Eight Pictures of Granada

The book store || paper shop is not really much of either. Still, it is my first stop. The lady behind the counter smils and sells me the very journal I am writing in now. So that’s a start.

Out behind the shop they are just getting out of school. In the plaza, university kids talk gossip over cheap coffee. Birds take refuge with the gardener, just over the fence. She is good at her job. Everyone here seems to be settled into a nice rhythm of life. We are not near enough to the ocean to hear it, but something about the way the city feels reminds me of small Mediterranean waves crashing, forever, on a short beach.

This is a good start.


A pigeon trades places with me as I enter the bakery. I wonder if there is pigeon shit on the pastry I am about to buy. But I remember that I am hungry and that, if there was pigeon shit, I would probably see it. Pigeons are not small birds, relatively speaking.

I eat the pastry next to the fortress wall on the top of the hill, opposite the Alhambra. It feels like the kind of view a Gondorian soldier might have had, just before the invasion. There’s a little snow left on the mountains behind the palace.

The pastry is flaky dough, sweet cream, apples, and sugar glaze. The view is the city, an old palace, the Sierra Nevada mountains, and a crayon blue sky.


One thousand years ago a Muslim prince walked this path to lead a rebellion against his father. Today there is no prince, no Muslim king, and less snow on the mountain ahead than there has ever been at this time of year.

On the way back down I pass a tree with a great gash in its side. In the gash there is a sticky, unfriendly sap. Past its prime, infected, searching for a host. 

The sun sets over the Alhambra.


On the street an old large spanish woman asks, as we avoid a near-collision, “They haven’t taught you yet that in Spain we walk on the left?*” and I try to smile at her. Later, another old Spanish woman tells me, in exaggerated and poor English, that I should learn how to read — this after I made the error of asking, in my sort of Argentinian Spanish, what train car we were in.

I laugh both incidents off in the evening with a bartender who recently moved from Jaén. I try jamón asado for the first time: pork roasted over a fire sort of like a döner shop would do it, sliced, then served on crispy bread and a volcanically liquid egg.

Home finds me hours later, wine-drunk and exhausted, thanks to the help of a local gas station attedant. I collapse on the bed. 

*They do not.


The statues in the abbey look lost. 

On a basic level, they do not seem to know where they are. Centuries of wear have carved their mouths into scarred, gaping pits, have given their eyes a vacant and terrified stare. And if you look really close at them, you can see even they don’t know where they are.

The aesthetic is all off, too, if you look around at the rest of the abbey. This is a normal place, below par for what most tourists will see in Spain, somewhat far off the beaten path, up a hill. There is a main hallway and there are some chapels and then, well. Then there is the courtyard where these are.

Get close enough to one and you may just be able to hear them whisper — take me back — and at the same time you may smell a smokey, firey, painful odor that suggest something of the place they first came from.


The bus takes no more than an hour to reach Güéjar Sierra. I take no more than four hours on the trail to reach the summit (if you can call it that). I eat and wonder what they might have eaten for lunch back in the days when these mountains were not for hiking, not for tourism, not for skiing, but for potato farming. I think I have an idea.

Do you think they ever got tired of the view?


The boy on the top of the village is shouting something at the top of his lungs. The hundred or so sheep seem to be listening.

With the help of a farm dog and the boy’s father, all the sheep head into the barn, where they meet a crowd of goat and cows, preparing for bed, saying something like, “Wild night out there?” as the last straggling sheep make their way in.

Under the cover of dark the father scoops up his son and they both look at the last rays of the dying sunset and at the first light of an infant moon.



The morning sun kisses Güéjar Sierra just the same as it kisses anywhere else, I guess, which is to say gracefully and not without some remorse for days long past. It also kisses with, if you squint hard enough, a weary and time-scarred hope for the days that are yet to come.

* * * 

Written in 2023.