There are more than 220 million olive trees in Spain, giving it the largest surface area of olive production of any country. And those olives, and the all of their byproducts, are delicious.

Nearly every great landscape view in Andelucia was filled with rolling hills of olive trees. We drove through them on our way south from Madrid to Seville, and promptly started ordering a plate of olives with every meal. We drove by olive oil factories, learned how to order just about any type of olive product in Spanish, and after a little while it felt like my blood was turning into olive oil.

The climax of the olive experience came when we reached the small town of Ubeda, in Jaen province of Andelucia. Our first evening in town I wandered past the church in the middle of town and was rewarded with the view above. We headed back in the morning to see great views of the olive covered hills rolling off into the distance where they met the mountains, like you see below.

After a solid hour enjoying the views, I knew we had to chase down a closer encounter with olives, and started asking around to see if we could find an olive oil factory, or tour of any nature. One lady seemed to have an idea – a little place called La Laguna that wasn’t on any of our maps and received no mention in Lonely Planet. It look a good leap of faith, and a bit of hunting, but we eventually found it. As you can see on google maps, it’s not more than a compound out in a in a sea of olive trees. But that compound is fantastic, including a cheap hotel, bar, restaurant, and the Museo de la Cultura del Olivo. It’s build on an old olive processing site, so has giant vats for olive oil in the basement, as well as 24 types of olive trees from all over the Mediterranean and 3 different type of historic olive presses above ground. There are some signs in broken English, but if you love olives anywhere nearly as much as I do, they will be more than enough to keep you captivated for a long while as you explore the many uses and falvours of olives.

Inside the Great Mosque of Cordoba

On the advice of a couple of other travellers, we wound our way over to Cordoba to see the old town and the Great Mosque – one of the greatest Islamic buildings in Spain, and one of the largest mosques ever built. It was indeed a pretty splendid building, a sea of columns with some fantastic treasures including a wall that was a mosaic of gold. It was a rough place to get a picture that really captured a sense of the space though, but it was very magnificent inside.

Unfortunately, the whole place left a bad flavour in my mouth because of the information pamphlet they gave out at the door. The whole thing had a condescending tone towards Islam, first off calling what everyone calls the Grand Mosque is called the the Grand Cathedral, and then diminishing the splendour of the mosque by saying:

Thus the beauty of the Cathedral of Cordoba does not reside in its architectural grandeur, but in the apostolic succession of the Bishop as a symbol of his pastoral service and the unity of the Church, founded upon the Word of the Lord, the sacraments, and the community of believers.

I just don’t understand why they have felt the need to diminish the grandeur of the building or the contribution of the culture that built most of it. Another choice line was:

It is a historical fact that the basilica of San Vincente was expropriated and destroyed in order to build what would later be the Mosque, a reality that questions the theme of tolerance that was supposedly cultivated in the Cordobra of the moment.

So here they are bashing the Islamic empire for a lack of tolerance in a pamphlet that is itself contains. It also condemns the destruction of the historical building, yet the Catholics plunked a massive cathedral right in the middle of the mosque. In any case, if you are in Andalucia, it is well worth seeing the building but I’d avoid the pamphlet.

This massive castle/palace complex claims to be the most visited site in Spain. Though Sagrada Familia in Barcelona also makes the same claim, the Alhambra is undoubtedly the best camera candy in the country. There has been some sort of palace/fortification on the site since at least the 11th century, with major construction taking place in the 14th and 15th centuries. It was the last hold out of the Islamic empire in Iberia, eventually captured by the Christians in 1492. In the 16th century Carlos V built a whole new palace on the grounds. But after that attention shifted away and the whole complex started a slow slide into disrepair until it started to attract tourists in the 19th century.

We spent a solid day wandering around the grounds, starting before sunrise as we had to queue up early in the morning to get some of the limited number of tickets to the Palacios Nazaries – the old Islamic palace. You can see one of the stunning ceilings from Nazaries above and a view out some of the windows looking over the city of Grenada below.

It’s cruel to even call it ‘ice’. While we were in Madrid we encountered what appeared to be a little urban ice rink set up for the holidays. Closer examination revealed that it was, in fact, plastic – like a plastic cutting-board. Kids were slipping and sliding all over the place, unable to stand up well or do anything that even vaguely resembled skating. It was sad watching these poor kids suffer the the joyless indignity of scrambling around wearing ice skates on a giant cutting board. Whoever’s idea it was to ruin these kid’s experience of winter sports should be punished.