Ten Days That Taught Us More Than Ten Years

Ten days in Andalucia can teach you more than years of living here — that’s exactly what happened to us in our first year. We had a lot of visitors that year: family, friends, friends of friends — it sometimes felt like we were running a small hotel rather than a real estate office. But one visit that first year stands out, because it ended up teaching us more about our new home than we had learned on our own in months.

Our children’s former babysitter from Belgium came to stay, together with her husband. He was deeply into culture and history, and within the ten days they were with us, he had us booked with guides in Granada, Seville, Ronda and Cádiz. Ten days, four cities, and by the end of it, we knew more about the region we had just moved to than some people manage to learn in ten years of living here.

In Granada, he took us to the Alcaicería, right in the historic centre. Most visitors walk straight past it without realising what it once was: the great Arab silk market of Granada, a whole network of narrow lanes packed with hundreds of small shops. Today it’s much smaller than it was in its heyday, but it still has that same souk-like feeling — tight alleys, small stalls, and a sense that you’ve stepped somewhere older than the rest of the city around it. We would never have found it on our own, or known what we were looking at if we had.

Seville gave us two of our favourite details from the whole trip.

The first is the Giralda, the bell tower next to Seville’s cathedral. It was originally the minaret of the mosque that stood on the site before the cathedral was built, and it has a detail that still makes people smile when they hear it: instead of stairs, the tower has a series of sloped ramps winding up the inside — built so that the muezzin, or visiting riders, could go up on horseback rather than climb on foot. It’s one of those small facts that turns a tower you might otherwise just glance at into something you actually remember.

The second is the city’s connection to two World’s Fairs, decades apart. Seville hosted the Ibero-American Exhibition in 1929, and much later, the Universal Exposition — Expo ’92 — in 1992. Both left their mark on the city, and Expo ’92 in particular changed an entire stretch of it.

A practical tip for anyone planning ten days in Andalucia with children: the site of that 1992 Expo, the Isla de la Cartuja, is now home to Isla Mágica, a theme park that opened in 1997. It’s an easy way to split a Seville visit into two very different, very good days — one day for culture (the cathedral, the Giralda, what’s left of the Expo pavilions), and one day for pure fun at the park. Isla Mágica is built around the age of exploration and pirates, and years later, our own children and their cousins still talk about Crashendo — a virtual rollercoaster with a pianist, projected onto a huge dome screen inside the park’s cinema, one of those rides that sticks with you long after the ticket stub is gone.

The same trip took us on to Ronda, perched dramatically on either side of a deep gorge with its landmark bridge connecting the two halves of the old town, and to Cádiz, widely considered one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in Europe. Both added their own flavour to those ten days, and both are still, all these years later, places we happily send friends and clients to visit.

Some of our best discoveries came later, and not because a guide pointed us there. On a family trip of our own, we visited Guadix, in the province of Granada, where entire houses are built into the hillside as cave dwellings — homes carved straight into the rock, some of them still lived in today. It’s a strange and genuinely memorable sight, and one I’d recommend to anyone spending time in the area.

Looking back, it’s a strange kind of gift. We moved here to build a life and a business, not to be tourists in our own region. But it was often our guests — arriving with fresh eyes, a guidebook, and sometimes a lot more curiosity than we had made time for ourselves — who pushed us out the door to actually see where we lived. Ten days with two people and their children who happened to love history taught us more about Andalucía than we might have picked up on our own in years.

If you’re moving here yourself, don’t be surprised if the same thing happens to you. Let your visitors drag you along — sometimes ten days in Andalucia with the right guide teaches you more than the years before it. You might be the one who ends up learning the most.

Ben Buyl founded Open Frontiers in 1996 and has lived in Sotogrande since 2001. This is the second in a series of personal reflections on life in the region — read the first, 30 Years of Open Frontiers.