strangely, there’s still that desire
On Valencia, Granada, and other Spanish locales
Love notes from Siel is a newsletter about love, writing, and travel from me, Siel.
Dear friend —
There are many reasons not to travel. For one, it’s expensive, usually. Once you get to the destination you’re under pressure to see, do, and eat everything before a looming deadline, a.k.a. the flight home. The whole deal requires a lot of initiative, and you’re tired. And isn’t travel’s passe now, with too many people doing it by rote, like lemmings? Plus there’s a lot of stuff you really should be doing instead (like writing your novel — that endless, ever-demanding task).
Yet strangely, there’s still that desire to travel — to get lost in the tiny winding streets of adorable whitewashed towns, to drink pomadas on a palm-tree studded island, to meander through the Alhambra.
The most potent push to travel comes, these days, from Instagram’s algorithm. Watch one video about Valencia, and suddenly your endless scroll is all Valencia, all the time. You learn Valencia is a great place to drink traditional orxata, evidently quite different from the Mexican horchata you’re familiar with, and surely there’s a good reason so many people are flocking there?
I asked Gemini for a three-word explanation of what makes this city special, and it spat this out: sun, paella, history.
*
Last month I went to Valencia. For a modestly-sized city (population: roughly 800,000) Valencia is unique in the way American cities of that size tend not to be. Indianapolis, for example, doesn’t have gigantic park that snakes through the city for nearly six miles, bisecting urbanity with greenery. El Paso doesn’t have a futuristic complex with iconic architecture called the City of Arts and Sciences. And Wichita, Kansas has nothing like a gigantic annual festival where elaborate figurines are constructed, paraded, then ceremoniously burned in a fiery spectacle — except for a select few award-winners, which are rescued for inclusion in Valencia’s local Museo Fallero.
Fiery spectacles aside, Valencia has a relaxing vibe, especially along the beaches and outdoor cafes where you can sit, people watch, and sip agua de Valencia, a local cava-gin-vodka-orange juice concoction. What’s less relaxing: Learning about all the nearby cities and towns you’re told you really must drop by. Why stop at just Valencia when Calpe — a beach town lined with hotel-spas — is just a 90-minute drive away — and Altea — an adorable hilltop town with an artsy vibe — just 20-minutes more?
*
A big benefit of traveling in Spain in May is that it’s still the shoulder season and hotel rooms can be booked last minute. In fact, soon after I made a last-minute reservation for Calpe, Hotel Diamante Beach sent me an email: Would I like to upgrade to a nicer, bigger, room with a beach view — for just 8 Euros?
I clicked yes and arrived to find a room with a big balcony along with a handwritten welcome note, chocolates, and a bottle of sparkling wine. Then another email with a 15% off coupon for a future visit arrived — a rather aggressive, but pretty effective marketing tactic —
Calpe is a beach vacation town catering mostly to European tourists from Germany, France, Britain with its high-rise hotel-spa complexes, sandy beaches, and cheerful promenade. Being small, it’s a lot more affordable, less crowded, and quieter than more famous Spanish beach towns like, say, Ibiza.
Altea, though less than a half hour away, has a completely different vibe. Its beaches are rocky and thus less of a draw, but its adorable old town has been nicknamed the the Santorini of Spain for its sheer adorableness: a tangle of cobblestone streets lined with little galleries, shops, and fresh seafood restaurants, all set on a hill with great views of the coastline.
The logical thing to do after Altea would have been to go home and resume normal life. But my boyfriend had borrowed his brother’s car and didn’t need to return it for a few more days yet — so we started driving south.
*
Granada is the most visited city in Spain because that is where the Alhambra is. Problem is, the Alhambra is so popular that tickets must be booked a month or more in advance. Go last minute, and the best you’ll be able to do, if you’re lucky, is score tickets to visit the thing next to the Alhambra — the summer place called Generalife. And that only for a night visit!
But on a pretty night this is a pretty romantic activity, walking through the moorish gardens and taking in the lights of the city. Also romantic: visiting a hammam for a soak and a massage, and dining in Albaicin, the historic moorish quarter where every restaurant looks like it was designed by a creative decorator with sumptuous tastes.
Even without tickets to the Alhambra, Granada is a gorgeous city to visit. But I’ll have to return sometime when I actually do have a ticket —
*
We drove back and returned the car. But then we rented another one — after flying to Menorca.
Did you know Spain has 179 islands? And that these get really expensive to visit in the summer months but are more affordable in May? Especially if you pick an island like Menorca, which is popular but not among the most popular?
The weather wasn’t cooperative on this trip, so my time there involved a lot less laying around on the beach than I’d imagined. Instead I explored the island: El Toro, a hill of a mountain with a little church on top and great views; Binibeca Vell with its whitewashed greek village; Cova d’en Xoroi, a bar carved in to rocks with gorgeous views; and Ciutadela and Mahon, the two main towns each with a little old town center with its market and church.
*
Seeing so much of Spain in one month was a beautiful experience — and an exhausting one. Just to be clear, I didn’t plan all these trips back to back because I’m a masochist. The real reason is that my boyfriend wanted to use up all his vacation days before switching jobs. The goal was make the most of this opportunity — but we went overboard.
Which is to say, the Spanish towns, unique as they are, do eventually start blending together is you visit them all in a row. Each one has a cute town center with a must-visit main market, a must-visit church, a must-visit park, and a musit-visit plaza. To blur our memories even more I also managed to squeeze in a couple shorter trips in Catalonia: Tarragona, where the brother with the car lives, and Peniscola, another cute little village on a hill.
By the time we were headed home to Barcelona after Menorca I needed a vacation from vacationing.
Now, it’s June. I feel incredibly lucky and privileged to have seen so much beauty! I’m also terribly behind on work. Also, some beloved houseplants have died!
But it’s all good. If you need travel recommendations in Spain, hit me up — though there are still a lot of places I need to visit. Basque country, Galicia, Gran Canaria — I’ll start thinking about them after I’ve gotten my life back together —
Love,
Siel
Three links you might love:
The American dream’s continuing allure. “The American lifestyle I’m so critical of, the lack of public transport, the selfish lifestyle, the gross materialism, the shortsightedness, the paper thin intellectually vapid bling, is very appealing to a large percentage of the world.”
A glitch in the matrix of online shopping. Third party sellers drop-ship the exact same products for multiple brands — at wildly different prices. “I ordered three more versions of the lamp. Sure enough, each product — sold by Amazon, Best Buy, and Lowe’s — arrived in an identical, unbranded box from Cranberry, N.J., with Hudson & Canal’s name on the return-address label.”
Deconstructing sunscreen dogma. “Moderate sun exposure can be good for you. Why won’t American experts acknowledge that?”
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