structure,
at its most extreme in this part of Spain, of vast
absentee-landlord estates and landless peasants. The andaluz
villages, bastions of anarchist and socialist groups before and
during the Civil War, saw little economic aid or change during the
Franco years - or indeed since. For the last twenty years, the
province has been an autonomous region with its own
parliament and a substantial degree of self-government.
The day labourers, jornaleros , earn a precarious living
from seasonal work, and as recently as 1986 the regional government
instituted land reform in an effort to head off a peasants' revolt.
Numerous instances of land occupation have resulted in violent
clashes between labourers and the Civil Guard. Throughout the
1990s, tourism, and ventures such as Expo '92 in Sevilla, have
brought some changes - above all radical improvements in
infrastructure, with new road and rail projects aimed at providing
faster connections within the region and with Madrid and Barcelona
- but much still remains to be done.
For all its poverty however, Andalucía is also Spain at its
most exuberant: the home of flamenco and the bullfight, and those
wild and extravagant clichés of the Great Spanish Dream. These
really do exist and can be absorbed at one of the hundreds of
annual fiestas, ferias and romerías . The best of
them include the giant April Feria in Sevilla, the ageless
pilgrimage to El Rocío near Huelva in late May, and the
dramatically moving Semana Santa (Easter) celebrations at
Málaga, Granada, Sevilla, Córdoba and Jerez, as well as in
countless small villages.