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  1. Unless I've missed it -- which is possible -- there doesn't seem to be a dedicated thread for Andalucia or any of the delightful Spanish cities located therein. My girlfriend and I spent five days in April drinking sherry and enjoying cheap, delicious tapas in Sevilla, Granada, and Cordoba before heading up to Madrid and Barcelona. I've given my recommendations for the latter half of our trip elsewhere in this forum, so here are some of my favorite places and impressions from our too-brief time in Andalucia! (I'd love to make it back and explore more of the region, as I felt we barely scratched the surface.) I thought we were really fortunate to find a number of places that had that ineffable combination of great food and drink, great value, and great atmosphere that made me want to come back again and again (which, in several cases, we did – despite my having compiled a long list of places to try for each city). We spent two nights each in Seville and Granada, one quick night in Cordoba, and then four nights each in Madrid and Barcelona. Every one of the cities was awesome in its own way -- Cordoba was probably the least fun because we weren’t there for that long and because I ended up getting sick that night, but I still enjoyed it a ton. If pressed, I’d probably favor our experiences in Seville slightly over Granada and Madrid slightly over Barcelona, but I would have happily spent another month or more just exploring all the places we went. The history there is just incredible; it may be unfair of me, but so much of the U.S. feels so plastic, anodyne, and characterless by comparison. Wandering down a random narrow alley and finding Roman walls or a 500-year-old church, or stopping at a random town for lunch and being the only tourists in a gorgeous 1300-year-old fortress…we just don’t have anything like that here. I love it. I wish I’d been sooner. I wish I could go everywhere. Sevilla The Alcazar was stunning, but my favorite part of Seville was the labyrinthine network of streets; every seeming dead end turned out to have a couple of picturesque alleyways splitting off from it in one direction or another. We stayed in the Hotel Casa de Colon, a renovated boutique hotel with an absolutely perfect location and a very reasonable price. I highly recommend it, but only if you pay the extra 10 euro or so and get one of the larger rooms with a balcony; I think the standard rooms are a little small and dark, but ours was spacious and airy. Our favorite places to eat in Seville: the back bar at Casa Morales (run by the same family since 1850; we went there twice, amazing atmosphere and everything was delicious, especially the imperial anchovies and the tortilla); the counter in the back of the grocery at Casa Moreno; Las Golondrinas II across the river in Triana (not much ambience, but phenomenal carrillada – pork cheeks – and the radishes are insanely tasty); Las Teresas in Barrio Santa Cruz (we went here twice also; I loved everything about it starting with the dozen legs of ham hanging directly over the bar seats – I highly recommend the secreto iberico and the boquerones fritos); and, for breakfast and atmosphere, Bar El Comercio (I still wish I’d picked up a bottle of the murky green olive oil they sell here, and their collection of antique cocktail and sherry bottles is something to see). Granada We rented a car and drove from Seville to Granada; the AirBnB we rented in Granada had both a spectacular view and a free parking space, which is pretty key in a city where automobile traffic into the historic center is strictly regulated. The Alhambra was everything it was made out to be, and the old Moorish quarter was very fun to walk around in (if a little steep at times), but the most enjoyable thing we did there had nothing to do with history. There’s a particular street artist in Granada called El Nino de las Pinturas, and we found a map online of the approximate locations of a lot of his pieces and then spent a morning going from one to the next in a sort of street art scavenger hunt. So much fun, and some of the photos we took are gorgeous. Favorite bars/restaurants in Granada: the snails were pretty decent at Bar Aliatar Los Caracoles; we had a great Moroccan meal at Tajine Elvira (get the eggplant dish that’s sort of like a hot baba ghanoush, and get the chicken and vegetable tagine as well); the wine bar at Taberna La Tana was awesome and the free tapas that came with every drink were generous and delicious; but my favorite place was probably El Tabernaculo, a tiny hole-in-the-wall run by the proprietor by himself and festooned with religious regalia everywhere (everything here was delicious; I didn't realize until after the fact that this was one of Anthony Bourdain's stops for Parts Unknown -- he sat in the same seat I did, but that's unsurprising since there were eight barstools at most). The N42 and Cordoba We drove from Granada to Cordoba along the N42, which is incredibly scenic. Along the way we stopped at Alcala la Real, a picturesque town of 22,000 that’s towered over by a Moorish fortress built in the 8th century. This is where we wandered through the fortress for a couple of hours and were literally the only tourists there; I was really, really impressed by how good (and high-tech) the exhibits were. Anywhere in the U.S. this would be a top tourist attraction that would be jam-packed from morning until night (not least because it would be pretty curious for an 8th century Moorish fortress to turn up in America). From there we took a slight detour to the mountain town of Zuheros, where we had a lunch of chuletitas (little chops) from milk-fed baby goats. I feel no remorse; they were delightful. In Cordoba we stayed at the NH Collection hotel, which was very nice except for the fact that our room was inordinately warm and there was no air conditioning, so they had to move us – at 1 in the morning, with my stomach feeling terrible – to a much smaller and less nice room that was, at least, cooler and more comfortable. We spent that evening (before I started feeling sick) at the Cordoba annual Cata del Vino festival, where for a 10 euro ticket you could enter a large covered pavilion and sample a fair amount of Montilla Moriles fortified wine, which is that region’s version of sherry. It was a lot of fun; there were literally thousands of people there and I think we might have been the only ones who spoke English as our first language. It’s basically an excuse for friends to dress up in going-out clothes, get together, and drink wine in a big tent, and I was surprised at how young the average person was. (I was also vividly reminded that Spain’s legal drinking age is 18, as several of the people we passed were definitely wearing braces.) Unfortunately my stomach starting acting up so we didn’t stay as long as we might have, and despite my having the names of half a dozen places that are supposedly amazing for dinner, that wasn’t in the cards and we ended up just making an early night of it. The next morning we spent a free-admission hour at the Mezquita – stunning, breathtaking, amazing – and then caught the train for Madrid. Places to eat in Cordoba: I never got to try them, but Blanco Enea, Bodega Guzman, Casa Rubio, and Taberna San Cristobal all looked excellent when I did my research, and they will be my first stops if I'm ever in town again.
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