CLEANLINESS IS NO LONGER DANGEROUS
But It Is a Little Expensive
It took a while, 19 months to be exact, but we finally made it to los baños árabes, the arab baths. To my knowledge, only three remain in Granada, and one of those is open for tours only. The Moors were a water-loving culture, perhaps because they were a desert people. Fountains and running water cooled their houses and gardens. Moorish aljibes (cisterns) can still be found all over old Granada, and their original, gravity watering system continues to run through the Alhambra. Bathing is also a religious practice. Moslems bathe often and are very clean.
After Granada fell to the Catholic monarchs, the baths were closed and bathing, even in private, became a dangerous practice, as doing so could catch the attention of the Inquisition. The main business of the Inquisition was not to hunt for witches but to evaluate the sincerity of converts. They attempted to determine by time-tested methods, like torture, which converts were, fact, false Christians. They were kept busy, because the Moors, as well as Jews, had been given a difficult choice: convert, flee or die. As both Moors and Jews had lived in Spain for hundreds of years, exile and death were undesirable options, so there were, no doubt, many false conversions.
One means of determining whether a conversion was true or false was the cleanliness test, as only the Moors made bathing a sign of faith — unfortunately, the wrong faith. Cleanliness was no longer next to Godliness but next to the stake. Those Christians who had bathed stopped, as the charge, “the accused was known to take baths,” could lead to a death sentence. Christians became very dirty, very smelly people and were proud of it. It was said that Queen Isabel allowed only holy water to touch her body. Whether Fernando touched her body, or even wanted to, is not recorded.
Our venture to the baths came about when our friend Celeste, who we met last fall, called and invited us to join her at the baths followed by dinner at her house. Celeste, a retired teacher (amazing how many teacher friends we have) and native Floridian, has lived in Spain for a number of years and knows the ropes.
Celeste lives on a very narrow street near the River Darro in the lower Albaicín. Her apartment is on the ground floor of what was once a three-story mansion. The central courtyard is lined with columns and enormous clay planters. The stairs to the rooftop terrace are taxing but the views are worth it. Her apartment is in the rear corner.
From her living room and sleeping loft there is an unobstructed view of the Alhambra. The apartment is small, quaint and requires you to duck your head twice, once as you enter the kitchen and again inside. There are no clues as to what this corner room of the mansion once was, but it was not an apartment. The kitchen, bathroom and sleeping loft were obviously added sometime in the twentieth century. From all appearances, the courtyard and exterior of this old building have never been modernized and were last repaired around 1740.
But the location is excellent and the rent is modest. It’s the perfect place to live a European, bohemian life, with an ambiance and character that are now rarely found.
The baths are located just over the river from Celeste’s pad, with the Alhambra high above. The only identifying sign on the sixteenth century building is a small plaque on the wall by the door: Los Baños Árabes. Inside there are steps up to a desk where you check in and receive a towel (reservations are required for each 1-1/2 hour session, after which the entire facility is cleaned). Just beyond the desk is a small courtyard with a fountain and ceramic decorations. Three stories above, a light, colorful fabric shields the courtyard from sun and rain. There is a restaurant on the top floor.
In the courtyard there are small, wooden, keyed lockers, and across from those a door into the changing room. You are required to wear a “bathing costume.” In the changing room are two slatted benches with hooks above for storing your clothes, and two, very small changing cubicles, so small, in fact, that when you bent over to pick up your underwear, which you’d dropped on the wet floor, both your head and your buttocks bumped the walls at the same time. There is also a toilet.
After changing, you step through a door, beyond which are two small, waist-high shower enclosures. Showering is also required. From this point on everything is tile, wet and dimly lit. The ceilings, which look like the roof of a cave, have enbedded lights and drip with condensation.
The first room contains tile platforms for lying down and a small, perhaps seven-by-eight foot, pool filled with very, very cold water. The water is 2-1/2 feet deep.
The entrance to the hot pool and message area is another narrow, arched doorway that required ducking the head to get through. The room was filled with steam. There are two massage tables, one along the wall and another in an alcove in the corner. At least one massage was being given the entire hour and a half that we were there.
The hot pool was about five feet wide and 25 feet long, with a sitting ledge just beneath the surface of the water and a narrow ledge along one wall. The water was hot, though not as hot as a Japanese hot bath. The room, of course, was so filled with steam that it was difficult seeing from one end of the pool to the other. Because attendance is restricted, the pools were never filled. There were perhaps 15 people there during our session.
We moved back and forth, fifteen minutes in the hot pool, 18 seconds in the cold pool, then five to ten minutes relaxing on a tile platform, then back to the hot pool.
It was a bit pricy, we thought, €13 each for the session. We didn’t take the massage, which costs an additional €7. We enjoyed it. It was still another new experience.
A LITTLE BIT OF ENGLAND
At Nerja on the Costa del Sol
As part of our 35th anniversary celebration, we decided to take a little trip down to the coast. We chose Nerja because our June visitors, Abigail and Roscoe and their parents, are going there. Rick Steves highly recommends it as one of the few beach towns, which, he says, “has kept much of its quiet, old world charm.” We decided to check it out.
We got up before dawn, checked the score on-line at NY Times (North Carolina won the NCAA basketball championship), and then took a city bus to the bus station for a nine o’clock departure to the coast. The first hour of the two-hour ride was over the mountains and through spectacular canyons with sheer rock walls. There were three stops along the rugged coast during the second hour.
There is no bus station in Nerja, the bus simply stops along the main street. The ticket office is a kiosk. It is a very nice section of town (I don’t think Nerja has a bad section) and buses are constantly coming and going, so it’s not like getting dropped off on skid row. We got off the bus and Kay pulled out our Rick Steves guide, as we were now going to look for a hotel. Up walked this little pixie of an Englishwoman and informed us that she had an apartment, right on the water, which would cost no more than any hotel we would find in Rick Steves. And how much would that be, we asked. I had an idea of how much the hotels we frequent cost, which was about €40-45. €30 euros, she said. It’s very nice. She then asked an English couple who were waiting for the bus for a testimonial. They had been staying in the apartment for the past week.
“It’s really quite comfortable,” the woman said. “The gardens are lovely with an ocean view. We’re coming back in a week.” What higher praise than that? We accepted. Then Ina, our gaily clad, English sprite, and the departing coupled hugged, and off we went.
We followed Ina, who we think to be about our age, through the narrow streets to her apartment, located in a modern, white, three-story building lined with balconies. As it turns out, she has two apartments, the one-bedroom we were taking and a studio next door. Both apartments face the street, along which were restaurants and small shops. The garden and pool (not filled in still chilly April) were on the ocean side. From the garden you could look out over the Mediterranean and down to the beach below, or toward the town and the Balcon de Europa, for which Nerja is known.
The apartment has a living room with two couches, wicker chairs, a television and a radio; a kitchen equipped with a toaster and coffee maker plus coffee and tea; bedroom, large bathroom and a small balcony with a table and two chairs. As is her custom, Ina provides her guests a bottle of champagne, chocolates on the pillow, pastry for breakfast and a baguette “because you should always have bread in the house.” And to think that we could be staying in a modest hotel room, as likely as not without a balcony, certainly with no kitchen.
Ina, who lived for years in Iraq and Africa, among other places, actually lives on her boat. We saw a photo, and it is not a rowboat. She gets about on a purple motor scoter decorated with a rainbow. She prefers short-term rentals because she likes to meet people, which she does by meeting the bus when she has a vacancy. She is delightful and full of life.
The town itself is one of many Costa del Sol English enclaves with a good smattering of Germans. You can walk the quaint streets and small plazas and hear almost no Spanish. The shops are geared to the tourists. There are pubs and English restaurants everywhere. Some menus are in English only, some in English and German, some with Spanish. There are also a number of Spanish restaurants, and we enjoyed a very good Spanish seafood dinner. But we did take advantage of the opportunity to take in a delicious and amazingly filling English pub lunch: steak and ale pie with chips, gravy, peas, carrots and cabbage for Kay; liver, onions, bacon, mashed potatoes, cabbage, peas and carrots for me. We did not eat again until the following day.
In addition to the Balcon de Europa, a cliff that thrusts out over the sea, Nerja is also known for the caves. The Cuevas de Nerja, which were discovered in 1959, are two miles outside of town. We bused out and walked back. The caves are beyond description, so I won’t try. There is no tour, you just waunder around down in the earth. It contains, according to the Guinness Book of Records (which reminds me, Guinness is readily available throughout the town), the world’s largest column shaped by the merging of a stalactite and a stalagmite. It is most impressive.
Almost all the town is located high above the sea on cliffs and bluffs. There are nine beaches, all reached by staircases down the cliffs, some sand, some gravel and rock. Eight are very small.
Facing the longest beach, Playa de Burriana, is a paved sidewalk. On one side there is a sandy beach and chairs and umbrellas for hire. On the other side a line of cafes, restaurants and small shops.
On Ina’s recommendation, we walked to the eastern end of Playa de Burriana in search of Ayo’s, a restaurant known for its paella, which is cooked outside in a huge, three-foot wide paella pan. It was fascinating to watch. Ayo, a pony tailed man in his fifties, wears shorts along with protective wrapping from the knees down to protect his legs from the heat. First he built a huge fire of broken pallets, over which the paella pan rests on an iron frame. In goes the secret broth, followed by cups of olive oil, then a bucket of chicken parts. He moves the chicken around with a small, cast iron shovel. Then he adds crushed tomato and chopped bell peppers. He stirs and stirs before throwing in a large pinch of saffron. At a certain point, in goes a bucket of rice. More stirring. Finally, when the rice is almost ready, he dumps in a bucket of shrimp. He stirs. Then he and his assistant wrap the handles of the pan in tin foil, and move it to another iron frame where it cools for a few minutes. Then it is moved to the serving table, where Ayo serves up each plate with a mound of rice, pieces of chicken and three large shrimps. This is brought to your table.
The cost of this Spanish feast is €5. And you can go back for more, which we did. When Kay returned, the pan was near empty. Wait, Ayo told her, for a fresh batch. He made a batch about every half an hour. Ten minutes later it was ready, hot and delicious. We didn’t eat again till the next day.
The cost of our meal, we had two plates and two beers each, was less than €14. We love Spain. And we have Ina’s phone number for our next trip to Nerja.
