Arcos de la Frontera

September 23, 2004

Another day with a seared image, coming right at the end of the day. After spending the morning circling the heights of Sierra de Grazalema and sometimes being sheltered from the sun by its scrubby oak forest, we dropped west toward the Guadalete River again and into the large, broad basin of the Guadalquivir, one of the longest rivers in Spain. The last 25 miles tended gradually downhill, and were completely exposed to the sun. My memory of this ride is quite faint, with the exception of the final unpleasantly warm climb up to Arcos.

One of the many things about this trip that I can’t quite bring back is how we managed lodging. I think by this point we must have booked everything from home, because otherwise we would certainly have never found or stayed in the Casa Grande Hotel - it is near the end of the most dramatic part of Arcos, the narrow finger that extends precariously along the top of a pencil-thin ridge high above the river. If we had arrived in town without lodging we would surely have found a place before this, so we must have known it was here. I remember having difficulty finding it on these narrow streets, but I’m probably blending memories with our second visit to Arcos, when we returned to this same hotel.

Which leads me back to our stay in Grazalema - had this been our plan all along, or did we cancel our reservation at Zahara after our fiasco at the reservoir? I sure wish I hadn’t lost the map we were following - it probably had our planned route drawn in ink.

We have stayed in hundreds, maybe even a thousand or more different lodgings on our tours. They of course all blur together unless something dramatic and memorable happened there, but there are a few - probably fewer than ten - where I was so impressed by the place itself that the memory of arrival burns brightly in my internal photo album. I’ll have to ask Rachael which places first come to her mind, but I’m pretty sure they would include our stay at Villa Dubrovnik almost 20 years ago; at the Kendov Dvorak manor house in Spodnja Idria, Slovenia; and at Hotel Niza, in San Sebastián.

For me at least, our first stay at Casa Grande Hotel is in that top tier. Arriving hot and tired late in the day, I’ll never forget the shock of the entrance to our room with its open window facing out across the plain, the river a seemingly sheer drop 200’ below us - it seemed like I could lean out and spit into it; and the beautiful set piece of a small table framed by the window with a bowl of green olives and two chilled glasses of sherry sitting on it. I could never forget that.