Grenada

is a swirl of confident, laidback locals, dredded art students and dazed tourists. There are baskets of spices on the twisty Arab calles that smell of incense, mint and grilled meat with tiny tearooms behind hotcolored curtains where you can laze on cushions and smoke the pipe.

Icepeaked mountains tower around a white city that swelters in its plazas and is cool and cavelike in green hedged gardens with fountains spilling everywhere. The mosaics in the Alhambra are old and jewellike... they found a way to make lace out of stone and paint it with colored glass. I feel a joie de vivre here, unexpected in the deathplace of Lorca and so many others, a musical history and the ghosts of horses on tricky cobblestones that ran with blood.

...Shannon