Our Trip to Andalusia – Part II

We recently did a road trip through Southern Spain (our first post-covid European vacation!). We did and saw so much that I had to break up a write up of the trip into two blog post. You can read first part (all about Seville) here; and in this blog post I want to spotlight what we did in Granada, Cordoba and Gibraltar.

GRANADA

It is a lovely city but all that sticks in my memory about Granada was how impossible it was to find our hotel (it literally took us over an hour driving through the labyrinth that’s old town Granada), Easter processions and Alhambra.

Hotel

Whenever we travel, we always stay in historical center – I love narrow streets, lots of history and things to see and do. And we also love staying at boutique hotels – places that are not traditional but that have their own personalities and charm. After doing a lot of research I ended up choosing Gar Anat Boutique Hotel , which was located right in the thick of things. This place was awesome – it was located in a centuries old guest house, had a super cool courtyard, great breakfast and each room was unique. And as an added bonus (because we were in Granada during Holy Week) we were able to watch Easter processions from our balcony!

Restaurants

La Picolla Carmela – by this point of the trip my family rebelled against having tapas every meal so I found this Italian restaurant close to our hotel – it had great tripadvisor reviews and serviced Italian food so we went. We had to wait FOREVER for a table (did not get seated till past 9 PM) but the food was SO worth it! It was one of my favorite meals of the trip and one of the best Italians we’ve ever had!

Farala – a very upscale place with a multi course (I think it was at least 9 courses) very creative modern menu – every dish looked like a work of art. It had a great writeup from Michelin and so of course we had to try it. Was it my favorite meal ever? Definitely not. Are we glad we went there – for sure!

Bodegas Castaneda – our Alhambra tour guide recommended this place and I am glad he did – it was awesome! We got a whole lot of tapas and they were all very good!

Alhambra – our guide recommended this churros place for us. Apparently they serve traditional churros – which are fat and have no ridges. Did we like it? How can you not like deep fried dough dipped in chocolate?! But we realized we liked non traditional churros much better:)

Things To Do

Alhambra is one of the top tourists destinations in all of Spain so of course it goes without saying that you need to go see it. I’ve seen photos of this place but I gotta say that they don’t do it justice – this place is SPECTACULAR! We spent over 3 hours there and it felt that we hardly scratched the surface – there is just so much to see and explore! We got a private guide and I would highly recommend you do the same because we’ve learnt a whole lot from him.

Food Tour – I love exploring and I love food so naturally I LOVE food tours! We’ve done a few of them during our travels and I was really excited when I booked one for all of us in Grenada. We used Food Sherpas and I would NOT recommend using it – all four of us felt that there is not much exploring, explaining OR food. But maybe you will

CORDOBA

We loved loved loved Cordoba! We went there for La Mezquita and absolutely fell in love with this charming town.

Stay

I could not find a hotel that I loved in Cordoba so we decided on an AirBnB. We absolutely loved the one we stayed at – the location was perfect, the place was spacious (two bedrooms), sparkling clean and with cool decor and the host was wonderful. I would stay there again in a heartbeat.

Things to Do

We only had a couple of nights in Cordoba so other than checking out La Mezquita we just walked all over town exploring its UNESCO famous courtyards. You can actually do a tour of courtyards (I know – it sounds a bit odd but trust me – they are so cool)

Restaurants

Restaurante Domasco – VERY good middle eastern place – cool decor, huge servings = all around wonderful

Bodegas Mezquita – when I was researching restaurants in Cordoba this one kept popping up. There are several locations all over town and they serve traditional dishes. The food was very good but the service was kind of ‘meh’ – go there if you have plenty of time to allow for subpar service.

Regadera – this was probably our favorite meal in Cordoba – modern Spanish restaurant with really cool decor and delicious creative food – highly recommend!

GIBRALTAR

I was looking for a place to stay in Tarifa but could not find anything to my liking and through – why not Gibraltar?!! Well, technically we stayed in La Linea De la Conception in Spain but we drove to Gibraltar for dinner!:)

The reason we stayed there was this houseboat with the direct views of the Rock of Gibraltar. It was TINY but a VERY cool place to stay for the night. Would I stay there for more than one day? Definitely not! But we all loved spending one night there.