We were expecting a long ride to a Moorish town with the world's largest palm forest. We ended up with a long ride.
And a city, not Moorish, and mainly closed.
And a palm forest, well, sort of.
It's known for a shoe industry, but it was located far out of town and was closed in any event.
And a Dutch guide whose English was confident but not idiomatic.
It was a beautiful Sunday, and Elx (as the natives spell it), though it is pronounced El-kay with an accent on both syllables, was a lovely place to spend it. Maybe not for the price, however.
The ship docked in Cartagena, Spain's main naval base. We were expecting a chance to leave a big city for a small picturesque town. After driving an hour and a half, we discovered that Elx was a major shoe manufacturer, and the town has 300,000 inhabitants, more than Cartagena. It does have palm groves that date back to antiquity, however, and a huge palm forest. Only it doesn't look like a palm forest. It looks like a bunch of palm trees with a city around them.
Only no one was telling us that. We stopped first at a place called El Huerto la Cura, the Grove of the Priest, where we were followed around by a video guy. There is a video guy who accompanies shore excursions from the ship (the ship does a video of the voyage they'll sell you) and we assumed that we had finally been blessed (heh heh) with that experience.
The big attraction is the so-called Lady of Elche, a pre-Roman Iberian sculpture of a woman (or perhaps a man) in perfect condition, found by a farmer tilling a field. Of course, this is a copy. And it wasn't found anywhere near this grove. But this is as close as we could get to the original (it's in Madrid).
El Huerto has some nice things, including a nine-branched palm tree dedicated to the Empress Elizabeth of Austria-Hungary, wife of Franz Josef (he is always called Franz Josef I for some reason, even though he was one of only two emperors of Austria-Hungary and the other one was named Karl).
It's kind of neat how they keep it up. They also have trees dedicated to individuals, such as King Juan Carlos (who is also Juan Carlos I) and his wife Sofia. It was explained that if the tree is dedicated to you, you get to keep all the dates.
What bugged me was that after going through the grove, we were asked to go see a DVD which we thought would show how to climb a palm tree, how dates were harvested, etc. Instead, it was the instant DVD of our own trip. They add on 30 minutes of explanation of all that, but we had to watch ten minutes of me fiddling with the camera (it's been acting up). No thanks.
I did have some great shots in the grove.
Not all of palms.
We bought some nice fresh dates. They're less sweet fresh, and quite delicious, but they don't keep unless preserved, which is why they are so damn sugary when you buy them in stores not located in a date grove.
We took a five minute bus ride to another point, from which we were to walk to the Basilica. The Basilica and the palm grove are each World Heritage Sites. Our guide again showed that English is not her native language when she translated it from the Spanish.
In Spanish it says "Patrimony of Humanity." On the way, we saw these two girls being photographed in front of big poinsettias. The first was the good big sister, doing just what she was told.
The second was mugging for the camera, making faces, dancing, you name it. We saw them later together, which is why I know they are in fact sisters.
It's this statue of Mary that is the reason it's a World Heritage Site.
I liked this depiction of the fires of hell better.
The outside also includes an unusual Joseph and child bas relief.
From there, the guide suggested everyone join her for lunch at the Sports Park across the way. Later, we learned how bad the food was, but we ourselves headed out of the park into the city, where we discovered that you could buy food and absolutely nothing else in Sunday in Elx.
We bought some good ice cream and some okay bread (crust good, crumb too sticky, very much Spanish bread). We also so this store across the street and had to look at it.
It was indeed a games store, and it had a wonderful Lord of the Rings poster inside. Of course, it was closed.
There were some wonderful views of palm trees around, of course.
And a lovely mimosa. And I'm not referring to orange juice and champagne.
There was a fountain that Marjorie photographed with the water running that seemed to be taking its siesta when we came back later.
And a weird thing, what appeared to be a driving school for children.
This was a small sized test track, which seemed to have carts (not in use) for running about and learning traffic laws. This reminded me of the lady who was in front of me in line for the ATM in Monaco. She had a California drivers license showing in her wallet, but turned out to live in France and work in Monaco. She said that getting her French drivers license was much, much harder than getting her California one, even though of course the French are terrible drivers. The same might be said for the Spaniards, even though they have these children's driving schools.
The ride back, I slept. What was interesting was that in Cartagena itself, the big news of the day was our ship in port. It seemed that was the only interesting thing to do on one's Sunday stroll, so there were crowds of people lined up to watch us.
A beautiful sunset as we left Cartagena. All in all, a relaxing Sunday. Would we have paid to go to Elx if we'd known the town was shut down? Probably, as we were hardly there to shop. Would we have gone if we knew it wasn't a quant town and the palm forest looked like anywhere in Fort Lauderdale? Probably not.
We benched licht for the fifth night of Chanukah, had an uneventful dinner (actually, it was eventful because our waiter had to try five times to get us decaffeinated coffee and I wish I were making this up), and went to bed early for Gibraltar in the morning.
No comments:
Post a Comment