Holidays and Sightseeing

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The Guidebook From 1987

My father has been to Granada three times and he has taken the same guidebook on every visit. It was printed in 1987. He knows it is out of date. He does not care, and after five days there I began to understand why.

We arrived in August to do five days of sightseeing, which was the first mistake. The old town was so crowded that in some streets you could not stop walking even if you wanted to, and the queue for the main attraction stretched around two corners before nine in the morning.

My father refused to join it. He had read somewhere in 1987 that you could book for the afternoon, so we bought our tickets for four o’clock, paid an entrance fee that was roughly nine times what his book said, and spent the whole morning doing something else entirely.

That something else turned out to be the best part of the week. We walked up the hill on the other side, away from every other tourist in the city, and simply explored for four hours. We managed to get lost twice, once seriously. And from the top the scenery was extraordinary: white houses below, mountains behind, and the landmark everybody had queued for sitting in the middle of it in the afternoon light, looking better from outside than it possibly could have from within.

We ate lunch in a place with no menu in English, chosen using my father’s only rule, which is to eat where the locals eat and never on a main square. It cost eleven euros for both of us and I still think about the bread.

The palace itself, when we finally went in, was genuinely impressive – not in the way photographs are impressive, but in the way a room is when you understand that somebody built it by hand, without machines, for another person to stand in.

A guide was taking a group round in English and we walked slightly behind them for twenty minutes, listening for free, which my father considers a legitimate holiday activity and I have never argued with.

The rest was ordinary and good. He does not sunbathe, and neither do I, so we never went near the coast except for one day trip to a village where the water was too cold. My cousin, who was in a resort in Turkey the same fortnight on a package holiday, sent us a photograph of her sunburn on the third day and did not send another one.

My father bought no souvenir of any kind, as usual. But on the last morning he wrote a postcard and posted it to his own house, which he has done in every city he has ever visited, and which is the only sentimental thing I have ever seen him do.

It arrived nine days after we got home. It said: Granada again. Still there. Bring your mother next time.