5th May
Today we travel from Granada to Malaga with a stop for lunch in the pretty whitewashed town of Antequera. Antequera is known as “the heart of Andalusia” (el corazón de Andalucía) because of its central location among Málaga, Granada, Córdoba, and Seville.
After a quick lunch we visited the Municipal Museum of Antiquera which was inaugurated by the Prince and Princess of Spain and housed in the beautiful old Palace of Nájera After an expansion in 2009-2011, it was reborn as the “Museo de la Ciudad de Antequera”, and now covers five thousand square meters and stands out as an iconic Andalusian municipal museum.
It is a very well organised local museum and definitely worth a visit. The Ground Floor and First Floor are about the early development of the area from Neolithic times through the Roman era and displays an impressive collection of Roman artifacts from the surrounding area, including glassware, jewelry, stone carvings and fragmentary mosaics. Its pride and joy is an elegant and athletic 1.4m bronze statue of a boy, Efebo. Discovered on a local farm in the 1950s, it’s possibly the finest example of Roman sculpture found in Spain.
Upstairs is a huge repository of religious items, from paintings to ornate silverwork. Floor Two is medieval Christian art and Floor Three displays artists from about the 1850s. The top floor is reserved for exhibitions of the work of world renowned Spanish artists.
You may disagree with the philosophy of bull fighting, but the bullring in Antiquera has been fully restored and is now one of the most beautiful in Spain. We had time to explore it and have a glass of wine before setting out for Malaga.
Warmed by the wine we got back on the bus for the remainder of the trip to Malaga. We went through some beautiful country with well established farms,
arriving in Malaga in the early afternoon and checked into our hotel, a restored old Andalusian palace in the old city.
On the agenda was a walking tour of Malaga and a visit to the Picasso museum. We had visited a Picasso museum in Montserrat and walking through the narrow cobblestone streets of Malaga held little appeal. On the other hand, the spacious room with a comfy bed and the very welcoming staff at the hotel held a lot of appeal.
6th May
The next morning we had to have all our luggage out by 7am and be breakfasted and ready to go by 8.30 so we didn’t lose our booking on the ferry across to Tangier, our gateway to Morocco. We were due to set sail at 12.00 pm. We arrived at 10am and the Ferry Terminal became our home for the next six hours as they kept cancelling and delaying ferries. We eventually boarded and settled down in relative comfort whilst one custom officer methodically and slowly processed every passenger (hundreds). Fortunately he finished before we got to the other side.
Morocco requires you to change your tour bus for a Moroccan tour bus and your guide for a Moroccan guide so we had all our luggage with us – in our case 4 cases – which we had to put in a container on the deck for the duration of the voyage. When we reached Tangier we were informed the lift was not operating and we would have to manhandle all our luggage down three flights of stairs. Thank god for teamwork!
If our impression that Morocco was a backward country was in place when we boarded our tour bus then it was soon dispelled on our drive to the hotel. Wide avenues with beautiful landscaping, parks and green spaces everywhere, people picnicking and playing sport and everywhere signs of progress and affluence. Our guide told us it was because of the King.
We arrived at our hotel, the Tazi Palace Fairmont Hotel, (without doubt the most luxurious of all our hotels) and met for dinner – except for those who got food poisoning from the tuna rolls in the ferry terminal – before retiring to bed. It had been a long day.
