Inspiring Excitement and Passion about History and the Humanities
New development on life in Spain. This summer we will be working in our huerta (vegetable garden). Everyone in Spain seems to either have a garden or belong to a community garden. Our rental house has lots of land with olive trees, and there’s room for a big garden, and so on Saturday we went…
Today we drove two hours to Nerja, a sleepy town about 40 minutes north of Malaga. Under ordinary circumstances, I wouldn’t think about going there. They have a pretty cool bridge, but it doesn’t have much on the bridge in Ronda, close to where I live, so it wouldn’t appeal that much to me. But…
As most of you know, I currently live in Andalusia, in southern Spain. What I’ve never really written that much about was the paperwork hoops we had to jump through in order to become legal residents. If you are an American and you want to move to Spain, you will need to do some (or…
If you were looking for the hippest place to be in 11th century Europe, you wouldn’t go to Paris. Or London, which was an outpost badgered by centuries of Viking invasions, and was about to be conquered by the Normans. You wouldn’t go to Berlin, or Florence, or even Rome. Or Athens. Nope, if you…
A crumbling castle in rural Andalusia with a Scottish history? And you can go wander around for free, and it only costs like €2 to get in to the building itself? Say what? Yep, that’s the Castle of the Stars at Teba. Teba itself is a pueblo blanco (white village – quintessential whitewashed Andalusian mountain town)…
This past Saturday I discovered what might become my favorite place in Spain so far: Gaucín. Gau-huh? Yeah, you’ve probably never heard of it. It’s a teeny tiny town of about 2,000 people in the mountains, all whitewashed, on the road from Ronda to Gibraltar, the A369. Apparently it used to be home to bandits and smugglers. It…
So. We went to Seville this past weekend. It’s about a 2 hour drive, and I hadn’t been there before. So we piled into the car, had screenshots of the directions saved (since we don’t have good data plans on our Spanish phones), and we were off. Getting to Seville is a piece of cake…
To be added to the “Things to Do in Ronda” series: yesterday we went to the Palace of Mondragon, which, according to legend, was the palace of the son of Morocco’s sultan. The last Arab governor, before the fall of Ronda in 1485, also lived here. It’s an amazing building, and since it’s a bit…
I posted last week about the history of Ronda, the town where I’m living right now, and how its history spans pre-Roman Celtic times, through Christians, Moors, and back to Catholic with the Reconquista. Over the weekend I dove deeper into two of the epochs, Roman and Muslim. After spending Saturday in Gibraltar buying groceries…