¡Málaga!

Posted in | at 7:35 PM

I should preface this by saying that it has always been a dream of mine to go to the Costa del Sol, which is situated on the Mediterranean edge of the Southern coast of Spain, directly to the east of Gibraltar.  Don't ask me why I've always wanted to go there, because I don't know.  Maybe I saw a picture in a book somewhere, or heard Sra. Carr (my Spanish teacher from middle school) talking about it, or maybe I heard my own mom talking about one of her many adventures when she was younger.  Who knows?  In particular, Málaga had always been the dream city of choice.

Well, imagine coming to Spain and having your señora tell you that you shouldn't go to Málaga because it's fea (ugly).  Nor should you go to any of the other places on the Costa del Sol because they're filled with tourists.  (I decided not to mention that Cádiz is also filled with tourists when Marisol said that I should go there instead.)  In a way, she was right, but in another, she was completely wrong.

A bit of a side note: I hate it when locals here try to tell me where to go without me asking them.  Obviously, they are going to know the city of Sevilla and the province of Andalucía and basically the rest of Spain better than I ever will, but just because one place is prettier or more exciting than the other does not want to make me go there any less.  Besides, everyone is going to have their own opinion anyway: case in point, Meagan's señora doesn't like Málaga either, so she told her to go to Marbella.  When I told Marisol this, she frowned and said, "¿Por qué?"  The moral of the story is, unless I ask someone for advice, what they tell me about places I plan on going is not going to keep me from going there.  Everywhere in Spain will be different than America.  I want to see all places: the good and the bad, the bonito and the feo.  (Marisol says that if she were to come to America, she would listen to the locals to determine where to go.  But if I told her not to go to NYC because I don't like that, even though she says she wouldn't go, I think she would.)

Anyway, side-note over.  I can definitely see where Marisol is coming from in terms of what Málaga looks like, but I still disagree.  More on that later.

As you may or may not remember, our story left off in Arcos.  My itinerary was incredibly complicated to get to Málaga from Arcos, because there's no direct transport (at least, not on Saturdays) between Arcos (or better yet, Jerez de la Frontera, the city next to Arcos) and Málaga, nor is there any transport at all in that direction really.  Oh well.  So this is what happened:

  • 8:00 a.m.: take a bus from Arcos de la Frontera to Jerez de la Frontera.  Because even though Arcos is on the big map of Spain that I keep going back to when describing places geographically, there is no transportation to and from the city except by bus and by car (which I don't have and am not even allowed to legally rent).  The bus came a little late, but that's fine -- the ride was only half an hour long and I had more than enough time to walk across the street in Jerez to the train station to catch the:
  • 9:33 a.m. train from Jerez de la Frontera to Dos Hermanas, a small pueblo outside Sevilla that I didn't get to explore for fear of missing my connecting train at:
  • 11:31 a.m. to Málaga.  Meagan and her parents were on this train as well, but they had gotten on at Sevilla.  And let me tell you: I mentioned the other day that my favorite paisaje had been on the way to Tarifa from Sevilla (one of the many steps to get to Morocco), but this train ride was even better.  The first half was pretty unmemorable, maybe also because I didn't have a window seat.  However, at one point, I closed my eyes for a little bit, not more than a minute, and when I opened them we were in a tunnel.  So that was weird, but then when we exited, I looked outside, and literally, we were riding along the side of a cliff.  There were plenty of mountains all around us, and they were all incredibly tall with incredibly sheer cliff faces.  Even more incredibly, there were people scaling these cliff faces.  It looked like something out of Avatar, except for real.  (I wish I had pictures, but it was too sudden for me to get out my camera and awkwardly lean over the stranger that was next to me to get a picture out the window.)  We drove through several more tunnels, finally exiting the mountain chain, much to our dismay.  Also astounding: we were literally 15 minutes from Málaga, which is at the beach.  I guess it's true what they say about going hiking in the morning and going swimming in the ocean during the afternoon.

That was my elongated travel schedule to get to Málaga.  We all arrived at around 1:40, with a lot on our to-do list and not enough time to do it.  First, we went to the Cathedral of Málaga, which I would venture to say is even prettier than the Cathedral of Sevilla, even though it's smaller.  And if you remember what Sevilla's cathedral looks like, that's saying something.  Málaga was built in a Renaissance style, which means that the colors white and gold are all over the inside of the building.  The outside has a lot of arcs and generally rounded architecture, while the inside is full of gold paint and embroidery.  The organ was particularly spectacular in that regard.





After visiting the cathedral, we trekked down to the beach to get lunch, hopefully to try and find one of several chiringuitos rumored to be speckled around Málaga's beachfront.  (A chiringuito is basically a hole-in-the-wall restaurant that serves really good seafood.  And I mean, really good.  You know how in the States the dive restaurants all have the best seafood?  Evidently, that goes for Spain too.)  The thing is, we didn't really see any that were open.  We tried this one ritzy restaurant for which we didn't have a reservation but were supposed to, but after 15 minutes of non-service we hoofed it on out of there and walked a little ways down the coast.  At this point, the clouds got even more threatening, so we gave up hope, took photographs of ourselves and the Mediterranean on the surprisingly brown-sand beach (except I have none, because my camera died while inside the cathedral), and then made our way back down El Paseo Marítimo de Picasso before it started to rain.  

And then we tried to find ANYWHERE to eat and it was IMPOSSIBLE.  Maybe it's just off-season for tourists so restaurants don't get as much business, maybe it was because it was the weekend and Spaniards like to enjoy themselves on the weekend, maybe something else.  But the only place that was open was a fairly nice, Italian place.  So we all got seafood there.  We figured since they're 50 feet (literally) from the ocean (or the nearest marisquería, which is basically the seafood equivalent of a butcher shop) that the seafood at this restaurant couldn't be too bad.  And it was great!

We made our way back through the city, with the port on our left (the part that is indeed fairly fea) and the city (the part that is muy muy bonita) and long street park on our right.  Meagan and her parents took lots of pictures; I, regrettably, did not.  Our last, really important destination was the Picasso museum.  Pablo Picasso, the famous Spanish painter, was actually born in Málaga, but did most of his work and spent most of his life in Paris.  (He actually didn't return to Málaga again after his last visit when he was 19.)  However, los malagüenos have still erected a museum in his honor, called El museo Pablo Ruiz Picasso, which features works that were created principally for his friends and family.  The museum was built in his old house, right behind the cathedral, in some of the smaller side-streets of the city.  My favorite painting was this one, called La bañista, or "Bather" in English.


After that, we had a little bit of time left, but not nearly enough to pay a visit to the Alcazaba near the cathedral, nor to the castle of Gibralfaro, which sits on the top of a foothill and overlooks the entire city.  Meagan's dad wanted to see the last one in particular, but it was quite a hike and we only had about half an hour before we had to start walking back to the train station.  So we, like Americans, had some dessert at a tapas bar: Meagan's parents split a brownie, and Meagan and I split a banana split (!), which was literally called "BANANA SPLIT" on the menu.  And it was so good.

All in all, the trip was a grand success!  A lot of traveling, but somehow not nearly the amount of travel time that we experienced on our Morocco trip...thank goodness.  The train ride back found all of us tired, worn out, and content.

As for my recommendation, I really enjoyed Málaga.  A classmate asked me the next day if she should take her mom to Mallorca (an island in the Mediterranean) or Málaga.  And I told her straight up: don't listen to what your señora tells you.  Málaga is beautiful.  But it depends on what you want to see: if you want a great beach, go to Mallorca.  If you want to see one of the oldest, most beautiful cities in the world, you should definitely go to Málaga.  (Shameless plug for Spanish tourism: terminado.)

Nick

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1 Response to "¡Málaga!"

  1. NCMeekins says:
    March 18, 2011 at 2:21 AM

    The best part of course was our excellent guides, Nick and Meagan. They handled all the Spanish interactions for us (I studied French which was of no use - my wife studied Spanish but let the fluent duo tour us around). For our part it was just great to see them both and share a day or two of their special time in Spain. I highly recommend the pair as tour guides!

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