Granada

There’s something that happens to a place that houses one of the wonders of the world. I’m going to call it the Taj Mahal syndrome. The monument is so overwhelmingly beautiful that tourists from all over the world come around to see it, and destroy the town around it. Agra, the town that was there before the Taj Mahal has become a monumental shithole. People like me get to places like this cynical about the whole affair from the beginning, arriving with a ‘I’ve seen it all in pictures, but I’ve come all this way so why not’ attitude, and walk out completely slack-jawed, dumbstruck, and in love after taking a million photos. Now it’s happened to me at La Alhambra...

A poet once wrote there is no misfortune worse than being blind in Granada and he was right. Unfortunately I still have that niggling feeling that I went to a theme park. Even Federico García Lorca’s grave is a tourist attraction. I read a newspaper article about how Granada’s tourism board opposes the wish of a high profile judge to exhume the poet’s body and reopen the case of his still unsolved assassination by fascists in 1936. (There’s circumstantial evidence as to who it might have been, yet no one has ever been taken to trial). The family, who opposes the exhumation has reserved the right to decide whether they would prefer to have his remains cremated or reburied next to his father or mother if it eventually happens. But the reasons why the local government opposes also has some citizens of Granada livid; the site is a common grave for other republicans of the area who were killed in the horrible weeks around the coup de état that brought Franco to power. Lorca may be the most celebrated of the dead in the grave, but to say that if he’s not there the site has no value is quite offensive.