Welcome to 2019! With the holidays behind us, I’m looking forward to a new year and new projects. But at the same time, I’m looking back to an amazing trip I was able to take in 2018 which will provide design inspiration for years to come. I took, literally, thousands of photos that I am just about done sorting and cataloguing. I will share a few of them in the next few weeks and maybe they will inspire others, too. Our trip in the fall began in Granada, Spain. We had beautiful weather even though it was quite cold.
One of the most striking things about the built environment of the city was the variety in the masonry of the walls. Everywhere there were mixes of brick and stone, sometimes very rustic and irregular, other times more stylized; some adorned with espaliered trees or dripping with lush vines. This architecture traces the complicated history of the city, from the caves and spectacular views of the Sacromonte neighborhood to the Albaicin (Albayzin) - the old Arab Quarter with it’s narrow, winding streets, to the Alhambra itself - which will be the subject of its own future post. Roman and peaked arches side-by-side attest to waves of European Catholic and North African Moorish conquests of Andalusia with Granada as the epicenter.
Not only is Granada one of the most beautiful cities I’ve visited, it’s one of the most delicious, where tapas are still free with a drink and a breakfast of chocolate and churros seems perfectly reasonable — which is why I’ll return some day.
