Intricate lettering in the Alhambra Palace, looking over Granada
Anniversaries and milestones crop up all the time when you work with as diverse a range of destinations as we do, but one in particular caught our eye this week. According to UNESCO, 2012-2013 sees the 1,000th anniversary of the official founding of Granada in Andalucia. This beautiful city has played a pivotal role in some of the most crucial events in Spanish history, from being a centre point of Al-Andalus to the last city to fall during the Reconquista by Ferdinand and Isabela.
Today, it’s probably most famous for the stunning Alhambra Palace, a remarkable legacy of the Moorish past, as well as the intricate Albaicin neighbourhood and the impressive cathedral. You can explore this charming and historically rich city on our holidays to Andalucia.
King Juan Carlos on his hunting trip to Botswana
I once read that Kings don’t say sorry, don’t explain or justify their actions and they don’t promise to change. If they do, then it’s a sign that things are going very wrong.
Well, things have recently gone very, very wrong for King Juan Carlos of Spain. Juan Carlos not only said sorry, but he did so with bowed head, and promised that it won’t happen again.
In some ways it’s farcical. The King professes empathy with a Spain in deep crisis, soaring unemployment and genuine hardship then he sneaks off to Botswana to shoot elephants. Unfortunately, he falls and breaks his hip requiring an immediate return to Spain for an operation.
Suddenly this quick jaunt to Africa comes into the glaring spotlight of publicity. It’s really not a time for any of Spain’s leaders to be seen to be indulging in luxury holidays. That it involved shooting elephants just makes it appear even more ludicrously disconnected from the lives of the Spanish people.
Oh, and by the way, when Juan Carlos was 18 his younger brother Alfonso died in a shooting accident involving Juan Carlos. Details are rather vague but the general outline is that a pistol assumed to be empty of bullets was not.
I don’t think I have ever seen anyone crass enough to suggest that this was anything other than a tragic accident. Juan Carlos was apparently devastated. However, there is a part of me which thinks that most people in these circumstances would most likely not return to shooting as a leisure pastime.
As a final ironic twist to the tale, the king is in fact the honorary of the Spanish branch of the WWF (yes, the Wildlife organisation, not the wrestlers).
So it really looks to be a holiday in poor taste on several levels. However, in other times perhaps this news would have been allowed to pass relatively unnoticed, a joke passing from mouth to mouth and a footnote on the inside pages of the newspapers.
However, it comes at the same time as a real scandal, one involving the king’s son-in-law, Iñaki Urdangarin who was indicted on charges of corruption in November.
The story centres around a nominally not for profit organization called the Noos Institute run by Urdangarin. It is believed that various public bodies in Spain, mainly the regional governments, were persuaded to commission works from the Noos Institute which were either never delivered or were enormously overpriced.
It is an apparently confirmed fact that Urdangarin has sent significant sums of public money to tax havens in both Belize and the UK.
King Juan Carlos has tried to distance himself from the situation, going as far as to say that ‘justice is equal for all’. However, there are those who believe that Urdangarin himself would not have been sufficiently influential to persuade regional governments to part with money for nothing. Spotlight back on the King….
The truth is that the monarchy in Spain is an anachronism. The constitution of Spain is the most modern, progressive and democratic in Europe. The monarchy only exists in there because of Juan Carlos as an acknowledgement of his quite remarkable role in the transition of Spain from dictatorship to democracy.
As essentially an adoptive son to Franco, the succession of Juan Carlos to power in 1975 was greeted with dismay by all except the core of Francoists left in Spain. However, what Juan Carlos did, on being handed absolute lifetime power, was to hand it over to the Spanish people. He brokered a peaceful and broadly inclusive transition to democracy in 1978.
When a coup d’etat was launched in 1981 it was Juan Carlos personally who called round military commanders to urge them to hold fast to democracy. It was he who appeared on television to reiterate his unambiguous support for the democratically elected government of Spain. It is he who is often credited with saving Spanish democracy that day.
So you see, modern Spain really does have a great deal for which to thank King Juan Carlos. That’s why he’s still around. Really the Spanish monarchy bears no comparison to the British monarchy in terms of their day-to-day integration into the life of the nation. A jubilee to celebrate the Spanish monarchy would be inconceivable.
In Spain you get the feeling that the monarchy has been given permission to stay as long as it doesn’t make too much noise, a bit like a child who has snuck downstairs after bedtime. Now the child is misbehaving and Spain is asking why they’re still in the room.
As the events of the late 70s and 1981 fade into history, the goodwill extended to Juan Carlos the man diminishes and as that goes, the reason to maintain the expensive trappings of the monarchy disappears.
There is a genuine chance that the monarchy in Spain is nearing its end.
Cultures meet in curious ways in Andalucia
In 1492 the city of Granada was taken from the Moors after being laid siege by Ferdinand and Isabela, the Catholic monarchs.
In this moment, Spain became, nominally at least, a politically unified body for the first time in its history.
The bigger task was to create cultural unity.
The Moors were unique in European history in that they sought to build on rather than destroy what had come before. The great achievement of Moorish Spain was this accumulation and compilation of knowledge.
Without knowing enough to be able to say that everything was rosy for the Christians, the Jews and the Muslims living hand in hand in harmony. They surely didn’t. However, they did all have the right to coexist in Moorish Spain.
After 700 years of this, the population of the Iberian peninsula was completely embedded. This photo of the church roof in the village of Júbar is a dramatic illustration of the point.
The idea that you could simply expel the Jews or expel the Moors is ridiculous.
It’s not as if there were neat demarcations between communities after all those centuries. Traditions and people had mixed. In all honesty, that blend is still apparent today, particularly in Andalucia.
The Alpujarras was the region of Spain which remained culturally diverse for the longest. It fell to a body of 6,000 troops, based in Granada, to patrol the entire region and ensure compliance with the new religious protcols.
That is to say to enforce the exclusivity of Catholic worship.
As you can imagine, it’s pretty hard for such a small force to keep an eye on what people were up to. This apparently is where the habit of hanging hams came from. The troops would basically travel round, hanging ham legs inside churches to make sure that they weren’t being used for Muslim or Jewish services.
This way the soldiers really just had to patrol the ham legs and make sure they were still hanging from the roof in order to ensure at least some level of compliance.
If you would like to take a holiday to Andalucia, call us on 01273 676 712 and we’ll get to work straight away!