A Travel Blog
On our day tour of the Western Highlands we stopped at numerous lochs and castles.
Doune Castle was a medieval stronghold near the village of Doune. It was constructed in the 1300’s by Robert Stewart, the Duke of Albany. Various movies and TV shows have filmed here including Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Game of Thrones and Outlander.
We escaped the city for a day and took a bus tour to see a small portion of the Western Highlands. One of our stops was the small town of Inveraray (pop. 600) on Loch Fyne.
Much of what remains of the town today was laid out in the late 1700’s as the first planned Georgian town in Scotland
Dean Village is a picturesque former village only a short walk from the centre of Edinburgh.
We were undecided on whether to visit Edinburgh Castle, but in the end, I booked tickets because I had fond memories of wandering around it years ago. Unfortunately this time was different, as every inch was rammed with people. There was no escape from the crowds.
In the end, Josie’s photo of the towering castle as seen from the Grassmarket down below was far more impressive. And free.
We timed our visit to Edinburgh well, escaping Toronto’s heat just as it exceeded 30C for the first time this year. The much cooler and windier Scottish weather is a bit of a shock, though.
On our last full day in Granada we hiked up to Sacromonte, the more remote eastern portion of Granada’s Albaicín neighbourhood.
The walk took us about an hour and the views became surprisingly rugged and rural quite soon after leaving the bustle of the Carrera del Darro area.
One of the smaller sights we visited in Granada was the Carmen de Max Moreau, a traditional house high in the Albaicín that was the former home and studio of Belgium-born painter Max Moreau.
Moreau lived in this house for the last 30 years of his life, until his death in 1992. He left the house to the city of Granada and it was opened to the public as a free museum in 1998.
Sunday was forecast to be the sunniest and warmest day for a while, so we took advantage and spent most of it trudging the knee-punishing hills of Granada’s Albaicín neighbourhood.
The streets immediately around our hotel — including the ones we use to get down to what I call “civilization” — are ludicrously scenic and we still can’t walk them without taking numerous photographs.
The Darro River runs between the hills of Granada’s Albaicín neighbourhood and the towering Alhambra complex. Along the banks there is a very scenic street known as the Carrera del Darro (Road of Gold in the original Latin).
The stone-walled Carrera runs along the left bank of the river. It’s lined with small shops, restaurants, and historic buildings. Stone bridges cross the river at several points.
After three hours on a pretty comfortable ALSA bus, we arrived in Granada early on a cloudy Saturday afternoon.
We took a taxi from the bus station up into the Albaicín neighbourhood where our hotel is located. Like Alfama in Lisbon and the Judería in Córdoba it’s a neighbourhood of steep hills and impossibly narrow winding cobblestone streets.
The afternoon of our Pueblos Blancos tour took us to the spectacular city of Ronda in Málaga province.
In a country filled with stunning scenery, Ronda may have the most dramatic. The city balances on top of an enormous cliff and is cut in two by a deep gorge (El Tajo) connected by an arched bridge.
Sprinkled across the Andalusian countryside around Seville are a series of small towns known as the Pueblos Blancos, or White Towns.
Since the towns aren’t very accessible without a car, we booked a day tour with Naturanda that took us with a small group through two of the smaller towns and on to the larger city of Ronda (which we posted about here).