We’ve spent a couple of days on the road with tight schedule. Well… I say tight but I’m grading on a curve. A tight schedule while on vacation really means we have a schedule. We did not have a schedule today. Some loose goals of visiting the 📍Alcazaba and the 📍Picasso Museum. We had 2 hours worth of tourism to pack in a roughly 10 hours window. Something we call the Joey method (Friends, Season 5, Episode 10: Dude, you just described seven days worth of stuff. You've got to spread it out a little, you know?)
With no alarm and no schedule, we naturally got out of bed around 11:00 and were having breakfast by noon-ish. Around 13:30 we were ready to head to the Picasso Museum only to find a long line at the ticket office. No worries we thought; we can buy a reserved entrance for later today and head to the 📍Alcazaba! Tickets were purchased for 16:00, leaving us plenty of time to visit the old fortress and chill before the museum.
The 📍Alcazaba itself was nicer than expected. Not as many gardens as we would have liked but old stones, intricate carvings and all the markings of the other fortresses we’ve seen. The irrigation systems and water features remain a hallmark as for all these structures through Andalucia. Why they felt they needed fountains and reflecting pools at the top of the hill makes no sense to me but they did it and it looked darn good.
With an hour to spare before our date with Picasso’s work we found a terrace to pour ourselves on and have dessert for lunch. The kind of thing one can only do on a lazy day. Our pie and lemonade helped us pass the hour in comfort.
Finally the time to visit Picasso came (for people trying to avoid a schedule we still manage to put something on it) and to our dismay, the line for people with reserved entries is longer than the people who just want to buy the ticket and enter. Our desire to save ourselves a line did not work out at all. Still, it moved fairly quickly and we were inside within 15 minutes or so. Why you need to reserve a time to enter just to queue like people without reservations simply did not compute for me.
The museum itself is small but well designed. Two floors with the work organized around the theme of people (mostly portraits) over the different phases of Picasso’s career. While they won’t go out and say it in the descriptions it pretty much depicts Picasso as a womanizing and horny man. While it doesn’t necessarily impact the work, it does impact how you see the person and the lens through which to view his work.
With all of our goals accomplished we went out to celebrate our success. As Karine had a job interview later that evening, we had to be careful in our celebration. With even the lightest of white wines packing 13% alcohol content, if one isn’t careful tipsiness can hit you like a freight train when you stand up.
Places
Alcazaba de Málaga · Centro, Málaga, Spain
Centro, Málaga, Spain
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Museo Picasso Málaga · Palacio de Buenavista, C. San Agustín, 8, Distrito Centro, 29015 Málaga, Spain
★★★★☆ · Museum
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