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Ronda, Spain
How's that bricklaying coming, how's your engine running, is that bridge getting built, are your hands getting filled
Almost four hours south of Atocha (and at the end of what for me was an insanely long travel day) is Ronda, an almost unbelievably picturesque Spanish hill town that was easily worth all of the trouble it took to get to.
When I decided I wanted to go to Spain, I bought the Rick Steves guidebook for my iPad and was immediately drawn to a small black and white picture of this, Ronda's Puente Nuevo, its new bridge and (reportedly) one of the most photographed bridges in the world. So with that image in my mind I started planning my trip around it, around the very few trains that actually go all the way to Ronda, even going as far as figuring out when the sun sets in Ronda (as late as 8PM in October) and logistically how I could be there to see it. Luckily all of the stars aligned just as I hoped and I arrived at the gorge with the late afternoon sun, even having just barely enough time to hike all the way down to the very bottom and watch the sun set over the valley. Spectacular.
We’ve already left Ronda and now find ourselves in Cordoba, only two and a half hours away by train(s), if all goes well. Once you get there, you quickly realize that there is more than one thing to see in Cordoba, but the reality is that if you only have time to see one thing you better damn well make sure that it's the Mezquita.
The conquering Muslims (sometimes better known as the Moors) ran things in Spain from 711 all the way until 1492 (a big year for Spain) and ran Cordoba until 1236. At the time (and only for a little while), Cordoba was the place to be and, at one point a thousand years ago, Cordoba was literally the biggest and most important city in the world. Its center was its spectacular Mosque (or Mezquita), with a sublime and almost endless field of brick and stone double arches. Eventually after the Muslims lost power to the Christians, most cities destroyed their Mosques to build Cathedrals (see next page), but the people in Cordoba switched things up a bit and instead only partly demolished their mosque. The final effect is startling, they created a building (the cathedral) completely surrounded by and trapped inside another building (the mosque), a shock to the system and to scale and to anyone's sensibility.
Deep inside the Mezquita, this is the center of the cathedral inside the center of the mosque, with only a few striped arches thrown in to let you know where you are or, more accurately, where you were.
Of course there are two ways to look at such a vulgar intervention. The first is to be horrified while the other is to admire that the conquering Christians in Cordoba at least realized the value of their Mezquita and saved some of it, leaving a UNESCO World Heritage Site where you can still see some of what Andalucía in its prime might have really been like. While the first way is the correct response, it's probably far healthier over time to just go with the second one.
A note about some of the photographs. I traveled to Spain with three cameras. My beloved Canon 20D with its 18-200mm lens, my trusted Canon S90 point and shoot and my always with me at all times iPhone 4. I used all three cameras and often created HDR (High Dynamic Range) images using three bracketed photos and also found myself taking panorama images- quickly panned images that I later put together using Photoshop Photomerge. The final results often better describe the space than even a wide angle 18mm lens can, although with all good things there is a bit of a cost. Often these panoramas create odd aberrations, strange conditions that obviously are far more surrealistic than realistic. A case in point is this photo, one which allows you to see a lot but also starts to create odd effects in the sky, almost as if the palm trees are glowing, which, thankfully, they were not.
