Hola todos!
As much fun as it is to travel, and no matter how often I have done it, I regularly forget how miserable it is to fly east. The exhaustion is so much worse if you aren’t able to force yourself to sleep on the plane but then you land at 5 a.m local time and then the only thing you can do is down a cheap but delicious espresso and then try to hard-reset your body clock with copious amounts of walking. Phew!
But on the plus side, the adrenaline of being in a new place and exploring a new city can help you (mostly) forget that you’ve slept for just a few hours in the last two days. So off to the races it was! A layover in Lisbon (involving a quick immigration line) and a hopper flight later, I was in Málaga.
I took the subway into the downtown area where our hotel was and stored my luggage at a nearby locker for the day, since the room wasn’t ready. Then, it was time to get my steps in!
First stop: ice cold Coca-Cola Zero Azúcar. (I am nothing if not consistent.)
A local panadería was on my way, as was an artisan market.
If there’s one thing to know about me, it is that I love getting lost in the rambling streets of a European town with beautiful architecture around every street corner. I walked for hours, stopping into churches, making note of tapas bars for later, and grabbing a grocery store lunch.
It was sunny and warm, and my parents weren’t arriving for a bit, so I decided to head to the beach. (No surprise there.) Between the warmth of the sun, the rhythmic crashing of the waves, and my beach book, I promptly fell asleep. In no time, it seemed, my parents had arrived!
We reunited in time for dinner: local meats, cheeses, and wine. We went for a dusk-time walk through the downtown that I had previously seen in the daylight; it was no less crowded, and the city felt both familiar and different, with a new vibrancy and liveliness from tapas and string lights.
The same church tower at different times of the day.
¡Reunimos!
Gelato in hand, we meandered through the town, absorbing the sights and sounds. Eventually, we wandered home in time to promptly crash in our beds.
* * *
The next day, we started our morning with a walking tour. If you’ve read my adventures in other cities, you know that this is a “must” for me in a new place. These tours are both history and culture lessons in one, and the local guides usually have great tips for places to eat, lesser-traveled sights to see, and streets to avoid. Although I already knew much of the region’s history from my studies, there were some cultural insights that were helpful. For example, why did we keep seeing “vermut” signs at every bar? Are malagueños really obsessed with, of all things, vermouth? As it turns out, yes—it’s their local sweet wine, and you can order it tradicional (with an orange slice), with club soda, or with Coke. (I tried it—it was decidedly *fine*.)
Tapas y vermut tradicional. Could have passed on both—as it turned out, this was a problem with what we ordered, not tapas writ large.
We also had tickets to see the Alcazaba and Gibralfaro, a defensive military complex from the Moorish occupation and built in the 11th century (!!). They’ve reconstructed parts of it to match descriptions and drawings of the original complex, but some of the stonework and columns are original (and you can just walk right up and touch them!). Increíble.
Walking around the two parts of the complex took a couple of hours (and a lot of inclined paths and stairs), so we ended the day with a sunset on the mountaintop. In need of seats and refreshment, we then found a local bar that provided both. Afterwards, we found another gelato shop to give us energy for the walk home. (It was a 15-minute walk, but you can never be too careful...)
We’re off to Granada in the mañana, but I’m glad we’ll be returning to Malaga at the end of our adventure—there’s plenty more to see!
Besos,
Tina the Exploradora
