We fall increasingly in love Granada all year round, but in the summer it is something particularly special.

Once again, it's been a funny old six months. I think that, after two years of remaining at home as much as we can to avoid mixing with too many people, it now feels slightly strange to be free to do whatever we please. Before the pandemic, we used to go into Granada a lot, and in particular once the weather started to warm up.

During the summer months, Granada is alive with music, dance and performance as one festival follows another. This year, the music began with the Milnoff Festival from 27th May. Normally, we would have gone into the city to see many of the performances during this fabulous and diverse programme of Flamenco events, but this year we were in the middle of our ‘Children’s Book Creation’ course. Following on from Milnoff, we are lucky enough to have the following major events:

Festival de Granada from 13th June - 10th July 2022

VI International Guitar Festival Granada from 11th July - 4th August 2022

Lorca y Granada en los Jardines del Generalife from 19th July - 27th August 2022

There are many free events and even the ticketed concerts are reasonably priced and set in the most beautiful venues around the city. To go to just one event will be something to remember.

Last week, we ventured into Granada to soak up the atmosphere of the Festival of Corpus Christi, arguably the major festival in the Granada calendar. The week of Corpus combines religious and pagan processions, cultural events and activities and the feria. In previous years, we have often met up with friends and just wandered through the streets admiring the fabulous traditional dress worn by festival-goers, enjoying a tapas and a beer in a sunny square and then taking in a free performance somewhere. We have many memories of lovely afternoons and evenings letting the atmosphere gently float over us, and the sound of guitar and hard flamenco shoes echoing beyond the walls of courtyard patios and disappearing into the trees.

As I mentioned above, we have found it difficult this year to muster up the excitement to get in the car and drive into Granada for a cultural night out, and I think it is simply that we have fallen out of the habit of just taking off for a spot of culture. However, we did it without too much encouragement and it reminded us how much we have missed over the last two years.

The weather was delightfully warm; the heat waves of May and early June had subsided a little and the late afternoon and evening promised a little more comfort. We arrived at a quiet time, so parked easily and wandered to one of our favourite bars for an ice-cold beer while we decided what we might do with the evening. One beer turned into two, but then we sauntered over the square and into the patio of the Ayuntamiento to see a Flamenco performance put on by some of the flamenco academies in the city. This is a lovely venue, and we had memories of performances from 3 summers ago, when we were able to sit in the cloisters and listen to great music. In a corner of the patio, someone was tapping away at marquetry and examples of his work were being exhibited in the courtyard. The clacketty sounds of fans being opened and flapped were as much the sound of summer as the sounds coming from the PA system, and there was something warm and languid about the whole experience and it imbued us both with a sense of calm and mellowness. Mind you, the two quick beers undoubtedly helped.

There was a programme of events which we scanned quickly, and knew that there were further performances in Plaza Bib-Rambla that we could catch without being in too much of a hurry. We nipped into Los Diamantes, the Granada seafood tapas bar (one of several of this name) that is something of an institution. Their latest iteration sits on a corner of Plaza Bib-Rambla and is modern, light and airy but it is a bustling, lively and very slick place where the staff seem to find it easy to offer efficient service and great seafood. We may have had another beer and then a very chilled glass of Rosado from Rioja, which was delicious, but who’s counting. My excuse was that I couldn’t walk very far as I have dodgy knees, so it really wasn’t the evening for extensive wanderings. We did manage to cross from one side of the square to other, to pop into Los Manueles, another branch of a very good and popular group of bars. It, too, was bustling, with people coming and going in their best Corpus outfits, and the past two years of pandemic were simply consigned to history. The summer season in Granada had started in earnest and nothing or no-one was going to get in the way this year.

On the way to Los Manueles, we did pause slightly in the square to watch the start of a one-man performance, but after a few bars of somewhat peculiar music we decided that it might not be our cup of tea, so shot off. However, fortified by another little drink and another tapa, we managed to find a seat in the rapidly-filling outside auditorium for another Flamenco performance, staged by more dance academies in the City. These performances are ordered by age group, and the evening showed how inclusive and diverse the art form is. One group was made up of older flamenco artists (women and one man) who could perhaps no longer dance with the passion of their former days, but rather they sat in their finery and accompanied their teacher with the castañuelas (castanets). At the opposite end of the age scale, the dance performances began with children as young as 5 strutting with attitude and panache and a lot of duende!

It’s quite easy, when sitting beneath the dark sky and the stars, with a soft, warm breeze weaving in and out of the leaves on the trees surrounding the square, to stay put and let the performances take you on their journey. As we approached midnight, the age of the students hit the later teens and some of the dancing and playing was excellent - 5 or 6 guitarists, percussionists and passionate vocalists provided the backdrop to dramatic choreography. Andrew had the occasional niggle that he was getting thirsty (and not, I hasten to add, for water), but he did manage to stay seated for the duration of the performance. We took the rare opportunity to saunter gently, bearing in mind my dodgy knees, to the Plaza de Los Lobos where one of Granada’s latest clubs is located. Eclipse has a very good social media presence, and clever video work makes the space seem much larger than it is, but we had been meaning to visit for some time. However, on earlier visits, we were often ready to return home to bed by about 11pm, which rather put paid to any ideas of late nights out on the town. Eclipse was fun, and Andrew managed to quench his thirst. It is very easy to find yourself carried along with the warm summer-night breeze, as Granada just has such an easy way about it when music and dance courses through its veins. A mature city, not unlike the ladies and gentleman with their castañuelas, retaining all the class of a rich cultural life lived but still with the sparkle of the passionate dancer at heart.

So, after two long years of lives suppressed and played down, it has been lovely to take the tentative steps back into a fully flamboyant Granada, doing what it does best. It doesn’t take much to remember the overwhelming joy that is derived from every aspect of life in Andalucia; the simple things in life that have the capacity to fill every sense with sublime contentment.