Granada

A city that still gives dinner away

The barman at Los Diamantes doesn’t ask what you’d like to eat. He simply pours a caña, slides it across the scarred zinc counter and follows it with a plate of hot, batter-coated anchovies. No charge, no ceremony. This is Granada’s enduring party trick: free tapas with every drink, a custom that survived every economic downturn and still catches British visitors off-guard. One pint becomes supper, two become a feast, and by the third you’ve forgotten the Alhambra booking you were meant to check.

Up the hill, down the centuries

Granada sits 680 m above sea level, high enough for the January evening air to bite like an English autumn. The Sierra Nevada peaks hover just 30 km away, often snow-capped until May, yet the same winter afternoon can end on the Costa Tropical 45 minutes’ drive south. Locals call it “ski and sea” day; you can follow a morning on the slopes with a late swim, provided you don’t mind the Mediterranean in March.

Inside the city the terrain is a giant stair-master. The Albaicín, the old Moorish quarter, tumbles down a ridge opposite the Alhambra. Its lanes are too narrow for anything wider than a donkey, so taxis dump passengers at Plaza Nueva and disappear. From there it’s a ten-minute calf-burn to the Mirador de San Nicolás where every sunset turns into an open-air reception. Guitarists tune up, students share bottles of red, and the palace walls opposite glow coral-pink until the floodlights click on and everyone applauds like the curtain has just fallen at the Globe.

Tickets, timetables and the morning stampede

Alhambra tickets go on sale exactly 30 days ahead at 8 a.m. Spanish time. Set an alarm; 6,500 places vanish within the hour and the touts charge triple. The £14 Nasrid Palaces slot is timed to the minute—miss the 10 a.m. window and the turnstile locks you out. Once inside, the Court of the Lions is smaller than the postcards suggest, but the marble still feels cool even at midday and the stuccowork is so fine it might have been carved with a surgeon’s scalpel. Allow three hours, longer if you stop to decipher the Arabic poems scrolling across the walls.

Sunday morning is the quietest slot; the city sleeps late and cathedral mass keeps the centre hushed. Book then, reward yourself with churros dipped in thick chocolate at Café Fútbol afterwards. The queue here moves faster than San Ginés in Madrid and the bill won’t top €4.

Caves, camellias and counter-culture

Behind the Albaicín the Sacromonte hill is pitted with whitewashed cave houses. Some are homes, others flamenco tablaos lit by battery candles and good intentions. The raw shows start at 21:30, last an hour and cost £25 including a glass of sickly sweet wine. Cueva de los Tarantos keeps front-row seats for early arrivals; expect no microphones, just a guitarist, a percussionist and a dancer whose footwork sends dust flying from the packed-earth floor. It’s closer to Seville’s gritty Triana than to the Costa del Sol dinner-and-a-spectacle circuit.

Downhill, the Realejo neighbourhood has swapped its former Jewish quarter status for street art and Erasmus bars. Look up at the graffitied shutters: a life-size Queen Elizabeth II stares down Calle Molinos, painted by local activist Raul Ruiz in honour of the Brexit vote that doubled Spanish university applications from the UK. The murals change every semester; the camellia trees in the patios of the old Carmelite convent stay the same, dropping pink petals onto the cobbles each February.

What to eat when you’re tired of tapas

Granada’s cuisine is Moorish meets mountain. Order habas con jamón and you get broad beans the size of pound coins stewed with cured pork from Trevélez, a village at 1,500 m where the air cures hams in 18 months instead of 30. The tortilla del Sacromonte contains diced calves’ brains and red peppers; it tastes better than it reads, especially after a second beer. Vegetarians survive on berenjenas con miel—fried aubergine strips drizzled with cane honey that caramelises on contact. Puddings are uniformly sweet: piononos from nearby Santa Fe are custard-soaked sponge spirals doused in rum syrup. One is enough; two induces diabetic guilt.

If you need a break from free tapas, head to Bodegas Espadafor (Plaza de Toros side door). Order a media ración of remojón, a salad of salt cod, orange and black olives that tastes like Seville sunshine, then watch the bullfight posters curl on the walls. Lunch for two with wine sits under £25.

When the city parties

Easter here is serious business. Processions start at dawn and climb so steeply that costaleros (float bearers) train all year. The best vantage is Carrera del Darro at 07:00; bring a coffee and prepare to flatten yourself against a wall as a swaying Virgin passes inches away. Corpus Christi in late May turns the centre into a herb-scented carpet: locals spend the night laying dyed sawdust and rosemary outside their doors, then watch the bishop sweep through at noon like a human vacuum cleaner. Nights end at the fairground on the city edge where toffee apples are dipped in pomegranates—the city’s namesake fruit still grown in private gardens.

Summer brings the International Festival: ballet in the Generalife gardens, orchestras inside the Carlos V palace courtyard. Tickets cost more than the Royal Opera House’s amphitheatre seats, but the backdrop is unbeatable. Pack a cushion; the stone benches are 16th-century hard.

The practical bits you’ll thank us for later

Fly to Málaga, hop on the direct airport bus (€18, 2 h) rather than the train which terminates 20 km short. A taxi from Granada bus station to the centre is fixed at €9; Uber is half the price but can’t enter the Albaicñ lanes. Accommodation splits three ways: chain hotels around the station, boutique pensions in 16th-century Reyes Católicos mansions, or cave Airbnb rentals in Sacromonte where Wi-Fi vanishes behind 2 m of rock. Choose according to calf muscle and fear of uneven floors.

Cash is still king below €20; many bars run card machines older than the Alhambra and British contactless fails spectacularly. ATMs inside banks are free; the ones in Plaza Nueva charge €5 a pop. Water from public fountains is safe; the one in Plaza Bib-Rambla even won a EU taste prize, so refill bottles and save both euros and plastic.

Winter daylight is short—sunset before 18:00 December to February—but hotel prices drop by half and the palace walls look warmer in low sun. August is furnace-hot at 38 °C and climbing the Albaicín feels like trekking through a hair-dryer, yet the free tapas flow faster because locals flee to the coast leaving empty stools.

Parting shot

Granada gives away food, views and centuries in equal measure. It also demands stamina, forward planning and a tolerance for hills. Turn up without an Alhambra ticket and you’ll spend the day queueing; ignore the altitude and you’ll shiver through April evenings. Get the basics right, however, and the city keeps its side of the bargain: one more caña, one more plate of something fried, another sunset that makes the whole audience clap.