This past week, CEA Granada had its last overnight excursion of the semester, to Sevilla and Ronda. Sevilla is the capital of the Spanish Autonomous Community Andalucia, and Ronda is another Andalucian city which is famous for the fact that the city was built upon two islets on top of a ravine.
After a rusty start of waiting for a new bus after our old one had issues, we were off to Sevilla around 8am, early but worth waking up for. After a lot of napping on the bus, we arrived in Sevilla around 11:30 and took a tour of Real Alcazar, one of the longest continually occupied castles in Europe (the royal family still stays here on occasion). In Granada, the most famous tourist destination (also the most visited tourist destination in Spain), is the Alhambra and there were a lot of similar sights in the Real Alcazar, a testament to the architectural style of Andalucia, which includes many aspects from the former Moorish occupants. For any Game of Thrones fans out there, this castle is also where the scenes in the Water Gardens of Dorne were filmed, and you can see why they choose this palace to play a role as a foreign land-- it's beautiful.
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| Front of Real Alcazar |
After our tour of Real Alcazar ended, we all had a bit of free time, and many of us went to eat while others of us indulged in one of our biggest homesickness, Starbucks! Sevilla is the biggest city of Andalucia, and has many of the shops you would find in a larger American city. Granada has most of these, but it doesn't have a Starbucks!
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| Starbucks |
Later that day, we went to visit the Plaza de España, a beautiful plaza that includes representations of every Spanish Provence. After this, we all went to our hotel for the night and many of us explored the city on our own and others met up with members from CEA Sevilla in order to get the scoop from someone who had been living there awhile.
The next day, we headed out to Ronda after another early bus ride. We arrived around 11am, and spent about 2.5 hours on a tour seeing the city and it's sights. We all split up for lunch and then headed back for Granada later in the day. Overall, it was a very educational trip to learn about the past and present of Andalucia and allowed us to see some of the most beautiful sights that Andalucia has to offer, even if one of those sights for me was a Starbucks.
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| The Ravine of Ronda |
Chase is the Fall 2015 CEA MOJO Blogger in Granada, Spain. He is currently a Senior at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.