Arcos De La Frontera is a little town on the top of a mountain. There are sheer cliffs on both sides and Arcos resides on a strip of land in the middle. It was one of the prettiest places in Espana! The views from the top were amazing, and the streets and buildings were very romantic. Arcos is one of the “white villages” because of its whitewashed walls. Before we left, we saw Arcos in the New York Times travel section, where they mentioned a famous alley where we took a picture. There was only one major road in Arcos, and it was very windy and very very narrow.
When we arrived, we missed our exit on the top and had to go all the way back down and up again. But the views from the road were awesome. There were also great panoramic views from the city plaza and the hotel we stayed at, the El Convento. Below are some pictures from the inside of the room. (can you tell we liked it?) Our hotel was mentioned in our travel book and the author, Rick Steves, even got a suite named after him.
The first night, we went to a tapas bar in what was formerly an old castle’s dungeon. The food and wine there were terrific, and when it came time for desert, the owner brought us over to the ice cream stand. They had the usual blue sign with all the Camy ice creams on it. I saw one called Marty which looked like some kind of an alien. When I asked for that, the waiter laughed at me and called me a stupid american. Well, maybe he didn’t call me that to my face but he must have been thinking that. That night we decided not to go to Morocco the next day and stay in Arcos another day. We would have had to leave extremely early in the morning and we weren’t even sure that going to Algiers would be a true taste of Morocco (other than hustlers trying to take our money). Plus, Arcos was such a cool place, that it made our choice easy. The only problem, as we later discovered, was that the next day was a Sunday and everything was d-e-a-d.
On Sunday, we started out with breakfast on the patio of the hotel, which had an awesome view from the edge of the cliff. Then we went shopping in the “new town” part of Arcos, which was lower down than the upper part where the church was. We made sure to make a reservation for the Alhombra in Granada, which is one of the most popular tourist attractions in all of Europe. The best gazpacho I had on the trip so far was here in a restaurant in a small plaza (Plaza de Cecila). On the walk up the narrow street we took some pictures of the landscape This day was probably one of the more relaxing ones of the vacation.
