Granada relics and impressions

Ooh, I didn't sleep well on my first night here and I think this might have been the relics.

Basilica de San Juan de Dios is beautiful. Peaceful gardens, a hospital for the vulnerable and poor. There is an inner chamber, fully lined in gold, with various relics of hundreds of saints - teeth, skulls, bones, even a piece of diaphragm. His tomb, the founder of the hospital, is central. I notice a tiny painting of the Virgin with her son, the same as one we have hanging in two of our childhood homes, right next to a piece of Saint Columba - the church I went to as a child. I don't like the feeling in here. It fills me with a sense of anxiety and suffocation, of fear of something unknown. My night, later, will be filled with the same feelings. I can't help wondering why the girl on reception likes working here, daily taking countless visitors into this room.

The rest of the Basilica was being renovated and we peered down from the balconies at the machines, under a plastic sheet, cleaning the floor below, all the statues also covered in dust sheets, looking for all the world like floating ghosts.

I like the rest of Granada, especially the Moroccan roads full of the smells of incense and shisha, lined with brightly coloured baggy trousers - of which I am now the proud owner of one pair - colourful glass lamps, girls in dreadlocks.

In the old part, Albaycin, where we're staying, up a series of steep cobbled streets, we arrive at a kind of terrace with the most beautiful views of the Alhambra and the snow peaked Sierra Nevada behind. I sense a longing for snow as I stand in the heat, gazing up at their white coolness. Again, photos will have to wait.

I hear clapping and guitar playing, voices singing in accompaniment, and I see a group of tanned, dreadlocked 30 somethings, sitting cross-legged around a tree.

We finished that day with more tapas, again cheap and very filling.