Malaga in November - Days 5 and 6 Jardin Botanico, Alcazaba, Art Galleries
Saturday is a quiet day, we do some shopping for the weekend in the morning and just stroll around Málaga, especially Palmeral de las Sorpresas and Plaza Merced, stopping a couple of times to sit and enjoy the warm sunshine.
Sunday is an important day because a lot of things in Malaga which one would normally have to pay for are free to visit. Bus number 2 to San José for the botanical garden leaves just outside our apartment so at just past 9 o'clock we are on our way. The bus costs €1.30 per person and you pay directly on the bus but you need smaller change than a ten euro note. The bus leaves us at the San Jose bus stop and from there it's less than a quarter of an hour on foot to the entrance. You turn left as you come out of the road where the bus stops, keep straight on and after a bridge the pavement becomes green and you know you're going the right way. Just follow it to the entrance. This time of year the Gardens open at 9.30 and there are just two other people. We spend nearly three hours there and feel we have done it justice without perhaps seeing absolutely everything. There's a very good website in Spanish and English which I studied the evening before and was useful to know what to see: http://laconcepcion.malaga.eu/en/
Mainly, the gardens are divided into two areas, the historical garden created by the Marquis and Marchioness of the House of Loring, Jorge Loring Oyarzabal and Amalia Heredia Livermore, with the help of a French gardener, the appropriately named Jacinto Chamoussen and the more recent areas of the Botanical garden.
Sunday is an important day because a lot of things in Malaga which one would normally have to pay for are free to visit. Bus number 2 to San José for the botanical garden leaves just outside our apartment so at just past 9 o'clock we are on our way. The bus costs €1.30 per person and you pay directly on the bus but you need smaller change than a ten euro note. The bus leaves us at the San Jose bus stop and from there it's less than a quarter of an hour on foot to the entrance. You turn left as you come out of the road where the bus stops, keep straight on and after a bridge the pavement becomes green and you know you're going the right way. Just follow it to the entrance. This time of year the Gardens open at 9.30 and there are just two other people. We spend nearly three hours there and feel we have done it justice without perhaps seeing absolutely everything. There's a very good website in Spanish and English which I studied the evening before and was useful to know what to see: http://laconcepcion.malaga.eu/en/
Mainly, the gardens are divided into two areas, the historical garden created by the Marquis and Marchioness of the House of Loring, Jorge Loring Oyarzabal and Amalia Heredia Livermore, with the help of a French gardener, the appropriately named Jacinto Chamoussen and the more recent areas of the Botanical garden.
Highlights for us are the Tropical forest effect area
of the Historical garden, the black bamboo wood just below, the cactus area also including the prickly pears,
the hibicus avenue and the historical Mirador.
It is very pleasant indeed to wander around even on a not particularly warm day in mid-November so I can imagine it must be even lovelier at a better time of the year.
There are just a few people around by the time we leave.
We take the bus back for a quick lunch but are out again by just past two for a second visit to the Alcazaba after our last in March 2018. Here there are quite a lot of people of all nationalities. The Alcazaba is better than we remembered it because the Palace area is really quite pretty with many of the architectural elements, on a much smaller scale, that we remember from our visit to the Alhambra in Granada in March.
We spend over an hour looking around and then go down to Muelle Uno to the Pompidou centre. Entry is free from 4 o'clock and we are at the front of a short queue. I am not an art expert but appreciate a lot of the art I see. However, in this case, perhaps because I also don't understand modern art, I am under-impressed, although I do note that there are paintings by Kandinsky, Miro, Picasso and Chagalle. There's also a bed designed as a sardine tin
and an area occupied by sheep on wheels. Nevertheless, I do discover that the Botanical Garden in Barcelona and the sea front in Benidorm were designed by the same person, Carlos Ferrater. Perhaps I will have to visit Benidorm eventually after all.
We don't actually spend all that long inside and follow up with a stroll along Muelle Uno to look at the Zoco market which mainly consists in clothing with just the occasional craft stall of interest.
We don't actually spend all that long inside and follow up with a stroll along Muelle Uno to look at the Zoco market which mainly consists in clothing with just the occasional craft stall of interest.
It's time for a break and it's Sunday so everything is one euro at Montaditos, so, we have a montadito and small beer each and some chips. It's a good job we have a sit and some sustenance because a 40 minute queue to get into the once again free Thyssen museum awaits us. The queue continues forming behind us. It's definitely worth it. We visited before, on our last trip to Málaga in 2018, so this time we concentrate on the temporary exhibition of Orientalist Painting in Spain on the third floor and some of the paintings we liked the most on the other three floors, in particular the preciosista and naturalist paintings from the second half of the nineteenth century. Very pleasant indeed. The Carmen Thyssen museum in Malaga also has a very good website showing all the pictures hosted in the various exhibitions with information about the artists and paintings: https://www.carmenthyssenmalaga.org/en/
By the time we get home it's nearly 8pm, a busy but interesting day.
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