4/26/22 Malaga

Malaga is famous for being the birthplace of Pablo Picasso, though his family moved when he was 10 in search of work. His father had been a painter and encouraged Picasso’s work. I like his early pre-cubism work much better than what he was famous for and saw a wonderful large portrait he did that is in the National Art Museum in Washington DC. We started the day exploring the city before entering the Picasso Museum. Picasso had always wanted a museum in Malaga but was particular about what kind of building was suitable. It has a collection of about 250 lesser known pieces, about half of which are on display at any one time.

This is a statue to an influential father
of the city.

Malaga has a delightful car-free downtown.

Selected enlargements of old newspaper
pages were embedded in the street.

Some of the old streets were decorated
with stones.

This is an old street sign that indicated
where carriages were allowed to enter.

The Cathedral of Malaga with the Bishops's residence
in the yellow home on the right. The church is known
as the one-armed church because it only has one bell tower.

The second bell tower on the right was started, but the
decision was made to transfer the funds to the US to
support our War for Independence. By the time there
was money to finish the tower, the people kind of liked
the one-arm distinction and decided to leave it as it is.

This ad for a Malagan beer brand features
a picture of a German tourist enjoying one.

There are so many beautiful doors here,
I had to include one.

Interesting sculpture in front of a recently
painted building whose clean surface was
marred by a rain storm laden with dust from
the Sahara which doesn't wash off easily.

El Pimpi (not a pimp) is a favorite character
here and supposedly an early tour guide.
There is an El Pimpi Restaurant that
Antonio Banderas is a partner in.

Banderas owns the penthouse of this
building, but we didn't see him.

Once we got into the Picasso Museum, we had nearly an hour to explore the collection, which was more that enough time for me. I have a tendency to see  many of the examples of modern art as a great joke on people with money who want to be seen as sophisticated patrons of the arts.The three pieces below represent my favorites out of the 120 we saw.

One of Picasso's wives

Behind the museum was a large plaza with more ruins.

Our next stop was at the storage area of a Christian brotherhood that participates in an annual mulitday religious display. They have enormous heavy floats that are carried for hours through the streets of Malaga, supported by teams of 240 men. Antonio Banderas happens to be part of this group and tries to get back each year to do his part.

The photo does a poor job of showing the
6 long metal poles that each take 40 men
to lift.

This is picture from a tv showing the
religious decoration atop the float.

This was our day for a lunch with a local resident and we went to a local square which was near 2 of the three apartments our group visited.

A statue of Picasso in the park.

The apartment with the banners is where
Picasso was born and lived for his 1st
10 years.

Our local guide led us to our hostess' apartment and introduced us to Pilar, who spoke even less English than we spoke of Spanish, so my phone with google translate came in handy. As we arrived, she was just about to leave to pick up ice and so our local guide took over that job. Her apartment is on the 7th floor and the elevator only held 4 of us plus her at a time. In theory, two trips should have gotten the 8 of us to her floor in two trips, but apparently Jim thought the elevator was pretty full without him and waited for Pilar to collect him. She got distracted and pretty much ignored my question "Donde is Jim??" so Jim looked up her name, not realizing there were 2 Pilars in the building and started exploring. In the meantime, our local guide came back with the ice, but hadn't seen Jim because of his gallivanting, so I headed down the stairs to find him and the guide came with me. Fortunately, he realized he was lost and went back to the bottom where we were able to rescue him. Other than that, we had a totally delightful afternoon, though Pilar cooked more than twice as many Spanish tortillas as we could possibly eat.

4/25/22 Cartagena

Please note that the blog software is uploading photos out of sequence and disappears them when I try to move them in place, so the travelog may seem disjointed.

No, we didn't miraculously go to Columbia. The original Cartagena is in Spain and was initially settled by the Carthegenians. It is a primary Spanish Naval Base and has several hills overlooking the harbor with forts on top. There were also three submarines in residence, only 2 of which I could find: One in dry dock and another very modern one.

A modern sub in black in the water

A older sub in dry dock, also black

One of several forts on the hills that surround Cartagena's
harbor.

This is sort of an undiscovered gem in Spain with a lot of ruins. They have a problem similar to Rome: a lot of time when they dig foundations for replacement buildings, they discover ruins that they then preserve. (Rome has a terrible time trying to extend its subway system for the same reason.)

It is a lovely, walkable place and our guide happened to also be an architect and did a fine job of explaining things.We were supposed to have arrived yesterday, Sunday, but got delayed because of the change of itinerary necessitated by Covid. In Cartagena, Monday is the day that the museums close because most visitors are long gone by Monday. Fortunately for us, both the ruins we saw opened briefly for us to get a tour so we didn't have to compete with other visitors beyond the rest of the people on our ship.

The downtown area is right along the harbor.

City hall

We started the day with an Asiatic Coffee, which is a cousin of Irish Coffee. It has a layer of condensed milk, coffee, cognac, and bit of Licor 43 (a combination of 43 ingredients). It was originally developed by fisherman, at least some of whom originated in the far east, like the Philippines, hence the name.  I enjoyed it, but Jim, the non-coffee person, had a coke.

Approaching the first ruin

Our first glimpse of the theater

Because of the age of Cartagena and the desire to
preserve worthwhile historical elements, when old
buildings are to be torn down, their facade must be
securely preserved like this one here.

Just up the street, we enter the ruins.

 

Sadly, for the folks who planned to build a wonderful
new residence with a beautiful red facade, their digging
unearthed part of the theater which then took over
their building site.

A entrance from the other side. Any blocks that are newer
are a solid color. Note the columns at the left. The solid
chunks are new.

The round blocks are former columns that were cut up
when this became a market place to stabilize or
build walls.

An entrance at the upper levels for the lower classes

View from the top (our favorite thing to do at such
locations is climb to the top)

From here, we walked back to the main street and headed toward another ruin, especially notable for a temple to an Egyptian goddess, Isis, founded in the 1st century and in use for about 200 years.The site also housed dining and bathing facilities and is still being excavated.

What we think the Temple of Isis originally looked like

One of the fine pedestrian streets

The remains of the temple of Isis

Looking toward the dining and bathing areas

This area housed a central room and 4 surrounding
dining rooms.