Andalucia Day 29 Monastery de la Cartuja and Bornos

First thing there's lightning and torrential rain. On the way down to the garage to load the car there are school children just inside the main door to the apartment block looking glumly at the deluge. By the third trip down (yes, there's a lift but I'm not keen on lifts) they have gone and there's just a drizzle.

Our first stop is Monasterio de la Cartuja just outside Jerez de la Frontera. This is an ancient and vast monastery, part of which, including the enormous cloister, is almost in ruins and can't be visited. We park just outside and walk through a park to what looks like the front of a church but is actually just an enormous facade. The small door in the huge wooden doors  opens onto a courtyard and a small chapel and at the end a church, once again with a small and open door. The sky is still grey, everything is damp from the rain, there are crows or rooks cawing, the crumbling grey and yellow stone gives an almost ghostly but at the same time exceptionally peaceful atmosphere.

The monastery is home to twenty cloistered nuns who have no contact with the outside world and very little with each other, they dress in white with hoods and when we go into the church the predominant colour is white, from the pews of faded whitewash to the walls and most of the ceiling. The rest of the ceiling is light blue with stars and the choir area nearly at the front of the church is in dark wood. At the very far end of the church there are two candles and a nun sitting looking towards them. Another world.

After, we look at the gift shop where the religious sculptures made by the nuns to support themselves financially are sold. Very beautiful and very expensive. There's also an exhibition about the monastery and the life of the nuns. Oddly, because we don't usually buy souvenirs, we buy a small candle.

The lost in time and slow slow atmosphere persists at our next stop in Bornos, just after Arcos de la Frontera. Bornos is a small pueblo Blanco, but is built around Casa Palacio de Ribera.

Of the building itself the other world atmosphere of greyish yellowish crumbling stone has been conserved, especially in the arches of the courtyard,  although nothing remains inside.

The special part is, however, the garden. Slightly, just slightly, overgrown in places it blends perfectly with the Loggia behind in stone and red paint and the only one of its kind in Andalusia. Beautiful, perfectly silent, no tourists (exaggeration there were three others...).

We picnic on a bench in front of the other attraction in Bornos which is a convent now used as a school and follow it up with the cheapest café con leche of the trip:1€ each

The appointment in Arcos de la Frontera is for 3pm and at 5 to 3 the Jazz is reluctantly squeezing itself through the narrow and sometimes also steep streets together with its tense and slightly perspiring driver. To think our Airbnb guests sometimes say the road to our place is narrow!

Our host helps us with our bags up and down more narrow streets and also some steps. Our room in his house is small and basic but the patio is huge, beautiful and with a splendid view over the countryside around Arcos. The patio temptation quells all desire for tapas and we repicnic as the lights come on below.
Kilometres by car: 70

Kilometres on foot: 10